AMPHISBAENA 175 



rors, with wire and plastic, glue and papier-mache; the knowledge 

 of a child combined with the naivete of the grown-up. 



y: 



But really, why are you so much against machines? 



o: 



Of course, I am not; some of my best friends are machines. But 

 I am very much against a strictly mechanomorphic view of 

 living nature. A machine is a deterministic construction; some- 

 one — an inteUigence — has had to make it; and even if it could be 

 "programmed" to make itself, who did the programming? A self- 

 reproducing machine that was not built by a primordial engineer 

 is an abomination thrown up by turbulent and sick times which, 

 in chiliastic dreams mixing superpower and impotence, have 

 created a mythology of a most maculate conception. I shall not 

 formulate the secret of life sitting on this bench on a summer day; 

 but I can say that we shall not have a satisfactory theory of 

 biology before we have learned to combine, in one concept, the 

 dialectic play between determinism and accident — a sort of 

 random nonrandomness — which seems to characterize the living 

 and reproducing cell. 



y: 

 It would seem to me that you are simply an angry old man 

 preaching some sort of dialectical biochemistry in which the 

 observer is walking simultaneously on both sides of the street in 

 opposite directions. One could call this also schizophrenic. 



o: 

 Well, as to being an angry old man, there is plenty to be angry 

 about, and it makes more sense for an old man to be angry than 

 for a young one; like most things, anger must be earned. King 

 Lear was an angry old man. We are no longer used to passion 

 in the natural sciences; it has been replaced by ambition. Our 

 young geniuses are passionately ambitious instead of being pas- 



