IN the first act of Sean O'Casey's The Plough And The Stars, there's a kind of scientific Punch and Judy show in which Fluther and the Covey hit each other over the head with their beliefs about the nature of the universe. The Covey announces that, whatever the church might say, life is all a matter of the "stickin' together of millions of atoms of sodium, carbon, potassium of iodide, etcetera, that accordin' to the way they're mixed make a flower, a fish, a star that you see shinin' in the sky, or a man with a big brain like me or a man with a little brain like you!"
Punch and Judy shows are not so funny if you start thinking about domestic violence. And the Covey's explanation of the universe is not so funny when men with big brains are telling us not only that life is about the sticking together of atoms, but that they've figured out how to stick them together in the right order to make a perfect copy of a sheep.
In 1940, when the zoologist Donald Griffin announced to a scientific conference his discovery that bats navigate by using ultrasound, one distinguished colleague caught him by the shoulders and started to shake him. What did he mean by such an outrageous suggestion? Radar and sonar were still highly classified military secrets, at the edge of human technological achievement. How could mere bats be able to do anything even remotely similar?
This attack was evidence, not just of a certain kind of scientific presumptuousness, but of a more general human arrogance. The shock was not that mankind could reproduce the wonders of nature but that anyone could believe nature might even come close to matching human technological achievement.
And yet, this week, as we contemplate Dolly the cloned sheep, such an encounter has a certain air of lost innocence. The question is no longer whether nature can match the achievements of mankind, but whether it can survive them. Are we looking at something that is not just historic but epoch-making: the death of nature itself?
THE evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins once wrote that when Francis Crick and James Watson, who discovered the molecular structure of genes in 1953, were awarded the Nobel Prize for "physiology or medicine", the decision was "right but almost trivial". What he meant was that while their work was in a narrow field of science, its meaning went far beyond it, touching every single field of human understanding. So profound was their discovery that they could have been awarded a Nobel prize for Everything Under the Sun.
It is not surprising that it has taken 40 years for this to sink in. The magic and mystery of life may have been replaced in theory with images of living things as great data banks of encoded information, but those images were themselves so mind-boggling that for most of us the sense of mystery was undiminished.
To be told that a polar bear, a pig and a porcupine are made of the same stuff may be vaguely disappointing, but the knowledge that all the cells in a single polar bear's body would stretch from here to the moon and back restored the magic. If on the one hand, we resist the idea of being gene machines, on the other we are quite flattered by the idea of being infinitely complex machines.
And for practical purposes, it hardly seemed to matter whether life was a mysterious, God-given force, or a set of chemically-encoded numbers. Numbers that are big enough start to take on the qualities of God - infinite, inscrutable, beyond our ken. It didn't really occur to us that once the codes of life were cracked they could be copied like information on a computer disk. Granted, cloning has long been commonplace in science fiction, but the most striking characteristic of science fiction is that it is has always got the future wrong
We should, I suppose, be whooping with joy at another astonishing demonstration of mankind's inventiveness. But we have learned the hard way - most obviously from the splitting of the atom - to be suspicious of scientific breakthroughs.
It's important not to get carried away, though, with dark fantasies of specially bred races of humanoid worker ants or of hundreds of cloned Sadaam Husseins setting out to conquer the world. The nightmare images of futuristic fictions like Brave New World and Metropolis belong inextricably to the age of mass manufacturing, when it was conceivable that evil capitalists might want to reproduce millions of docile workers, with all traces of troublesome humanity engineered out of, their genes, to work the assembly lines. But that "future" now belongs to the past - in the post-industrial world, the problem with evil capitalists is precisely that they don't want huge numbers of unskilled workers, cloned or otherwise.
AND my seven-year-old pointed at once to the flaw in the notion of mad dictators copying themselves: "They wouldn't have the same memories." A cloned cell still has to grow to adulthood over the normal span of years. It has to become human in a different time, in different circumstances. And since even identical twins, nature's human clones, are always separate individuals, how much more individual must people raised in different generations be?
This is the paradoxical comfort that the idea of cloning contains. Even while demonstrating the extraordinary effect of genetic codes, it also points to their limits. It reminds us that, after all, our humanity is not a mere function of our DNA: it arises from memories and experiences, from love and abuse, from what we ourselves and those around us have made of their genetic inheritance.
The real question that Dolly poses, is not, then, about human individuality but about the relationship between human beings and other species. For all its mad loss of proportion, the animal rights movement has been alerting us to something quite profound - the idea that moral responsibility, which we have always limited to human beings, may have to be extended to animals as well.
Throughout human history we have thought of nature as something beyond ourselves, to be worshipped or exploited, cherished or mastered. Whether we have wanted to be part of it or to destroy it, we have conceived of it as an independent, pre-existing force.
In the last century, we have done more and more to shape the natural world in our own image, diverting rivers, changing habitats, changing the composition of the atmosphere. Now, we seem close to taking to ourselves the power to alter the course of the river of life, the flow of DNA through the generations. We seem to be on the point of making nature go the way of sex and sport and become just another copyright commodity, controlled by multinational corporations.
And at such a point, we have to ask whether we - or more precisely our corporate businesses - are up to the responsibility. In a week in which the archives have revealed that scientists seriously considered letting a nuclear power station in Scotland melt down just to see what would happen, only a sheep could be satisfied with the official answers to such a question.