DS: The premise of science and technology has been that they will improve the quality of our lives. And in many ways they have, at least for a minority of this planet's population of humans, but often the benefits of scientific discovery have been accompanied by detrimental effects. And today, our use of technology has created immense problems: global pollution, threat of nuclear war, energy shortages, resource depletion, extinction of many species of plants and animals. What has gone wrong with the bright promise? 

DS: Scholars are now beginning to question many of our long held beliefs about the objectivity of science. Its ability to provide a comprehensive description of nature, our capacity to manage the environment, and more fundamental questions must asked. Is nature there to be used in any way we see fit? Is it our preordained destiny to subjugate all of nature? Is our drive to dominate an inborn characteristic of our species? These are not abstract questions for some future time. For unless we soon find a new perspective, and act with a new concern, the nature itself will call a halt and tell us perhaps too late that in despoiling the planet, we are also destroying ourselves.

DS: The wonder of life on Earth, that it's evolved such diversity and such balance. For every habitat, the appropriate species, everything with a place. Some human habitats still reflect what the longest span of our history was like, when we live lightly on the land.

DS: In the natural scheme of things, numbers, resources, interlocking lives, or a magnificent planet wide community.

DS: Matter and energy stream through nature, in perfect equilibrium, and every living creature is part of this life sustaining flow.

DS: Then, one species found new ways to tap into the forces of nature, with other species under control, modified and put to work. New technologies extended the process of control, fostering greater numbers and far greater powers. The belief in the right to control now whet's our appetite for new means of control. And every success reinforces our faith in technology. We apply engineering concepts to the manmade and the natural. We look for tolerance levels in nature, even for the environments capacity to absorb pollution. If technology creates a problem, then the solution must be more technology. Even though the result is often one more problem.

DS: We tried to make our technological society function more smoothly with machines to do our work and what do we achieve?

DS: Another massive population of discards.

DS: This is not to belittle what we are achieving, in medicine, for instance. We even have some grasp of the most complex thing we know, the brain. But in a technological society, what good is knowledge unless it's put to work? When we try to put genetics to work, building better babies, just as we assume we can build a better world?

DS: Or will we arrived at a different perception of our place in nature? Cambridge chemist Author Peacock.

Author Peacock: We have no right to be destroying organisms as if we can just rape the earth and destroy it for our own purposes. And we don't have to wear modern knowledge. And this is where science comes in. And ecology and biochemistry and everything else helps us to have the knowledge to manage the surface of the earth of its atmosphere, its resources more intelligently than any previous generation to foresee the consequences of what we're doing.

DS: The ultimate technological disaster would be a planet unable to support life, the ultimate technological solution, find or build another. Author Germaine Greer has views on technology.

Germaine Greer: To ?prate valar? it was basically religious, you have tremendous confidence in it. It has great glamour for us, people love procedures. They love talking about their operations and things like that. It's fascinating, but it's a huge excitement. And we're bringing up a generation of children who have watched film after film after film, which was nothing but a hidden afrair with the technology, where the earth is reduced to a sort of meaningless background. Most of it is shocked far from any growing thing, and huge sound studios, children who grow up dealing with computers day in day out having Star Wars on their computers in which they destroy our planet. And what would happen is a little pattern of particles on their computer.

DS: Technology shapes our view of the world. But what a mixed up view it is: cosmetic, contradictory, grotesque.

DS: A perception of reality is channeled into our homes every day. But it's media reality, part of our entertainment package. How can we pick out what's important from this information overload? How can we distinguish fantasy from reality? We feel distanced from disaster. And when there is a major technological slipper, poison gas in Bhopal, it makes the news. But how does it really affect us? 

Unknown Speaker: Science industry and the government created the poison. 

DS: We experience much of it remotely through a technological media. It's just one more puzzling piece to be fitted into our shifting, kaleidoscopic view of what's going on in the world. Is our perceptual problem in the brain or in the mind? 

Unknown Speaker: Pineapple, bag, groceries, real, helicopter, home, earns, raccoons. 

DS: When the brain is processing information from the senses, we can watch it at work, map brain activity. But that doesn't show us how we pick out what's important from a barrage of information. This selection process isn't built in, it must be learned. It's part of our culture. And it's our culture, the product of the brain that separates us from nature. All life is a form of separation enclosed within a membrane or a skin. But some things must get through, including information. Eyes detect movements Sighs, distance, and sometimes color. Unlike us, bees perceive ultraviolet light. Their eyes and brains work on a different spectrum. Perception has evolved to fit each animals way of living. migrating birds are sensitive to the Earth's magnetism. They have a built in compass to help with navigation, complemented by eyes that can spot landmarks, with the brain processing and integrating all the information.

