Knowledge Without Mechanism: What Narby Gets Right

“The most defensible claim in The Cosmic Serpent is the simplest: indigenous pharmacological knowledge is reliably accurate. How it was acquired is the open question.”

The critics of The Cosmic Serpent are right that Narby's DNA-serpent-biophoton hypothesis is speculative and that he moves too readily from correlation to causation. They are wrong if they take this criticism to undermine the book's central argument.

The central argument is not about DNA. It is about epistemology: Western science has a standard of evidence that it applies inconsistently. Evidence that indigenous pharmacological knowledge is reliably accurate would, in any other domain, trigger serious investigation of how that knowledge was acquired. In this domain, it triggers dismissal of the explanation the knowledge holders provide, on the grounds that the explanation involves experiences that are epistemologically inadmissible.

The inadmissibility is a prior, not a finding. Western science has not found that ayahuasca visions cannot convey accurate pharmacological information. It has assumed they cannot, dismissed the testimonies that claim they do, without investigation.

The most defensible version of the Cosmic Serpent argument is not the DNA hypothesis but the epistemological challenge: 'We don't know how they knew' is a different statement from 'they didn't know.' The conflation of these two statements is not science. It is the refusal of a question.

Sources

• Narby, The Cosmic Serpent (1998)
• Schultes & Hofmann, Plants of the Gods (1979)