Genome 82
| "Genome:the autobiography of a species in 23 chapters" | |
| author | Matt Ridley |
| pages | 344 |
| publisher | Harper Collins |
| rating | 10/10 |
| reviewer | Jon Katz |
| ISBN | 0-06-019497-9 |
| summary | Uses 23 pairs of chromosomes to explain our species |
There is much more to each of us than a genetic code, writes Ridley, "[b]ut until now human genes were an almost complete mystery. We will be the first generation to penetrate that mystery. We stand on the brink of great new answers but, even more, of great new questions. This is what I have tried to convey in this book."
And he's succeeded, brilliantly, even entertainingly. Genome isn't about the Human Genome Project itself, but rather about what the project is uncovering in labs all over the world. Some time this year, geneticists say they will probably have a rough draft of the complete human genome. In a short time, we will have gone from knowing little about genes to knowing nearly everything.
The human genome, the complete set of genes housed in 23 pairs of chromosomes, form Ridley's outline for what he terms an autobiography of our species. Spelled out in a billion three-letter words using only the four-letter alphabet of DNA, the genome has been altered, edited and handed down for more than three billion years. With the first human-readable draft of the genome poised on the horizon, we -- the people Ridley calls "this lucky" generation" -- are the first beings who will be able to read and ponder this profound document about what it means to be, well, us.
In Genome, Ridley picks one newly-discovered gene from each of the 23 human chromosomes and tells its story, in the process recounting some of the history of our species. Ridley weaves each chapter to be more compelling than the one before. Genes that cause disease, influence language, behavior and intelligence, genes that enable us to write grammatically, that guide the development of biology and intelligence, that permit us to remember, that relate ultimately to selfishness, hope, fate, self-interest, instinct and history.
Ridley aptly promises what he calls a "whistle-stop tour of some of the more interesting sites in the genome and what they tell us about ourselves." Some stops along that tour aren't pretty -- from the creation of Luca, the Last Universal Common Ancestor (she looked like a bacterium and lived in a warm pond) to the blood-curdling research of Nazi scientists.
Two of the most powerful chapters come towards the end -- his horrific recounting of the history of eugenics, the perverted use of genetics to breed superior humans, and his chapter on free will. This chapter raises the most elemental question when it comes to the genome, one the world has and will continue to debate: do we truly have free will, or is our behavior and fate genetically pre-determined?
Ridley's answer is both affirming and disturbing.
This is an amazing book. It's hard to imagine a more sweeping, powerful or complex subject, yet Ridley, a former science editor and reporter, has made it completely accessible, clear and comprehensible. Genetics is important to every single human being, yet few people know much about it. But in Genome, hardly a paragraph is anything but lucid. You could give it to your grandmother and she'd have little trouble getting through it, or grasping its monumental significance.
Beyond that, Ridley's great ambition for the book, declared in his preface, isn't just hype. We are, in fact, on the verge of one of the great intellectual achievements in human history. We are about to learn more about ourselves, the way we evolve, and our behavior than anybody before us has ever dared to imagine. This is a book we all urgently need to read. We are entering a new era in human knowledge and self-awareness, and few of us are really prepared for it. This book will help get you ready.
Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.
fnord. fnord. fnord. (Score:1)
Can this book be trusted? Seems like the gnomes and the Illuminated Masters are up to no good.
Genetics literature. (Score:2)
I'd be interested to see how it works in relation to the wirtings of Lyall Watson, Richard Dawkins, et al. And what perspective he takes on the whole use and puropose of genetics.
Nice to see a book on genetics looking into Eugenics as well, especially as they are bringing it in through the back door, trying to iron out the imperfections of humanity through genetic tweaking.
Hmm, more books, less time...
Doesn't everyone say this? (Score:2)
I'd like to see someone claim that they're living in the most unimportant and trivial years in human history.
How high does the conspiracy go? (Score:1)
"Most Intellectual Time" (Score:2)
The human race has forgotten the difference.
What about genetic engenering? (Score:2)
If this is really the Major question addressed by the book(tm), then I'm a little concerned. The answer is no, we've known that the "nurture" has a pretty big effect, probably as much as "nature" since the 60s when studies of twins were done.
Also, at least based on the review this book doesn't seem to cover what the most important issue is relating to genetics these days is (at least as I see it): the morality of these choices we are giong to be facing. If we do map the genome then we are going to have the ablity to change it, at least in our children. Even now it would be trivial to decide if a child is male or female, has blue eyes or brown. What happens when this becomes cheap (its comming soon) and the masses get ahold of this. Just think about what would happen if China (for instance) decided that its citizens had the right to choose whether their children could be male or female. Considering how valued male children are now, what choice would most Chinese citizens make. Would this be a good thing? I don't know, but we've got to start asking these questions.