DS: By detecting differences in the chemical content of water, spawning salmon can find their way right back to the streams where their lives began. Many mammals have sense organs that are effective in the dark, like those of the first mammals, which arose when daylight hours were dominated by the dinosaurs. ultra sensitive ears and noses present an image of the world that's made up of sounds and smells. Many night mammals have large eyes to gather what little light there is.

DS: For mammals whose waking hours include daylight, there's a busy complicated world to proceed. There are enormous opportunities for interaction with other creatures sharing the same habitat.

DS: In this African environment, different lifestyles fit together in a workable balanced community.

DS: These monkeys are vervets they live in small home based troops. Some activities serve to strengthen the bonds that hold the troop together. Grooming fosters proximity, familiarity, mutual satisfaction. The workings of this society have to be learned, just as in any culture through imitation, trial and error, the young learn where they fit in how do we interact with fellow troop members. They learn how to survive by finding out what the environment offers in the way of benefits and of dangers. How best to get around. What to watch out for the long grass may hide predators, and indeed, once been sighted from the trees above. Something else to be learned the vervet vocabulary, including the alarm call that says Python, a powerful hard to see predator. Vervets respond to the warning as if the code summons up a mental image of the danger. A Python warning immediately elicits just the right behavior for detecting the big snakes presence in the grass.

DS: Other animals within range of the warning may choose to get away without risking a move across the ground. Even though the flimsy thorny branches can be a bit of a hazard in themselves.

DS: There's survival value in learning the very specific alarm calls. One call signals of possibility of an attack from a Marshal Eagle.

DS: The young especially may fall victim to this large bird of prey.

DS: There's also survival value in understanding the warning calls of other species. African Starlings will send a general alarm at the sight of any bird of prey. This time, a glance shows there's nothing to worry about. A Battler Eagle isn't a threat. This sort of behavior may have led to the development of human language. After all, we share a common ancestor with monkeys and apes, for all the differences in our brains. Arthur Peacock

Author Peacock: So although there is a continuous thread of increased consciousness right through to human self consciousness, there's no doubt that human beings do have some very distinctive characteristics. And when we emerge into self consciousness as human beings have, with the use of language, or the creation of culture, something different is happening on the surface of the earth.

DS: It's a difference that's transforming the surface of the earth.

DS: It's a difference that may have appeared quite hard to detect during the long, early period of our history when humans live close to nature. But the seeds were already there, the potential for explosive growth and massive change. It lay in an ability to see nature in a new way to see it as something apart, something out there, to be visualized in the mind's eye to be understood, and recorded, and so more easily manipulated. But once the process began, at first, slowly and tentatively, and then inexorably, and finally with devastating speed, it resulted in a creature with a radically changed vision of itself. And with a new way of perceiving the world around.

DS: Yale psychiatrist Robert J Lifton.

Robert J Lifton: The only way we can perceive nature is through the filter of our gray matter. That means we must recreate everything we encounter, we see nothing nakedly. If I look at a tree there, I see it differently from the way chimp or one of my standard poodles would, because I take it in to that gray matter and recreate it and so does any other human being. On the one hand, that's the moral of the human. It's what enables us to have the great slides of imagination that create human culture. On the other hand, I think it always gives us the sense that we're a step away from things, the only way that we are touching reality, symbolizing through recreating what we perceive. One way that I look at it is to see us as human beings, as having a task of symbolizing everything that predetermined animals do by something close to instinct, or at least innate tendencies. Of course, we've got our innate tendencies as human beings, but essentially where the great symbolizes and one big question in terms of what happens to human beings in nature is how we symbolize nature.

DS: Among the San tribes in Africa, hunters use symbols that are graphically descriptive. A quick, silent shorthand, useful when tracking animals with sharp ears. A San hunter can read a lot more into this though, than mere identification. He can fill out the shorthand for wharthog with a whole range of information, what he's learned from years of careful observation, and what he's picked up by listening to other hunters stories. That's the essence of any culture, a shared experience with elements that can be passed on to other members of the society.

DS: Another identification, the sign for kudu.

DS: We may be the only species to conceive of a long term future, A Son diviner seeks answers about what's ahead in a handful of leather discs. When will the rains come this year? What success will the hunters have?

