About two weeks ago I did a post on synthetic biology, a term that struck me as ironic, if not fully oxymoronic.   The Taoist response came quite… naturally, dare I say.  Today there is something of a follow up in the NYT: Pursuing Synthetic Life, Dazzled by Reality. 

    Scientists, it seems, the more they search for synthetic life the more fascinated they are by the breadth and extent of biological diversity of earth.  They more they learn, the more they realize how little they know:

“My view is that we know less than 1 percent of what’s out there in the biological universe,” Dr. Venter said.

     Venter is the man who announced recently that his lab had produced a complete DNA sequence of a microbe, the start, perhaps, of synthetically created life.   We might understand him as embodying a certain human arrogance: believing that he can become a creator of nature instead of simply just a manipulator of nature.  But even he has to marvel at what lies beyond his knowledge, and also beyond his scientific reach:

Way is vast, a flood
so utterly vast it’s flowing everywhere.

The ten thousand things depend on it:
giving them life and never leaving them
it performs wonders but remains nameless.

Feeding and clothing the ten thousand things
without ruling over them,
perennially that free of desire,
it’s small in name.
And being what the ten thousand things return to
without ruling over them,
it’s vast in name.

It never makes itself vast
and so becomes utterly vast.

Tao Te Ching, 34

     That may be an apt description of Way, as seen from the point of view of the profusion of bacteria: small in name but utterly vast.

     I also like the way the author of the article talks about the diversity of biological existence:

Scientists who seek to imitate living cells say they can’t help but be
perpetually dazzled by the genuine articles, their flexibility, their
versatility, their childlike grandiosity.

    "Childlike grandiosity"  – sounds like something out of the Tao Te Ching. So much so, I wonder if she was somehow inspired by it.