Don’t Blame DNA The really critical implication of the discovery still lies with the door that geneticists have opened on the environmental influences of our behaviour, our personalities and our health, 1 and with the critical blow it strikes on the idea of biological determinism. For the past decade, the public has witnessed a rising epidemic of tales of discoveries of genes that dispose humanity to homosexuality, to alcoholism, to political persuasion, to running ability, and to artistic taste. But even before yesterday’s revelations by Venter, scientists had stopped believing in the gay gene. Yet belief in its existence still persists among the public. The assault on biological determinism that geneticists have now triggered will be timely, and will prove that human nature is a lot more complex and intriguing than determinists have given it credit for. Even more importantly, the discovery has critical implications for our understanding of idea of free will. It has become increasingly fashionable for individuals particularly in the United States to blame actions and crimes on the influence of their genes. Consider the following story. A young American woman, Glenda Sue Caldwell, was convicted of killing her child and was jailed for life. Only later did she begin to display the symptoms of Huntington’s Disease, an inherited brain disorder that produces horrific delusions and uncontrolled movements. Claiming she was a victim of her genes, the woman was cleared on appeal. Since then, several other U.S. defendants accused of violent crimes have argued that they too were innocent victims of their genes. They were not responsible for their actions. Their genes were. None of these people have yet succeeded in persuading courts of their innocence and their genes’ guilt. Most lawyers felt such an outcome was nevertheless inevitable. In other words, genetic predestination could soon have been used to excuse murder or robbery—if it had not been for this discovery that we lack the genes to thus dispose us! Kevin Davies is the author of The Sequence, a story of the human genome race11. He said, “There has been a recent study on perfect pitch, the ability to know the absolute pitch of a musical note, that strongly suggests that is acquired through the inheritance of a single gene.” “That may sound like a clear-cut piece of biological determinism. However, there is a crucial corollary: you have to be exposed to early musical training for the ability to materialize. 13 In other words, even in seemingly simple inherited abilities, nurture has a role to play.” And then there is the case quoted by Venter. “Everyone talks about a gene for this and that. But it is not like that. Take the example of colon cancer. People say there is a gene that predisposes us to the disease. And certainly it runs in families. It is caused by an inherited weakness in one gene that controls DNA repair in other genes. 14 But that gene is found in cells in every part of the body. However, it is only the colon where we find all sorts of toxins and bacteria that provide the harsh circumstances that cause that gene to finally break down and for cancer to spread.” In short, it is not a colon cancer gene but a gene that affects our ability to respond to the environment. And that, is what human nature is all about.
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Robot Even before the first robot was built, the subject of robotics was controversial. The word "robot" was coined in 1921 by a Czech playwright who wrote about a colony of machines endowed with artificial intelligence that eventually turned against3 their human creators. Although that account was fictional, the first industrial robots were in use by the early 1960s. Today, we continue to be intrigued by robots and their potential for both good and evil. Basically, a robot is any machine that performs work or other actions normally done by humans. Most robots are used in factories to make products such as cars and electronics. Others are used to explore underwater, in volcanoes and even on other planets. Robots consist of three main components: a brain, which is usually a computer; actuators and mechanical parts such as motors, wheels and gears; and sensors for detecting images, sound, temperature, motion and light. With these basic components, robots can interact with their environment and perform the tasks they are designed to carry out. The advantages are obvious — robots can do things humans just don’t want to do, and they are usually more cost effective. Robots can also do things more precisely than humans and allow progress in medical science and other useful advances. But, as with any machine, a robot can break down and even cause disaster. There’s also the possibility that wicked people will use robots for evil purposes. Yet this is also true with other forms of technology such as weapons and biological material. Robots will probably be used even more in the future. They will continue to do tasks where danger, repetition, cost or the need for precision prevents humans from performing. As to whether they will be used for good or evil, that depends on the nature of the humans who create them.
