The term triple helix is taken from the biologist Richard Lewontin, who uses the analogy with DNA to make his point that the form of living things is determined not only mechanically by their genetic inheritance but by nutritional and environmental influences as well. It is revealing to view the human species in this way, since each of us is shaped not only by our individual genes but also by our education and by the community within which we grow up. We are the products of our community and reflect its values and share its “world-taken-for-granted”.
Homo sapiens is unique in biological evolution, for it has the power to change both its social environment and its educational “nutrition,” and thus change the species itself. This is, in fact, what we have been doing since man emerged as a tool-using ape, but only once in human history has it been proposed that the human species must reinvent itself; that was by St Paul, who argued that Jesus was “the new human being” and “the first born of a great new family.” The clarity of his evolutionary vision has largely been lost in Christianity, and has never been so sharp in other religions, but awareness of evolution is vital to man’s spiritual development today, and religion which refuses to re-lay its foundations on an evolutionary plan is worse than inadequate: it is holding humankind back.