FUTURE SHOCKS.

• Author: Turner, Frederick
• Position: Books - Review

Great books for the biological century

In the November 1995 issue of REASON ("Biology 2001"), Gregory Benford declared the end of the era of physics and the coming of the biological century - not only in science but in the way we think. "Beyond 2000," he wrote, "the principal social, moral, and economic issues will probably spring from biology's metaphors and approach, and from its cornucopia of technology. Bio-thinking will inform our world and shape our vision of ourselves."

Four years later, bio-thinking is everywhere: on the health-and-genetics-obsessed covers of news magazines, in the metaphors informing debates over Internet governance, in the worried murmurs of Washington intellectuals. Daytime talk shows debate the merits of multiple births caused by fertility drugs. Conflicts over gay rights revolve around nature/nurture arguments. A trade war between the United States and Europe threatens to break out over the issue of genetically modified food.

In a 10th-anniversary review of his famous "End of History" article, Francis Fukuyama declares its thesis flawed only because genetic engineering threatens to end fixed human nature. "At that point," he concludes, "we will have definitely finished human History because we will have abolished human beings as such. And then, a new, posthuman history will begin." (Meanwhile, prominent reviewers of Fukuyama's latest, far less radical, book, The Great Disruption, find its biological interests beyond the pale.)

The line between "natural" and "artificial" has become a matter of urgent political concern. Issues of genetic determinism, evolutionary psychology, and brain physiology have spilled into moral philosophy. Questions of social and political order have become fraught with biological meaning - and vice versa.

At the dawn of the biological century, we've asked contributors to our annual book symposium to suggest works of fiction or nonfiction that provide insight into the meaning, promise, threats, challenges, or opportunities of such a world - and to explain why these books are important.

Bruce Ames

In 1780 Benjamin Franklin wrote to Joseph Priestley, the chemist, biologist, and minister: "I always rejoice to hear of your being still employed in experimental researches into nature and of the success you meet with. The rapid progress true science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born too soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. We may, perhaps, deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport. Agriculture may diminish its labor and double its produce: all diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, (not excepting even that of old age,) and our lives lengthened at pleasure, even beyond the antediluvian standard. Oh that moral science were in as fair a way of improvement, that men would cease to be wolves to one another, and that human beings would at length learn what they now improperly call humanity."

Biology is making amazing progress with help from the genomics/DNA-chip and computer/Internet revolutions. Those of us in the thick of this progress believe that it will have an enormous impact on health and agriculture. Will the powerful methodology of biology illuminate moral science? This question, which would have interested both Priestley and Franklin, has been tackled in Edward O. Wilson's beautifully written book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Random House, 1999).

I am attracted to some of Wilson's evolutionary ideas about the unity of knowledge and the biological roots of moral behavior and religion, but I think he gets environmentalism and economics somewhat wrong. As one of the leading biologists of our day, he is justifiably concerned that the burgeoning human population will eliminate many of the world's species. He has too rosy a view of environmentalist panaceas, however, and fails to appreciate the insights of economists concerning the ability of free markets to deal with this problem.

Such issues are addressed more cogently by Peter Huber in his eloquent and thoughtful new book, Hard Green: Saving the Environment From the Environmentalists (Basic Books, 2000). Huber's manifesto skewers most of the current environmentalist proposals as counterproductive and makes the case for markets and wealth, rather than bureaucracy and poverty, as the correct path to preserving species, the environment, and human life. My own work on cancer prevention (see socrates.berkeley.edu/mutagen) has convinced me that the environmentalist campaign to eliminate all traces of synthetic industrial chemicals and pesticides is misguided. This crusade and the new one against genetically engineered food are distractions from the real causes of cancer and other diseases, such as unbalanced diets and smoking. These distractions hurt poor people and the environment.

As Thomas Jefferson, another polymath and a friend of both Priestley and Franklin, said in 1789: "[Science] is the work to which the young men should lay their hands. We have spent the prime of our lives in procuring them the precious blessing of liberty. Let them spend theirs in showing that it is the great parent of science and of virtue; and that a nation will be great in both always in proportion as it is free."

Bruce Ames (bnames@uclink4.berkeley.edu) is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Center at the University of California, Berkeley. He won the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1998.

Ronald Bailey

Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Harvard University Press, 1975), by Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, will be considered one of the more prescient and seminal texts pointing to the 21st-century revolution in genetics and neurobiology. In Sociobiology, Wilson drew together a vast amount of research to prove that behavior, like the physical bodies of animals, is determined by genes. In fact, distinct behaviors can be considered in some sense to be external "organs" that help an animal survive and adapt to its environment. The behaviors influenced by genes include mating habits, warning calls, territorial defense, and foraging techniques.

Wilson's presentation of the research on animals was magisterial in scope, covering everything from social insects to gorillas. But his book met with fierce resistance from intellectuals because he dared to include a chapter that extended his genetic approach to the behavior of human beings. The notion that some human behavior might be strongly influenced by genes was anathema to the prevailing social science conceit of the time that the human psyche was culturally determined and thus infinitely malleable.

Ultimately, Wilson's intellectual sin was to claim that there is a core "human nature" that arises from our genes. If there is a human nature, then certain utopian social schemes, usually promoted by the left, would be impossible to implement. For example, Wilson pointed out that genetics strongly undermined the notion that altruism could be inculcated throughout a society, if only the proper social institutions were adopted. His work also suggested that "biology is destiny" with regard to some of the persistent psychological differences between men and women. And although he did not himself follow his findings to their logical conclusion, Wilson's work hinted at how a genetically based territoriality could evolve into the institution of private property.

Sociobiology has weathered firestorms of criticism, and 25 years later many of its insights have been backed up by further research into human genetics. Although human minds and cultures are extremely flexible, biology is increasingly finding that there is indeed a human nature that has a genetic basis. Researchers are discovering more and more genes that predispose their bearers to a variety of behaviors and characteristics, including risk taking, homosexual activity, and high intelligence. This list is growing and will certainly expand dramatically as geneticists begin to explore the new terrain that the Human Genome Project will shortly open.

Of course, no one gets the future exactly right. Wilson thought that it would be 100 years before scientists obtained a detailed understanding of the genetic basis of human psychology. At the current pace of research, it will probably take a lot less time than that. Also, Wilson, ever the Harvard academic, thought that uncovering the principles of sociobiology would lead inevitably to the "planned society." Yet understanding the genetic underpinnings of the human mind could instead lead to an unprecedented expansion of human autonomy. To the extent that we don't like the behaviors toward which our genes predispose us, we will be able to change them at the most basic biochemical level. In a sense, human nature can become what you want it to be.

"We are compelled to drive toward total knowledge, right down to the levels of the neuron and the gene," Wilson wrote. "When we have progressed enough to explain ourselves in these mechanistic terms, and the social sciences come to full flower, the result might be hard to accept." Wilson was bleakly assuming that biology would only show us the behavioral cage in which we are confined by our genes. But such knowledge may also give us the key that opens the genetic cage to a new, and unsettling, world of freedom.

Ronald Bailey (rbailey@reason.com) is REASON's science correspondent.

Gregory Benford

When confronting immense issues stretched over long times - and a century is now as much a cultural chasm as a millennium was in the ancient world - I believe in going back to the classics. There is no better guide to worried regard of the future than Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel Brave New World. With its social control induced by the drug Soma and its endless diversion of the consuming masses...