The Dharma in

DNA
By Dee Denver
- What’s in it for me? An introduction to
Buddhist biology.
In 2004, Dee Denver went to hear the Dalai Lama speak in Bloomington, Indiana. Truth be
told, he didn’t expect much from the talk. A molecular biologist with a stack of Richard
Dawkins books on his bedside table, he was a self-described rationalist. The kind of hard-
nosed empiricist who has little patience for spiritualism or religious mumbo jumbo. But, the
Tibetan monk’s speech caught him o guard. What he said didn’t sound like nonsense at all.
It was logical and compelling. Especially what he had to say about the nature of the self and
impermanence. The Dalai Lama had his own way of speaking about such ideas, of course,
but they still resonated with the scientist. These ideas, he realized, helped him think more
clearly about his own work. That chance encounter launched him on a path of discovery.
The deeper he dug, the clearer it became that Buddhism and biology weren’t just circling
the same insights  – they were converging paths toward the same conclusions. That, in a
nutshell, is what we’ll be exploring in this Blink. Along the way, we’ll touch on some of the
main ideas that Denver addresses, as well as highlight some of the most notable ways that
Buddhist philosophy and biology productively overlap in their understanding of what exactly
it means to be human.

- The clash between science and religion

isn’t universal.
Let’s jump in with a well-known story. There are lots of ways of telling it, but it’s always
about progress. Really, it’s the story of how we became a modern society. It goes something
like this. Western civilization began with the ancient Greeks. There were lots of philosophical
Greeks with their heads in the clouds. But there were other kinds, too –  pragmatic types
who observed the behavior of bees and sh and recorded the movement of stars and the

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 ow of rivers. The word didn’t exist yet, but they were empiricists. Scientists, in short. They
didn’t just ponder abstract theories – they studied reality with their own eyes. Greek culture
was taken over by the Romans, who turned that learning into the practical purpose of
building the world’s most technologically advanced empire. This golden age didn’t last long,
though. While reason illuminated the world in Greek and Roman times, after the fall of the
Roman empire the clouds of religious dogma obscured it. These were dark ages in which
the free-spirited, open-ended inquiry of the ancients was replaced by rigid religious
orthodoxy. But, the iron grip of religion loosened over time. By 1859, the year Darwin’s On
the Origin of Species  was published, the tide had again turned. For many of Darwin’s
contemporaries, this path-breaking study of evolution decisively settled the 1,500-year-old
battle between religion and science in favor of the latter. That’s not exactly a nuanced telling
of this story – we’ve condensed a lot of history into a little less than 200 words, after all. But
our snapshot does capture an idea that’s common-sensical for many scientists: that religion
and science just don’t mesh. It’s easy to see why this is widely accepted –  religion and
science do often advance mutually incompatible claims. To take just one example, if natural
selection drives the evolution of life, where does that leave God, the creator of all species?
Biblical scripture meanwhile tells us that humans are created in God’s image and, unlike
animals, have souls. But say you accept the theory that humans are descended from
nonhuman lifeforms. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell once asked, where exactly, during
the long process of evolution from amoeba to human, did the soul come in?  Di erent
scientists have proposed various ways of resolving this clash. Some, like the evolutionary
biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins, take a hard line. Religious claims, he
argues, are unfalsi able gobbledygook with no explanatory power whatsoever. As such,
religion should be banished from public life. The American paleontologist Stephen Jay
Gould, by contrast, argued that religion and science have nonoverlapping domains of
authority. Simply put, religion is about values, while science is about facts. A question like,
Do greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming? is a factual question. There’s a single,
empirically discoverable, and correct answer. But a question like, Under what
circumstances, if any, is it acceptable to drive a species to extinction? can’t be answered in
the same way –  it’s a  moral  question. In that domain, Gould thought, religion can help us
think more clearly. But other scientists have begun to question this common-sense position.
To stick with the example we used earlier, the soul – an eternal, unchanging human essence
– doesn’t gure into Darwin’s theory of evolution. Religions like Christianity, Judaism, and
Islam, which teach that humans possess souls, will inevitably nd it hard to accept the
Darwinian worldview. But what about a religion that doesn’t posit the existence of the soul?
A religion that denies the existence of the soul’s secular counterpart – the modern concept
of the self? How does the story we’ve been telling change when we shift our perspective
and look at the relationship between religion and science through Buddhist lenses?

