Taoism was the Chinese state religion for something like a millennium and a half, until 1911. Its principal text, the Tao Te Ching, was said to have been written 2,500 years ago by Lao Tzu, who was a contemporary of Confucius.

Tao means Way, and the promise of Taoism is a life in harmony with the direction and momentum of cosmic forces.

The Tao's pictographic symbol is that of a gate - illustrating the fate of mankind to be constantly moving from one thing to another. We are never in front of the gate, never beyond it… always in it. The only unchanging thing about our reality is that it never ceases to change.

Charles Darwin might have known a little something about Taoism when he said: "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."

A species that cannot or will not respond to change won't survive, and similarly, individuals who decide they cannot or will not go with the flow of change mortally wound themselves.

Yet, not everything that can be labelled as change is a genuine demand of the forces of the cosmos, and it is a great challenge for individuals to try to sort out the genuine from the false. (There is always a little cloud of charlatans about who are prepared to bamboozle their way to some kind of profit by persuading us to accept some thing or another as inevitable.)

To give an example, it would have been ridiculous for anyone alive today not to have learned how to operate a telephone. The forces of the cosmos, it is now quite obvious, have moved in that direction. Many of us live in hope, however, that cellphones will prove to be a blind alley in the Tao of Telecommunications, beyond which we shall very soon be able to move. I personally hope for the same fate for jet skis, snowmobiles, sport utility vehicles, Botox and Britney Spears… but that is by way of being an entirely selfish digression.

Some people are better at detecting the direction of the cosmic forces than others. Prince Charles... and I do have a reason for picking on him that will become clear in due course… is just dreadful at it. Mouths dropped back in the 1980s when he attacked the architectural establishment for adopting "progressive ideas" with which he disagreed, and for blighting the British countryside with buildings he considered ugly.

Then he caused scientific eyes to roll back in their sockets when, in the year 2000, he delivered a Reith Lecture (sponsored by the BBC, in memory of its first Director-General, Lord Reith) in which he accused scientists of concentrating so much on rationalism that they ignored "their heart's reason, rustling like a breeze through the leaves." He claimed that scientists were "smothering a sacred trust between mankind and our Creator," a phrase that baffled not only scientists, but a great many theologians as well.

One commentator, pointing out that Prince Charles had "a long history of high-minded pontificating on issues about which he is generally quite ill-informed," quoted Professor Steve Jones as having said that he should "go back to school and do more A-levels."

You'd have thought that rather rough handling would teach him to leave well enough alone, but not a bit of it.

He was back at it again at the end of last month, raising the spectre of a "grey goo" catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines, designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves, would suddenly take over and devour the planet.

He is reported to have called upon the Royal Society - the oldest scientific club in the world - to discuss the "enormous environmental and social risks" of a technology of which he is obviously very afraid.

This is nanotechnology, a new branch of science in which scientists are learning to manipulate individual atoms and molecules of matter. It has already led to smaller, more powerful computer chips and new kinds of cosmetics, fabrics and computer products. Some 450 companies and almost 270 university departments in Europe, the US and Japan have invested $4 billion this year in further research.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair singled out nanotechnology as a vital area of research in a speech last year.

"Visionaries in this field," he said, "talk about machines the size of a cell that might, for example, identify and destroy all the cancerous cells in a body. Nano-machines might target bacteria and other parasites, dealing with tuberculosis, malaria and antibiotic-resistant bacteria."

It's all grey goo, though, to the Prince, who seems now firmly fixed on a lifetime's path of trying to halt, by Royal Command, the waves of the Tao lapping at his feet.

Look, I don't want to put this any higher than my own very humble and insignificant opinion, but I'll bet that if that sweet and serene old Chinese sage, Lao Tzu, were alive today and were asked, in public, whether the signs pointed to Prince Charles making a good King of England, he'd get agitated to the point of needing to be restrained by the Police.

The reason I pick on Prince Charles is that he seems to me symbolic of a whole band of people who have suddenly (well, relatively suddenly) popped out of the woodwork. They're latter-day Luddites, most of them on the European side of the Atlantic, who have suddenly taken against progress in a big way. Nanotechnology alarms them. Genetic engineering alarms them. New drugs alarm them. Science itself seems to alarm them.

They claim to have the moral high ground. It is the ethics of these things about which they are concerned, they say, fingering their Good Books. Political parties are formed around their fears, and universally, they mock what they see as the naivet? and misplaced optimism of people on this side of the Atlantic for our appetite for plunging ahead with discovery. There is no question that they have dampened science's ability to move at speed.

Yet ethics do cut both ways, and Europeans ignore the ethics of mankind failing to do what it can to solve problems through science. Scientists in California in the 1970s, for example, were responsible for a five-year delay in microbial genetic engineering, to allow regulation to catch up with research. This caused, in its wake, a five-year delay in work on haemophilia and diabetics, and people deficient in the human growth hormone. There is no doubt that people suffered and died, perhaps needlessly, as a result.

Part of Prince Charles's Reith argument was against genetically-modified crops - an issue about which Europeans are apt to get very excited. Mankind must grow organic crops, was his message, and mankind must stop thumbing its nose at Mother Nature.

I was interested to read, a few weeks ago in the Guardian, that an economist, Indur Goklany, has calculated that if the world tried to feed its current six billion people using the same, mainly organic techniques that were used in 1961, 82 percent of the earth's land area would be required, instead of the 38 percent that is now required. It would mean ploughing up the Amazon and irrigating the Sahara desert, for a start.

The British scientist Richard Dawkins, in an open letter to Prince Charles that took him to task for his Reith lecture, wrote: "I think you may have an exaggerated idea of the naturalness of traditional or organic agriculture. Agriculture has always been unnatural. Our species began to depart from our natural hunter-gatherer lifestyle as recently as 10,000 years ago - too short to measure on the evolutionary timescale.

"Wheat, be it ever so wholemeal and stone-ground, is not a natural food for . Nor is milk, except for children. Almost every morsel of our food is genetically modified - admittedly by artificial selection not artificial mutation, but the end result is the same. A wheat grain is a genetically modified grass seed, just as a Pekinese is a genetically modified wolf.

"Playing God? We've been playing God for centuries!"

At a conference in London earlier this month, 40 members of the international scientific community were asked to list what significant discoveries and achievements would have been limited or prevented, if science at the time had been governed by the same precautionary principle that has been forced upon science today by people frightened of its implications.

The list was very long, too long to reproduce. But a few of the items they listed, chosen almost at random, were these:

The aeroplane, antibiotics, aspirin, blood transfusions, CAT scans, the discovery of DNA, electric light bulbs, fire, the internal combustion engine, the internet, the jet engine, knives and vaccines for measles, polio, smallpox, rabies and other diseases.

Nuclear power, oil, open-heart surgery, organ transplants, pasteurisation, penicillin, the Periodic table, Quantum mechanics, radar, railways, space exploration, steam power, the telephone, the wheel and X-rays.

We'll do well to pay attention to something Mrs. Albert Einstein once said. She had been asked whether she understood her husband's Theory of Relativity.

"No," she said, "but I know my husband, and he can be trusted."

Lao Tzu would have approved.