DS: Every human culture is built on generations of accumulated information and invention, including how to feed the body and the spirit.

DS: Between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago, during the last ice age, this area of southern France lay along the edge of an immense ice field that covered the rest of Europe. It was densely forested here, and teeming with animal life. For millions of years, great rivers have gone out the limestone cliffs and left steep gorges and caverns that extended up to two or three kilometers into the mountain sites. The Ice Age hunters who sheltered in these caves conceived of a future and from what's been found with their bones, they may also have thought of a life after death. The head, pillowed on a stone. Shells in some way perhaps useful in another world. But what of this world? What went on in the living brain that once lay inside this ancient skull?

DS: Remarkable evidence has been found deep within the caves of Western Europe. Prehistoric paintings, symbols transmitted through time, but what their exact meaning is, we can only guess.

DS: Did animal shapes materialize in the mind of the Stone Age hunter? Did he see living forms moving in the fire the contours of the cave? If this was merely decoration, why was it done so deep within the caverns?

DS: There seems to have been some element of magical control, some reaching out for power, power of the animal strength and speed or power over the animal. Then the images went beyond what could be seen in nature, into what could be imagined, and ritual brought the symbols to life.

DS: Eventually, there were other ways of sharing experience, animal forms, took on new meanings, they no longer communicated something about the animal itself, but something totally different. The forms became purely symbolic, abstract, even though at first they remained ?caporious?, still identifiable with their origins.

DS: But as this way of communication developed, the symbols became more stylized, and what this invention of writing to transmit information through time, learning was no longer limited to what could be remembered. Long before the written word, humankind had begun to spread around the globe, but in relatively small numbers. By the end of the last ice age, 4 million. But then came the domestication of plants and animals. Our first significant way of controlling nature, paired with writing to record and pass along all the new techniques. This invention of agriculture, sent our numbers sky high.

DS: There was an explosion not just of numbers, but a culture.

DS: More beliefs, more ways of seeing the world, and all of a sudden, more people with more power.

DS: Whole populations are bonded together by their common ideas, their cultures, each one an enveloping skin that directs attention in.

DS: We become insulated, cut off from nature. Cultures evolve, while nature spawned species, cultures give birth to ideas.

DS: New ideas arise and as long as the environment will receive them, they survive and flourish.

DS: When cultures clash, who see the contradictions in human engineering. Technological powers can be used to create or to destroy.

DS: How have we as human beings come to this point? When we seem to regard the entire planet, simply as an insignificant backdrop to the struggles of rival ideologies and religions. We've been catapulted into this complex age, with minds appropriate to much simpler times. When we lived in small family groups, dispersed over large territories. It's still the same mind we have now, but it seems ill equipped to deal with vast numbers, to respond rationally to the symbols of power, or the lure of charismatic leaders. And it's a mind whose unconscious need for significance and self esteem is dramatically reinforced by all of the paraphernalia of modern warfare. Our deeply rooted motivation to control our surroundings appropriate to an earlier age is now supported by the enormous power that technology has placed in our hands, not only to manipulate others of our species, but to subdue the planet itself.

Robert J Lifton: I think technology affects our relationship to nature in very profound ways that we still don't understand. Because with the elaboration of high technology, with the technological environment that we now all live in, nature is hard to touch. We're a little uncomfortable with the whole idea of nature because we've moved out of it, and not quite in place in nature, like other animals, and perhaps especially in Western man, that leaves us with this impulse to take hold by control and hit.

DS: Control is the essence of science itself. In an experiment, control all the variables, alter one, and then observe the effects. Control is easiest in a manmade situation, isolated from nature. The scientific view is usually indirect, and fragmentary. Faced with incredible complexity, most scientists try to break nature down into its components, analyze it, study it bit by bit, and finally, try to put the pieces back together. The scientific view is usually objective, animals become objects to be measured. Even something as complex as animal behavior is being reduced to the quantifiable, reduced to numbers, as are the animals themselves. 

Unknown Speaker: Seven? That's right. That's what I get to.

DS: This is how we built up our knowledge of nature. Bit by bit. 

