MOCK ON, MOCK ON, VOLTAIRE, ROUSSEAU

We are the final frontier (The Guardian, February 10th, 2005)

Humans have always thought of themselves as special, and with good reason. As far as we know, we are alone in the universe in churning out great works of art and literature, in formulating the laws of physics, and in creating the spectacle that is morris dancing.

But our view of ourselves as the pinnacle of life has suffered huge blows at the hands of science. Every now and again comes an idea so revolutionary that it rocks the foundations on which our hubris is built.

At the University of San Diego, California, VS Ramachandran, director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition, points to three major upheavals in scientific thinking that have served to remind us that we are not so special after all. First came the Copernican revolution in the 16th century. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus argued that the Earth was not at the centre of the solar system. Instead, he relegated our planet to one of many orbiting the sun.

Copernicus wasn't the first to come up with a heliocentric model of the solar system, but his description was backed up with mathematics that meant it was taken far more seriously. "At once, the whole notion that Earth was special was rendered obsolete and that must have been pretty humbling," says Ramachandran.

If Copernicus ruffled feathers by saying the Earth wasn't special, Charles Darwin got personal more than 300 years later by implying that humans weren't special either. With the publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin promoted his theory of evolution via natural selection, immediately suggesting that humans were just another kind of animal. "It meant we weren't the crowning glory of evolution, we were just hairless apes that happened to be slightly cleverer than our cousins," says Ramachandran. "It was a great shock. Victorian women fainted when they heard about it."

Nearly a century later, two Cambridge-based scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, unravelled the structure of DNA. According to Ramachandran, it led to a further challenge to human arrogance. We were, in short, simply vessels of self-replicating molecules, whose only purpose was to pass them on to another generation.

So what's next? What will be the fourth revolution? And will it, like those before, force us to question once more what it means to be human? To find out, Life put the question to some of the world's top scientists.

The leading candidates for the next revolution are enthralling, depressing and mind-boggling. Seth Shostak, of the alien-hunting Seti organisation in California, believes that we will become the first species to invent our successor, intentionally demoting ourselves to intellectual second fiddle. Others say we will finally understand the workings of the mind, and with it grasp fully the nature of self. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City University of New York, believes that we will discover parallel universes, perhaps floating just inches away from our own. Elvis Presley might even be alive and well in one of them, he says. The Oxford University neuroscientist Susan Greenfield sees a bleak future. We will see a melding of man and machine, she says, leading to the demise of the individual.

Whatever shape the next revolution takes, it may help humans to understand their condition rather than knock it down further. "The big question is why these revolutions don't make us profoundly sad. We're reduced to bags of chemicals with no free will, living on a normal planet, but people still find that exciting," says Ramachandran. "I think it's because with greater understanding, we see ourselves as part of some grander scheme. We're part of something larger than ourselves and once we identify with that, it is not degrading, it's ennobling."

Is he trying to say that materialists aren’t really materialists?