- Buddhists see the self as a dynamic

process, not a stable identity.
Let’s turn to Buddhism. We’ll start with another story – the record of a meeting between a
Buddhist monk and a Greek king called Menander. It took place in northeastern India around
150 BCE. One day, Menander decided to visit a local monk who was said to be very wise.
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 The dialogue didn’t play out as the king had imagined, however. When Menander asked him
what he was called, the monk said he was known as Nagasena. His name wasn’t really
important, though – it was merely a conventional label. Menander was puzzled. What did the
monk mean? Nagasena explained that his parents had referred to a certain bundle of mind
and matter by that name. He’d kept the label for the sake of convenience, but there was no
unique being, person, or soul to be discovered under that label. If the venerable monk
Nagasena’s identity couldn’t be found in his name, the king asked, could he be found in
some other feature –  the hairs on his head, for example? The monk shook his head. The
hairs on his body, then? No. Menander listed other features in which Nagasena might be
found: his skin, bones, blood, sweat, and so on. Not there, either. Did he consist of a feeling
of pleasure or pain, then, or a perception, mental impulse, or state of consciousness? Nope.
Or did he exist apart from his body or mind? No again. So where, Menander nally asked,
was the monk called Nagasena he’d come to see? Nagasena’s answer is famous. Many
Buddhists regard it as one of the best explanations of one of their tradition’s most important
ideas: anatman, or nonself. It goes like this. How, Nagasena asked, had Menander gotten to
his hermitage? By chariot, the king replied. What, Nagasena asked, is a chariot – is it the
axle, or the wheels, or the frame? No, replied the king. The spokes on the wheels, then, or
the yoke? No. Is it something outside the chariot, or the idea of a chariot? Menander said it
wasn’t that, either. We can’t nd the chariot in any of its parts, Nagasena concluded, nor is it
outside those parts. But we’re happy to say the chariot exists. So we’re using the
word chariot as a convenient label for a bundle of matter consisting of wheels, a frame, an
axle, a yoke, and so on. The name Nagasena, the monk added, is the same: it also refers to
a group of things rather than one single thing. In other words, the concept called self is like
the concept called chariot. We know it exists: if we were to meet a monk named Nagasena,
we’d see that he was made of esh and blood and occupied space and hear him ask his
questions. But would we be able to pin that self down and attribute it to any single feature?
For Buddhists, the answer is no. There’s no xed, independent being behind the “I” we
conventionally use to refer to ourselves. The self, in short, is a  relationship. A dynamic
interplay of parts. Let’s break that down a bit more. When the Buddha spoke of humans, he
didn’t refer to static entities. Personhood, for him, was a bundle of ve attributes: matter,
sensations, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Matter includes the
physical body –  the skin, bones, blood, and sweat in which Menander tried to nd
Nagasena. Through the body, we experience sensations. These can be negative, like the
unpleasant sting of a nettle, or pleasant, like the warmth of sweet tea. But often, they're just
neutral, like the breeze on a day that’s neither hot nor cold. We catalog these perceptions:
having been stung by a nettle, we perceive nettles as nettles and connect them with the
feeling of stinging skin. Then there are mental formations – all our desires and aversions and
happy and unhappy ruminations. Finally, there’s consciousness, which is our awareness of
all these physical and mental attributes. The relationship between these processes gives us
an identi able and consistent sense of personhood. But isn’t that just a redescription of the
self? Put di erently, having de ned the self in this ve-fold way, why do Buddhists go on to
say that there is  nonself, or  anatman? Well, remember, it’s a  dynamic  relationship: it’s
de ned by constant change. For Buddhists, the world is marked by impermanence, and our
consciousness is an endless re ection of this state of change. Our bodies age. Sensations
like the sting of a nettle or the warmth of tea are eeting. Desires grow and fade. Things that
once brought us happiness lose their allure; what seemed compelling yesterday may leave
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 us cold today. If every attribute of personhood is marked by impermanence, Buddhists
conclude, the self is nothing less than a  process of constant change. It can’t be pinned
down. In fact, they go further. We su er when we refuse to accept this impermanence.
When we try to hang our personhood on a single attribute. If we x our identity on physical
beauty or worldly success, for instance, we have to wage a futile battle against the passage
of time and the uncontrollable ow of events. There is, Buddhists say, no surer path to
su ering.

