Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
they have planted in Eden. The monolith is science completely given over
to nature's own ends, an instrument of natural selection placed on earth
by a selfless intelligence in order to nudge our ape ancestors toward their
scientific destiny. But there is trouble in Kubrick's paradise. This first taste
of knowledge also gives rise to evil. Like the fruit that Eve desires because
it will make her like God, knowing good and evil, the monolith symbolizes
the scientific journey that lies ahead. But in human hands the gift of science
is both life (science as knowledge) and death (science as power). Only a sci-
entific god who possessed the fullness of knowledge could resist the tempta-
tion to abuse it, and this time had not yet come; as this episode closes, the
very bone tool which has enlarged our ancestors' prospects for survival has
become a weapon wielded by an ape-Cain against an ape-Abel. This
agon
is later recapitulated in the climactic death-struggle between Bowman and
HAL, but with scientific redemption as its outcome. Knowledge as power
in this stage of evolution, having found its highest expression in HAL's
artificial intelligence, once again threatens to destroy science as knowledge—
represented here by the mission of the space ship
Discovery
. In order for sci-
ence to be purified, it must forsake power, and this is enacted in Bowman's
death-struggle. When he surrenders his life by shutting down the ship's
computer intelligence, he symbolically completes what was left undone by
humanity's ape forebears. While they had merely tasted from the tree of
scientific life, Bowman, having now abandoned himself to knowledge, has
become one with it. In death he is analogous to the Christian Messiah who
undoes the harm introduced by the tree of knowledge by being nailed to its
branches. Bowman's ensuing descent into the underworld of the extrater-
restrial monolith recapitulates what has occurred in his death-struggle with
HAL. Just as the Edenic tree represents the fullness of moral knowledge
that only God can possess, the monolith represents the fullness of scientific
virtue—science as knowledge purified of all other motives. His death, like
Christ's, enacts the perfect moral obedience that alone can open the way
to life. All others must enter by the same gate. By disabling HAL, Bowman
severs science as knowledge from science as power, but this also cuts off all
hope of rescue. Having surrendered himself to pure knowledge, he becomes
powerless, yet he is made strong in his weakness. This fatal choice makes
possible his entry into evolution's city of God—the heavenly Jerusalem in
which science and nature are one.
We would never mistake these two stories for science, but this is pre-
cisely what their documentary counterparts make possible. This is because
the evolutionary science presented in
The Ascent of Man
and
Cosmos
doubles