Unknown Speaker: Looks like female 14. That's right. Yeah. So 40 to 50. Okay

DS: Now, with the help of new technologies, we can even study life at the molecular level, as we try to unravel the mysteries of growth and development. But some scientists wonder, no matter how we look, how can we ever hope to see the genesis of all human nature? Nobel laureate, biologist Francois Jaco

Unknown Speaker: It is a legend mostly convincing that we can watch the status and how stem cell penetrate into an excel fuse, and then initiate the development that the sandwich becomes two cell one cell becomes two cells them for sale, then a small bowl then a small back, and at some time of this incremental development, we are a small group of sales which individualize and which multiplies and which becomes an upsell. And it is with this must have several million billion silence, that you are able to learn and to speak and to write and to play music, and the whole syntax and language and comment and music, and the whole thing is contained in this small amount of salad. And this always the most incredible thing you can you can watch on us.

DS: Based on a patchwork of images, out view will inevitably be limited.

Unknown Speaker: By instance, how you will handle this did or builds itself, we can say a lot of things about human and you can describe your whole structure, we can say how it contacts how it uses energy around us. But what are the genes which come into action to make a finger or to skeleton scattered, then this will just don't know.

DS: Nevertheless, we seem determined to press on with our attempts to control the incredible complexity of human development, regardless of the consequences.

DS: Author Germaine Greer,

Germaine Greer: I'm afraid of what will happen as we learn to read the DNA, because I think we'll assume we've got ?Holland, we've got Potter?. And we will begin to make decisions about genes, lighting, and so on. Unfortunately, it's the question of economic need or greed, which is going to distort the situation. It is being done by private enterprise without any of the necessary controls, I think they all say whereas we're very responsible community. But the Manhattan Project was was an enterprise with a responsible community, the proliferation of mutagens as being the creation of a responsible community. And we may be on the verge of making our worst mistakes yet, that will be Kasliwal.

DS: We seem prepared to tackle even the most basic process of life with our usual principle, what can be done, shall be and now many scientists are voicing concern. Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin.

Unknown Speaker: The irony of all the progress in molecular biology is that it reinforces people's idea that if it just know about the molecules that are everything there is to know about people. And that's just wrong. Because what we are is a consequence of a very complicated social interaction that is not coded in our molecules.

DS: By studying the smallest particles in the universe, or the complex ecosystems on this planet, know the flaw of analyzing nature in bits and pieces, of trying to perceive the whole through the sum of its isolated parts. And it may be scientists themselves, who show the way to a new approach in the search for our place in the natural order. 

DS: This is how science fragments Nature. But nature is complex dynamic, it's impossible to grasp the whole from a series of isolated parts. But there is another way, not a photographic, but a holographic approach.

DS: Every broken piece of the hologram contains enough information to form a complete version of the original image. And today, some scientists are looking for a way to achieve this kind of worldview. Not a splintered perception, but an integrated unified image of the world. One that will give a more complete picture of nature, the kind sought by physicist David Bohm,

David Bohm: This cannot change and most people think in terms of the whole. First, one of the most important reasons why people are not doing this as the science has been apparently so successful by taking the parts of course even before science, people find it hard to evolve. But I think it's gotten more difficult since then. And so my work is themed, ultimately, not only changing science, but at helping to change the way that people think more generally, in the hope that this will create a more viable species. 

DS: So whether scientists track subatomic particles, probe out into space, or back into time, the aim is to find some unifying principles that will tie all the minute observations together. By following the product of subatomic collisions, occurring under the same conditions, thought to exist when the universe was born, physicists are gaining a clearer picture of what may have happened at the very moment of creation.

DS: They're beginning to get new ideas about the relationships among all the universal forces. But the more we learn about the vast magnitudes of time and space in the universe, the more cause we have for humility. And the more we know, the more we realize just how much we don't know. Nobel Prize winning physicist Stephen Weinberg.

Stephen Weinberg: I think oddly enough, one of the marvelous things about science is the experience that scientists so often have been wrong. But it's not only that we are reminded from time to time of our own fallibility. It's also that the experience of being wrong gives a wonderful sense that after all, there is a real universe out there. We theoretical physicists sit around and talk we write on the blackboard, we come up with all kinds of marvelous ideas about what the universe was like when the temperature was a trillion trillion degrees, or what elementary particles are like when you bring them to a distance of a billion billion billionth of a centimeter. And we write on the blackboard and we talk each other into things, and occasionally we might have the things that we're just making it up as we go along. But the wonderful thing is that nature is there waiting to correct us.

DS: At the leading edge of science, there are those who see that some things will always remain beyond our understanding.

