Newton, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Crick and Watson: which have had the greatest influence on human development? Newton was undone by Einstein, and Marx has been undone by history. Fossil investigation has yet to show any sort of proof of Darwin's theses, and Einstein, though a very great genius, sits firmly in a scientific tradition which was edging towards a theory that would conflate time, space and nuclear particles, and probably would have got to E = MC sooner or later.
But Crick and Watson, now, their discovery of the secrets of DNA stands apart as a breakthrough almost without scholarly precedent, and with virtually an unlimited scientific application. Soon the genetic relationship between kindred animal species will be mapped to the last genome, and a vast universe of knowledge will be available to scientists. Computers will probably be able to chart the history of the origins of all species through the molecular forests of deoxyribeonucleic acid, and finally, the history of mankind's movement on this world will be open for examination.
Cheddar Gorge
Already, extraordinary discoveries have been made. A stone age cadaver in the Cheddar Gorge has been found to have DNA material in his tissues which suggests that he is an ancient kinsman of a schoolmaster who today lives just a few miles away from the gorge. The early evidence from the south of England suggests that virtually everything which has been believed since the time of Bede about the invasion of Angles, Saxons and Jutes, about the conquest and expulsion of the native Celts, is all fiction.
What seems to have happened is that the Germanic invaders defeated existing tribes, and supplanted their leaders and their culture; the people themselves remained, obediently following the new rules, and learning the new languages. There are problems about this: why, for example, are there so few Old Celtic words in English today? Aside from brock for badger, and the dun, for brown, there are virtually no pre-Germanic Celtic words in English.
Yet vast numbers of ancient and pre-Anglo-Saxon placenames remain in English, suggesting that this store of knowledge was retained by the people who had otherwise abandoned their language. Departing people do not leave placenames behind them to be discovered by those who expel them. The retention of these names suggests an orderly transfer of knowledge which would not have occurred between invaders and fleeing refugees.
These clues aside, common sense tells us of the difficulties in expelling an entire people. The invaders, after all, arrived in England in small vessels. There could not have been many of them, and their weaponry would have been light and primitive. They simply would not have had the power to expel the Celtic - or rather, Romano-Celtic - peoples permanently from the entire mass of what is now England.
Linguistic nationalists
In other words, we did not need the DNA discoveries of Crick and Watson to realise that the traditional belief in the "Germanic" conquests of England cannot be sustained by the available evidence. The belief was accepted because linguistic nationalists wanted to believe it; they wanted the fictions of Angle, Saxon and Jute supplanting the "backward" Celt.
And if the fictions of Anglo-Saxon racial expulsions of Celts are about to be revealed by DNA analysis, are not comparable fictions about the nature of the Irish people about to be exposed also? In other words, the racial stock of the Irish is, rather like the racial stock of the English, largely aboriginal, and the differences between the two are accounted for by different conquests. Thus the peoples are not so very separate, but their conquerors are.
But myth, of course, is not susceptible to science. Even the relatively simple science at the disposal of the inventors of lingustic nationalism in the 19th century should have caused them to doubt the validity of what a nation is. It is, after all, an imagined community: it is the power of the imagination which binds a nationalist from North Belfast with a nationalist from South Armagh, though they have never met and their ways of life are entirely different. It is the self-same imagination which excludes from that community the unionist neighbour of the North Belfast nationalist, though between them they share proximity, urban habits and possibly even common genes.
Spanish Armada
It is in part a question of what makes you comfortable. For generations people in the West of Ireland have explained their dark complexions as a legacy from the Spanish Armada. All hokum, of course. The Armada theory depends on the notion that those unfortunates who survived being shipwrecked were all swarthy hidalgos, and that they were either very numerous or that they were such manly fellows as to leave a lasting genetic imprint down the western seaboard.
But the tale is a nice one, and so it remains, and will certainly survive the scientific debunking of DNA analysis. Knowledge bashes its head in vain against the ramparts of myth. What Irishman proudly boasts of being descended from English settlers? Gael, Viking, Norman, Huguenot, Gallowglass: these are ancestors to boast of. But we tend to draw a discreet veil over ancestry which derives from English soldiers who settled here and married local girls, though the huge number of English names in garrison towns tells its own story.
Newton, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Crick and Watson. They changed the face of science, but preceding them and succeeding them stands the power of myth, beyond demolition by such as they.
Myth is what makes us human; it creates communities out of strangers and enemies out of neighbours. It is the lord of all.