The reason lies in the plasticity of the symbol. For the evangelicals who bear the double helix as their emblem, DNA represents an icon of order, and therefore what they consider evidence of intelligent design. No fixed meaning exists for icons like DNA. Unlike fossils or moon rocks, DNA is both omnipresent and cannot be directly observed. It is therefore more plastic as a symbol and can be deployed in nearly any circumstance. The double helix can represent Intelligent Design or evolution, scientific triumphalism or Christian resistance. It is a powerful symbol, but one whose multivalent power is neither stagnant nor fixed.
The double helix, with its multicolored nucleotides linking its two long strands, has taken on a reality beyond the illustrative one for which the symbol was intended. It has become more than merely an image. Since Watson and Crick first introduced it as a model of DNA, it has transformed in most people’s minds from an approximate model to an actual image, an imago biologica of the genetic code at the center of our biological lives. It is impossible to see it unmediated, but even with the aid of powerful microscopes DNA doesn’t look exactly like the double stranded molecule that we so often see in culture. Most people think it does. The signifier has become the signified. Chalk up some of this to scientific ignorance, but also to the fundamental way that icons and other images work. The same has happened with religious symbols as well. Warner Sallman’s famous painting Head of Christ has become for many American Christians the essentially true image of Jesus. (See David Morgan’s work for more on this.)
There is a term in religion for an image that really is what it represents: a murti. In the Hindu tradition a murti is not only an image of the divine, but the divine itself made manifest. Krishna, Shiva, Devi, or any other God manifests in the murti, and through ritual practice the image becomes that which it represents. Something similar has happened with the double helix. As a murti, the double helix of DNA functions as not only a symbol approximately representing our genetic code, but as a manifestation of those genes. When I asked students in my religious studies classes—a fair cross-section of students at the college—what DNA really looked like, they described the familiar multicolored ladder-shaped molecule. Like Sallman’s Head of Christ, Michelangelo’s work at the Sistine Chapel, and a myriad of other icons, the double helix has become a symbol as real as the idea that it represents.
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