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Water Crisis in Spain There’ve been floods, gales and heat waves across Europe-and some lay the blame for the unpredictable weather on climate change. Spain is undergoing its worst drought for sixty years with many areas in the south of the country not seeing a drop of rain for months. Some reservoirs are nearly empty while the volume of water in some rivers is down to a third of its normal level. Guadalajara, in the centre of the country, used to be a prosperous tourist area. Its old Moorish name, ironically, means "water running through rocks." But when Emma Jane Kirby visited the small town of Buendia, she found an ecological disaster area in the marketing. There’s a strange smell around the lake at Buendia, the sort of smell that greets you when you first open the fridge after a week or two away from home—a putrid stench of salad leaves that’ve begun to turn to compost in their cellophane bag. I’m reluctant to mention this to my companion, Marco ObisP0 because this after are is the place where he has spent every one of his summer holidays and a just few hours ago we were pouting over the family photograph books while he reminisced wistfully about his idyllic childhood. The problem is I don’t recognize this place as being the same one he showed me in the pictures Those images boasted bronzed children racing joyfully down a bank of emerald green grass towards a vast expanse of water so blue that the cornflower sky above looked dazzled. But this landscape is bleached and barren, the banks crusted white, the ponds patchy and the colour of thin ink. Guadalajara in the centre of Spain has been hit hard by drought. The rains haven’t come since spring last year, leaving the soil parched and lifeless, as cracked and scarred as the face of a small pox victim. The sun has sucked the life from anything that once had the energy to be green and stealthily, its hot tongue has lapped away at the lake’s edge reducing the reservoirs to a fifth of the size they were twenty years ago. As quickly as the water’s evaporated, so have the tourists—the holidaymakers from all over Europe with whom Marco played as a child have been lured away to other areas of Spain where swimming or sailing a boat can be done without fear of scraping knees or hulls on the lake bed. If the landscape is crying out for new water management, then it’s weeping with painful dust-dry tears. North east of Buendia, only the ancient Spanish pine forests seem able to sustain life, some atavistic survival instinct wing them triumph over droughts which long ago killed off the weaker competition. But the trees are now so dehydrated and sapless they’ve become irresistible to fire-two weeks ago, thirteen thousand hectares were lost to a spark from a barbecue-an inferno that also claimed the lives of eleven men. As far as the eye can see now, the hills are almost bare.
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The Environment in Perspective:Is Everything Getting Steadily Worse? Much of the discussion of environmental problems in the popular press leaves the reader with the impression that matters have been growing steadily worse, and that pollution is largely a product of the profit system and modern industrialization. There are environmental problems today that are both enormous and pressing, but in fact pollution is nothing new. Medieval cities were pestholes—the streets and rivers were littered with garbage and the air stank of rotting wastes. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, a German traveler reported that to get a view of London from the tower of St. Paul’s, one had to get there very early in the morning “before the air was full of coal smoke.” Since 1960 there has been progress in solving some pollution problems, much of it the result of concerted efforts to protect the environment. The quality of the air in most Canadian cities has improved. In Toronto, for example, the concentration of suspended particulates, or soot, in the air has fallen dramatically since 1962. To put this figure in perspective, it should be noted that the current health advisory level for the index is 32. At a level of 58, people with chronic respiratory diseases may be affected. At 100, even healthy people may be affected by prolonged conditions, and those with cardiac and respiratory diseases could suffer severe effects Recently in Toronto, the index has exceeded 32 on fewer than half a dozen days annually. Similar improvements have occurred elsewhere in Canada and in other industrialized countries. Even the famous, or rather infamous, “fogs” of London are almost a thing of the past. There have been two high readings of particular note in the British capital in 1959 (when the index rose to 275 and there was a 10 percent increase over the normal number of deaths) and in 1962 (when the index rose to 575 and there was a 20 percent increase in mortality). But more recently, London’s, cleaner air has resulted in an astounding 50 percent increase in the number of hours of winter sunshine. In short, pollution problems are not a uniquely modem phenomenon, nor is every part of the environment deteriorating relentlessly. Environmental problems do not occur exclusively in capitalist economies. For example, in the People’s Republic of China, coal soot from factory smokestacks in Beijing envelops the city in a thick black haze. Similarly, smoke from brown-coal furnaces pollutes the air almost everywhere in Eastern Europe. It has been estimated that a third of Poland’s citizens live in areas of “ecological disaster”. The citizens of Leipzig, a major industrial city in what was formerly East Germany, have a life expectancy a full six years shorter than the national average. However, we do not mean to suggest that all is well with the environment in market-oriented economies or that there is nothing more to do. While there have been some improvements, serious problems remain. Our world is now subject to a number of new pollutants, most of which are far more dangerous than those we have reduced, even though they may be less visible and less malodorous While environmental problems are neither new nor confined only to capitalist, industrialized economies, these facts are not legitimate grounds for complacency. The potential damage that we are inflicting on ourselves and on our surroundings is very real and very substantial.
