How far can a Buddhist approach to biology take us?

Subjectivity is a key to the Buddhist approach to understanding the world (Image: Christophe Boisvieux/Corbis)

In Buddhist Biology, David Barash highlights parallels between these empirical systems of thought, and suggests that together they can show us how to live

AT FIRST glance, Buddhism and science seem natural bedfellows. Both seek essential truths about the world and the human condition and both set great store on their empirical approach. Yet the perception of a growing affiliation notwithstanding, at a deep level they are some way apart.

The Buddhist approach to understanding is largely subjective: no one can meditate for you. And certain Buddhist principles, such as reincarnation, are blatantly unscientific. Science, on the other hand, requires verification and is often poor at quantifying personal experience (note the "hard problem" of consciousness). Above all, whereas science strives for objective knowledge, Buddhism offers an ethical framework in which to apply it.

In his new book, Buddhist Biology, evolutionary psychologist David Barash is candid about this misalignment. His main aim, however, is to do for biology what other Buddhist-inclined writers have done for neuroscience, physics and psychology to highlight the parallels between the two disciplines, which he says "complement each other like a pair of powerful searchlights illuminating the same thing from different angles".

He homes in on three areas where the commonalities are most evident. The first is individual identity our sense of having a fixed self which Buddhists claim is an illusion (many brain and behavioural scientists would agree; see New Scientist, 5 May 2012, p 44). Barash sees a biological equivalent in the understanding that we are a product of the genes we inherited and the biological processes that sustain us, nothing more.

Likewise, you don't have to look far in nature for affirmation of the Buddhist principle of impermanence, which holds that all things are in a state of flux: life is growth and decay, organic material is constantly recycled, even genes mutate.

Finally, the Buddhist idea that nothing exists as an independent entity but rather arises through multiple causes and conditions is a fundamental tenet of ecology. Decades of field studies have shown that organisms are shaped by their environment, and by the community of other species that make up their ecosystem. "Food webs, such as those connecting mouse, acorn, and gypsy moth, do not merely describe who eats whom, but trace the outlines of their very being," Barash writes. No wonder that Buddhism, more than any other religion, is a natural ally of environmentalism: interconnectedness is written into both their creeds.

Barash presents all this with an infectious enthusiasm that more than makes up for the book's occasional shortcomings: it is repetitive in places, and the lengthy quotes from Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh and other scholars sometimes feel indulgent. Mysteriously, he waits until the final chapter to reveal his true motivation, which is to find meaning in a world in which life is defined by the success of our selfish genes. He hopes to go beyond the science, to transcend what he calls "the brute biological fact of being alive".

This is what the American psychiatrist Ernest Becker labelled humanity's "terrifying dilemma" in his 1973 classic, The Denial of Death. Mankind, he wrote, "has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness. And yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever".

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How far can a Buddhist approach to biology take us?