A question (Score:1)
The NYT review (URL) (Score:3)
Check out Ridley's earlier books (Score:2)
Ridley is one of the best popularisers of "Evolutionary Psychology" around, along with Stephen Pinker and, of course, Dawkins. And what we are learning from EP about human behaviour is making all our psychology, and most of our politics, as obsolete as the flat earth.
Genome sucks! (Score:2)
Trolling for Scooby doo!
And screw Scappy too!
Re:Doesn't everyone say this? (Score:1)
That seems to be ignored by people as they assume that the knowledge they are pursuing is going to give complete knowledge in an area (I remember a comment somewhere about there being nothing more to give a Nobel physics prize for after some theory or other). So things will never be as exciting as this again.
However I think we can safely say that this new knowlege will bring at least as many questions as answers and the people addressing them will think they are in the most pivotal point in human history.
To pull this back towards topic as far as I understand the Human Genome project is invoved in collecting fairly raw information and there is still a lot of work to understand the mechanisms of how this abstract information stored in a 3-digit, base-4 notation actually provides enough information to define you and me.
That will provide for an even more interesting time and who knows what questions those answers will raise.
Great choice of wording Jon! (Score:1)
"You could give it to your grandmother and she'd have little trouble getting through it, or grasping its monumental significance."
Geesh Jon! Ya think?
Life equals information? (Score:1)
In the first pass, computers accelerate the
decoding of the complex human genome by allowing
the "shotgun" method: chop into a million pieces,
decode, and statistically reassemble.
In the next phase, computers will help identify
and guess at the function of the expected 100,000
proteins in the genome. The function of only a couple percent are currently known. A quarter to a third can be currently guessed at from similarities to known ones.
Will knowing all this explain life?
Re:A question (Score:1)
No - "Doesn't everyone say this?" (Score:1)
"May you live in interesting times"
The origin of this is said to be a Chinese peasant in the first(?) dynasty, roughly 4900 years ago. At the time bands of warlords were ravaging the area in their quest for power, and the *ideal* dream of most normal people was to have simple peace and quiet.
Human Genetics == Greeks inventing Gods (Score:1)
Look what we have so far:
Greeks inventing Gods
Geneticists searching for the gene that makes you a geneticist
Physicists inventing theories that predict particles to solve problems in other people's theories (there's some unelemental about there being more sub particles than elements. I have a theory how that could be true but it would require fitting GR and QM nice and snug and I'm afraid there's an uncertainty principle about accurately describing both of those two at the same time.)
I believe making bacterial machinery to eat oil is great it shows hard work and intelligence. The rest is a little arrogant and overrated. No intent to build a consistent theory. Just get the pills out who cares.
Not so fast! (Score:3)
Thanks Jon for this interesting review. But please understand that we know very little about what all these ATCG's are doing. Going from the genomic sequences to the genes will take time. And understanding what all these genes are doing will take even more time. We have now barely scratched the surface. We don't even know how many genes we have (probably between 80 and 150K), and many of our genes make several proteins. Proteins are involved in complex pathways and
A Shift In Medicine (Score:1)
Now, we visit specialists who have expertise in a particular system of the body and it's afflictions: gastroenterologists, dermatologists, cardiologists, etc. Once the genome is mapped out, and we dicover that certain ailments are controlled by particular chromosomes, I wouldn't be surprised at all to see medicince shift from the current systemic approach to a chromosome-based approach.
Because each cromosome is so complex, you'd have specializations in particular chromosomes (or maybe groups of related chromosomes). So you'd go to see your doctor, who would then refer you not to a cardiologist, but a chromologist (?) who had expertise in, say Chromosome 11, which appears to control the problems your having.
DNA as a programming language (Score:3)
> made up of a "billion three letter words"
> (codons?), that means that there are (only) a
> billion factorial different genetic ids for
> humans to take? So what is the proabability of
> there being someone else on Earth having the
> same genetic makeup as me?
"Codons" is correct, and when you consider that there is a lot of genetic diversity that is NOT expressed in a given environment, and further consider the fact that the 'genetic deck' is shuffled each generation, the chances of finding an unrelated person of exactly the same genetic makeup are astronomical. Among those to whom you are related, the odds go down, but are still very high with one notable exception: Identical twins. And even identical twins show differences in development due to slight environmental differences as they develop in and out of the womb.