David Bohm: Our minds in the same minds as we had in the Stone Age, perhaps even more violent, and yet we are given this tremendous instruments of destruction, and even our ordinary instruments of being alive that are extremely destructive. So this whole way of thinking I think is untenable. You say that you think of this going on for 1000 years, I would say the probability that we will get through this without one tenth catastrophe and other things were very tiny. So therefore, without some change, I'd say this technology produces a non viable species of human beings.

DS: The more force we exert on nature, the more perilous our own future becomes.

DS: We were certainly not put on Earth in order to dominate all of nature. Like all other organisms, we arose out of the ecosystem and are embedded in it. And we forget that at our own peril. But even our most powerful scientific and technological innovations are ultimately limited by the natural world. 

DS: How do we see the world and our place in it? As an illusion, with us as masters of everything on earth? When we look at the world, and see only resources for our exclusive use, opportunities for control, we reflect perceptions deeply entrenched in our technological society. And once a particular way of seeing has been learned, it's very hard to learn another way, the brain holds best to its original perception, even when it knows it's wrong.

DS: It's hard to change, but not impossible. There's hope in the very fact that our attitudes to nature are learned. We can learn to look at the world and see an integrated life giving whole.

DS: We can learn to see that our isolation from nature is as artificial as our manmade world.

DS: Can we broaden our view beyond the detail, the fragmentary to see the natural world as a single interacting community?

DS: We all live and die in the same world. What happens in one part affects every part. The impact of human numbers and human activities is all around us. The tragedy is not only that this happened so but that it still happens at all, in the light of all we know and of all we can do.

DS: Our priorities are as much a factor as our perceptions. The Western world is built on growth, expansion, but the upward spiral of our economy cannot go on indefinitely. Some things we may have to give up.

DS: We see our economy as technology based, but its nature [energy] based operating within a planet wide system whose limits are not ours to change.

DS: Nature's message is clear, if we would only pay attention, there is only one Earth community.

Author Peacock: We now have the choice of either making the surface of the earth or hell to live in order to be a balanced ecology in which we survive. Well along with other organisms, this means we're not going to be able to do everything we want to do, or we have what we most want to do is to survive well in a balanced way which gives future generations a chance to live and gives us the chance to do and therefore we simply don't have any choice but to have reverence for the other forms of living organisms on the surface of the earth. By reverence I don't mean adulation, total retreat before, I mean taking their interest into account. It's also true. This is the kind of passion and motivation their interests are also other interests, we depend far more than we realize on the whole network of biological organisms being their interlocking ecosystems. So it's our survival and as a tip very close to interlocked.

DS: This is a view of what links all forms of life to each other, and to the stuff of the entire universe, the DNA molecule, the evolving blueprint for everything that lives? How will we do our knowledge of how DNA works? As an opportunity to manipulate nature with new power to take over the evolutionary process and directed to our own hands? Or will we see it as one more testament to the wonder of all the possibilities that exist in nature?

DS: The wonder, is not to be the perfect end product of evolution, but to be an ongoing part of the process, part of the universal miracle, we may never fully understand.

Author Peacock: The stuff in the world isn't what we think it is, if we just look at it through the perspective, this is this, a chemist, or whatever? Because you've got to take into account that the stuff that the universe can become human beings. In other words, this raises a very key question what kind of universe is it is the stuff of the universe can actually under special circumstances, the surface of the earth four 1000 million years, become a thinking mess, which knows that it's the path by which it's been evolved. That's the remarkable thing. We will I hear talking as being a bit of the old universe.

DS: In the old mythology, and all forms we're seeing in the fixed patterns of the starry heavens, the fortune telling Zodiac. Now it's time for a new perception. One that takes into account needs and destinies other than our own. The creatures of the Zodiac inhabit the earth around us, but not as fixed images in a human calendar, but amongst a multitude of living forms, as numerous as the stars were all life at its origins.

DS: The explorations of science are drawing us closer to ancient intuitions that saw a unity in all things.

DS: Our distinct distinction as a species has been the capacity to foresee the results of our actions and to alter them to avoid danger. Now that the consequences of our present attitudes are so undeniable, we are faced with the challenge of forging a new vision of our planetary home. 

DS: There have been times in our history, when we have questioned accepted beliefs and brought about radical change. Will we continue to cling stubbornly to our present attitudes? Or will history look back and see this is a period of change, of questioning, of new insights, a shift to a saner, more balanced view of our place in nature, a new direction that will release the tremendous potential of the human part of nature?