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Effect of the Great Depression It is difficult to measure the human cost of the Great Depression. The material hardships were bad enough. Men and women lived in lean-tos made of scrap wood and metal, and families went without meat and fresh vegetables for months, existing on a diet of soup and beans. The psychological burden was even greater4: Americans suffered through year after year of grinding poverty with no letup in sight. The unemployed stood in line for hours waiting for relief checks, veterans sold apples or pencils on street comers, their manhood—once prized so highly by the nation—now in question. People left the city for the countryside but found no salvation on the farm. Crops rotted in the fields because prices were too low to make harvesting worthwhile; sheriffs fended off angry crowds as banks foreclosed long overdue mortgages on once prosperous farms. Few escaped the suffering. African Americans who had left the poverty of the rural South for factory jobs in the North were among the first to be laid off. Mexican Americans, who had flowed in to replace European immigrants, met with competition from angry citizens, now willing to do stoop labor in the fields and work as track layers on the railroads. Immigration officials used technicalities to halt the flow across the Rio Grande and even to reverse it; nearly a half million Mexicans were deported in the 1930s, including families with children born in the United States. The poor—black, brown, and white—survived because they knew better than most Americans how to exist in poverty. They stayed in bed in cold weather, both to keep warm and to avoid unnecessary burning up of calories; they patched their shoes with pieces of rubber from discarded tires, heated only the kitchens of their homes, and ate scraps of food that others would reject. The middle class, which had always lived with high expectations, was hit hard. Professionals and white-collar workers refused to ask for charity even while their families went without food; one New York dentist and his wife turned on the gas and left a note saying, “We want to get out of the way before we are forced to accept relief money.” People who fell behind in their mortgage payments lost their homes and then faced eviction when they could not pay the rent. Health care declined. Middle-class people stopped going to doctors and dentists regularly, unable to make the required cash payment in advance for services rendered. Even the well-to-do were affected, giving up many of their former luxuries and weighed down with guilt as they watched former friends and business associates join the ranks of the impoverished. “My father lost everything in the Depression” became an all-too-familiar refrain among young people who dropped out of college. Many Americans sought escape in movement. Men, boys, and some women, rode the rails in search of jobs, hopping freights to move south in the winter or west in the summer. On the Missouri Pacific alone, the number of vagrants increased from just over 13,000 in 1929 to nearly 200,000 in 1931. One town in the Southwest hired special policemen to keep vagrants from leaving the boxcars. Those who became tramps had to keep on the move, but they did find a sense of community in the hobo jungles that sprang up along the major railroad routes. Here a man could find a place to eat and sleep, and people with whom to share his misery. Louis Banks, a black veteran, told interviewer Studs Terkel what these informal camps were like: Black and white, it didn’t make any difference who you were, cause everybody was poor. All friendly, sleep in a jungle. We used to take a big pot and cook food, cabbage, meat and beans all together. We all set together, we made a tent. Twenty-five or thirty would be out on the side of the rail, white and colored: They didn’t have no mothers or sisters, they didn’t have no home, they were dirty, they had overalls on, they didn’t have no food, they didn’t have anything.
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Is More Growth Really Better? A number of writers have raised questions about the desirability of faster economic growth as an end in itself, at least in the wealthier industrialized countries. Yet faster growth does mean more wealth, and to most people the desirability of wealth is beyond question. “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor—and I can tell you, rich is better,” a noted stage personality is said to have told an interviewer, and most people seem to have the same attitude about the economy as a whole. To those who hold this belief, a healthy economy is one that is capable of turning out vast quantities of shoes, food, cars, and TV sets. An economy whose capacity to provide all these things is not expanding is said to have succumbed to the disease of stagnation. Economists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx saw great virtue in economic growth. Marx argued that capitalism, at least in its earlier historical stages, was a vital form of economic organization by which society got out of the rut in which the medieval stage of history had trapped it. Marx believed that “the development of the productive powers of society... alone can form the real basis of a higher form of productive powers of society”. Marx went on to tell us that only where such great productive powers have been unleashed can one have “a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.” In other words, only a wealthy economy can afford to give all individuals the opportunity for full personal satisfaction through the use of their special abilities in their jobs and through increased leisure activities. Yet the desirability of further economic growth for a society that is already wealthy has been questioned on grounds that undoubtedly have a good deal of validity. It is pointed out that the sheer increase in quantity of products has imposed an enormous cost on society in the form of pollution, crowding, proliferation of wastes that need disposal, and debilitating psychological and social effects. It is said that industry has transformed the satisfying and creative tasks of the artisan into the mechanical and dehumanizing routine of the assembly line. It has dotted our roadsides with junkyards, filled our air with smoke, and poisoned our food with dangerous chemicals. The question is whether the outpouring of frozen foods, talking dolls, radios, and headache remedies is worth its high cost to society. As one well-known economist put it: The continued pursuit of economic growth by Western Societies is more likely on balance to reduce rather than increase social welfare... Technological innovations may offer to add to men’s material opportunities. But by increasing the risks of their obsolescence it adds also to their anxiety. Swifter means of communications have the paradoxical effect of isolating people; increased mobility has led to more hours commuting; increased automobilization to increased separation; more television to less communication. In consequence, people know less of their neighbors than ever before. Virtually every economist agrees that these concerns are valid, though many question whether economic growth is their major cause. Nevertheless, they all emphasize that pollution of air and water, noise and congestion, and the mechanization of the work process are very real and very serious problems. There is every reason for society to undertake programs that grapple with these problems. 11