I have been involved with a major crop genome database since the late 1980's, and I have had the following quote on my office door since I first saw it in 1992:
There is little else I can say in response to Mr. Edelhart's comments.- --
--------------------------------------
perverted genetics? (Score:1)
Given that, and the parental "obligation" to give the best they can for their children, doesn't that obligation extend to making sure they're as smart/strong/ueber as possible? Can we afford to not make the next generation utterly hyperintelligent and creative, considering how well we've done in the past *cough, cough*.
It's unlikely that there will be any sociological force great enough to counter the relentless march of technological progress excepting a jihad executed on a massive scale. Our species seems to have the tendency to do anything that can be done, anyway. Not that I'm complaining.
Genes, Jeans, and Jon Katz (Score:1)
(c) 2000 BigBioTech (Score:4)
will be owned by Corporate Intellectual Property groups. Want to come up with a cancer cure? Need to pay through the nose.
Free Will (Score:2)
Having said all which, does being "free" depend on not understanding why you make your decisions?
Re:Check out Ridley's earlier books (Score:2)
you are so right (Score:2)
I recently suggested that maybe a new temporary patent should be developed for a certain class of biotech discoveries, so companies can still profit from their research but not at the cost of new research. While I usually eschew nutty suggestions for new "classifications" and paperwork, I really can't come up with any other simple solution.
A. Keiper [mailto]
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society [tecsoc.org]
"Our Species" (Score:1)
What a Eurocentric view. Take a look at Africa, the bushmen in Australia, the American Indian. They are all part of our species, but they do not exhibit the same tendencies.
The relentless march of technological progress is not so guarenteed.
Re:Doesn't everyone say this? (Score:1)
Re:What about genetic engenering? (Score:1)
Re:perverted genetics? (Score:2)
Even if we assume parents will usually make good decisions in these matters, where it really gets ugly is when the state decides what constitutes the master race.
I think the best uses of this would be to eliminate genetic traits that we can all agree are undesirable - I think it would be good if my (purely hypothetical) children didn't have to have the sort of orthodontic work I did, or have my high cholesterol. But I'm not at all sure I would interevene to make them taller, or smarter.
What I really look forward to is complete physical and genetic modification of exisiting persons - get some heavy-duty nanotech and gene therapy going and let me choose for myself how tall and how smart I want to be. That's much further off.
I don't (Score:1)
Spoiler alert:
The ending on the Human Genome project, philosophicaly, is going to be: genes set up lots of interesting potentials, some of them in fiendishly complicated interactions, that are, in every individual case, mostly going to be lost due to environment. We can do lots of stuff (and will be able to do more) that may or may not be a good idea.
What else is there?
Oh, yeah - the 'net. We have the best system for communication in the history of the world. And maybe someday we will have something to say on it. Woohooo - we can put the Sears catalog (well, not the Sears catalog as such, they stopped doing that) on the Web. My email to some guy in France last night thanking him for a bit of software he threw into the public domain was more important than that, in the grand scheme. Cooperation between far-flung strangers is one of the highlights of our culture.
Space exploration is plodding along sort of OK. But I don't see anything big being done in the next decade or two.
The big dreams of our culture are to have fewer kids getting stoned and possibly lower rates of some diseases for a while until the organisms get resistant. Some people dream of politicians who aren't quite as corrupt as the ones we have now. Others dream that we might be able to be a little less mean to each other.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
You say nature, I say nurture, let's call the... (Score:2)
In a new book Judith Harris, "The Nurture Assumption," a third, and perhaps more important alternative is looked into: the idea that a child's peer group has lasting impact on his/her development.
On another note, I don't like the tone of, "we have to start asking these questions." The usual result is that somebody (a mandarin or politician) asks the question, gets it answered by a lobby group, and the answer gets shoved down the throats of an unsuspecting public.
I - as someone who tends toward libertarianism - beleives that people will eventually find the right choice (perhaps after some wrong turns), but the choice they will find on such moral matters are often better than any answers from any political body.
To take the China example - even if boys were favoured every time, after a few years, the scarcity of females would probably make people value female children a lot more... and maybe there would be a natural decline in population first, but in the end, culture will adapt to the situation.
Re:Free Will (Score:1)
Thinking of some contenders ... (Score:2)
On the strength of just the genome project and matters related to it? It may be very useful, but is hardly more interesting for requiring billions of AGCT sequences than a few thousand.
The most interesting ideas, IMHO, give great insights in forms which are often beautiful and compact. On these grounds filling a hard-disk's worth of mostly random data hardly counts.
Off the top of my head, here are some ideas that
start to justify "greatest
Invention of philosophy, history, drama, etc. as we know it in ancient Greece -- c 400 BC.
Shakespeare's tragedies -- c. 1600.
Darwin's theory of evolution -- c. 1850.
Discovery of general relativity and quantum mechanics, -- 1916-1930.