- The self can’t be found under a

microscope, either.
Let’s recap. For Buddhists, there’s no unchanging, xed self, identity, ego, or soul. There’s
only interplay and interaction and change. This idea isn’t exactly intuitive for nonBuddhists.
In the West, it runs up against thousands of years of religious, philosophical, and scienti c
thought which reaches the opposite conclusion. The thing is, though, there are lots of
commonly accepted, apparently obvious, and convenient ideas which are wrong. For many
scientists, the concept of a stable, identi able self securely housed within a body is one of
those ideas. Here, then, is one of those overlaps between religion and science we
mentioned at the beginning of this Blink. So let’s turn to science. More precisely, let’s talk
about DNA. We can start with Francis Crick, the codiscover of DNA. For Crick, the discovery
of DNA gave rise to an “astonishing hypothesis.” It states that the bundle of joys and
sorrows, memories, ambitions, desires, and sense of personal identity we call an “I” is
nothing more than a vast assembly of nerve cells and molecules. As the American biologist
David Barash later noted, scientists have had to rethink the relationship between bodies and
genes in light of that hypothesis. Simply put, bodies have been “demoted” while genes have
been “promoted.” That, in turn, has undermined the common-sense notion that every
person is a self neatly tucked into a body. That they occupy the space inside the boundaries
marked by their skin. So, with that, give this question some thought. What, evolutionarily
speaking, is this thing we call a self? Well, the individual “I” is the product of natural
selection – a mechanism which, over millions of years, molded and shaped our ancestors.
This mechanism is indirect, however. The bodies which house the selves we call “I” and
“you” are the products of evolution working at the level of genes. Evolution’s legacy to us is
the DNA which, in part, accounts for the faces which look back at us from our mirrors.
Only  in part, though. Genetics isn’t fate. The face in a mirror, like the body to which it is
attached, is – as Crick said – a vast assembly of cells and molecules. And those cells and
molecules don’t exist in isolation. Genes don’t “express” themselves in a simple, linear
fashion; they interact with the environment in which they nd themselves. Their “content” is
determined by the food we eat and the air we breathe. By the books we read and the
exercise we take part in – or avoid. Their expression, in short, interacts with the sum total of
our experiences. Genes may be the blueprints, but the beings we encounter aren’t perfect
realizations of those blueprints. As Richard Dawkins puts it, we can only really talk
coherently about the “e ect” of genes if we also specify how the environment in uences
them. A gene “for” X in one environment can be a gene “for” Y in another. Or it can fail to
leave its mark entirely. Neuroscientists point out, for example, that identical twins with a
genetic predisposition to depression can experience their genetic makeup in entirely
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 di erent ways. If one twin enjoys a comfortable life with few stressors, their brain may not
produce the neurotransmitters that “activate” depression. If the second twin has a harder life
– maybe they’re poorer or more isolated socially, say – their brain is highly likely to produce
those same neurotransmitters. These kinds of complex interactions, scientists like Dawkins
conclude, make it all but meaningless to talk about the absolute, context-free e ects of
given genes. So what are we left with? It appears that the further we dig, the more dynamic,
open-ended interplay we nd. The body is a vast assemblage of interacting cells and
molecules which are largely shaped by a mechanism outside the body – the work of natural
selection on genes over millions of years. But DNA doesn’t give us a stable concept of the
self, either. We can’t say that we are the DNA that makes us up because that, too, is caught
up in a process of constant change. We’ve come full circle. No self. Nonself. Anatman. By
di erent paths, we’ve reached the same conclusion. We tried a philosophically-minded
approach and a scienti c one. Neither brought us closer to the independent, xed self.
Instead, we found a series of relationships and patterns and interactions. Buddhism and
biology converge. Both suggest that our reality is fundamentally structured by change.
Nothing is static; there are only patterns that momentarily assemble themselves before
fading away again. As the American mathematician Norbert Wiener once put it, we are
“whirlpools in a river of ever- owing water.” Science and religion have often been seen as
incompatible ways of understanding the world. That’s hardly surprising: their shared history
is full of clashes and con icts. But past hostilities shouldn’t blind us to the possibility of
fruitful collaborations in the present. That’s especially true of Buddhists and biologists. Their
views on the nature of the self and impermanence aren’t just compatible – they’re closely
aligned.

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