P.S. Feynman's thoughts in a similar vein
Re:perverted genetics? (Score:1)
Funny, I just finished reading Dune.. (after seeing the movie like 30 times or so) Even after the Butlerian Jihad and the injunction against thinking machines, the Bene Gesserit continued with a secret breeding program whose end result was to be the Kwisatz Haderach (or Super Being)..
So even a Jihad won't change the basic human urge to improve itself (technologically or otherwise). Or rather, those humans that _do_ implement that urge tend to do better than (and, historically, then shortly supplant/conquer/annihilate) those that do not.
Your Working Boy,
Re:I don't (Score:1)
It is still a very good time to live because of the great technological advances that exist today. All we need is a few great feats that again remind us of our american dream. I am very enthusiastic about space travel, so in my mind a mission to mars would be a great start. But this is not the only great endeaver to be started on, but something needs to be done before stagnation truly sets in.
Re:What about genetic engenering? (Score:1)
I believe they claimed 98% success (although of course, 50% success is the baseline). So the ability to choose sex is here.
Genetics is just part of it (Score:1)
Sure, genes determine some critical information about the "hardware," but, like any complex machine, organisms are affected by use and environment.
The purely deterministic genetic view is pretty weak. For an amusing, somewhat outrageous analysis of the situation (and why Darwinism is *really* just a flavor of Christianity), check out Brian Goodwin's "How the Leopard Changed Its Spots (the evolution of complexity)". ISBN 1857992512.
Re:What about genetic engenering? (Score:1)
You:Again, your knowledge is lacking. Mapping the genome has nothing to do with being able to change it. Being able to change it like you're talking about requires knowing what each separate gene does, which is an entirely different thing than knowing (a) the sequence of each gene--what the Human Genome Project gives us or (b) knowing where in the genome the gene is physically located--what mapping gives us, and what we've had for most genes for several years now. Your example of eye color is a perfect one for how wrong you are. We've mapped the region responsible for eye color. We don't have a clue how it works. We're nowhere near the point of being able to produce babies with custom eye colors.
No no no. True, if we want to create a custom eye color (say.. purple) that does not occur in either of the parents then yes, we have to understand what is going on at a deeper level than just mapping. But that's not what I was claiming. If we want to create a child with blue eyes, say, then all we have to do is sort the sperm and eggs given to us for the given trait. We don't even need to know how the genetic code is expressed (what pathway the protiens use), we don't even need to splice in any new DNA, we just need to be able to diferentiate between DNA that has the code and that which dosen't.
Developmental evolution (Score:2)
Of all the genes that are going to be characterised in our genome, we share a large proportion (I apologise for not having an exact figure here) with most other organisms including the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the bacterium Escherichia coli. These latter genetic systems have been extremely well-characterised by extensive resesarch over the past decade or so. Thus, I suspect that to a large degree, much of what we will find in our genome will not come as any surprise.
What we have come to realise from what information is available is that most of the genetic variation that makes us biochemically, morphologically, and perhaps behaviourally different from one another is in the developmental regulation of these common genes. What is the more exciting aspect of the genome sequence is not each and every gene itself but the small sequences associated with, and perhaps even the spatial distribution of, these genes.
So the exciting discoveries will most probably not be in finding "the gene" for making one tall, but rather how patterns of developmental regulation -- in the varying spatial and temporal expression of a common pool of genes -- create variants in height.
This will require not a few, but rather thousands of genome sequences! I am waiting with bated breath for the technological advances in computing and mechanical power that will allow me to point a tricorder at each individual specimen and obtain a complete characterisation of its genome, contrasted with its phenotype (physical appearance). What's exciting is that this is in a sense already possible, with DNA chips that can measure the varying levels of transcription of each gene.
I have to concur with Ridley about one comment: This is a very exciting time to be in biology.
free will & determinism (Score:1)
| Why are some of us combative, friendly, hopeful, grammatical?
| Does free will or genetic determinism shape our behaviour?
it is clear that genetic endowment does give us a predisposition
towards certain behavioural traits, but it is in nowise clear
that all our behaviour stems merely from the nurture of external
circumstances and our genetic endowment. a few comments:
--| conscious human action |-----
Is man in his thinking and acting a spiritually free being, or is he
compelled by the iron necessity of purely natural law?
sad signs of the superficiality of present-day thought that a book which
attempts to develop a new faith out of the results of recent scientific
research,* has nothing more to say on this question than these words:
With the question of the freedom of the human will we are
not concerned. The alleged freedom of indifferent choice has
been recognized as an empty illusion by every philosophy
worthy of the name. The moral valuation of human action and
character remains untouched by this problem.
(David Friedrich Strauss, Der alte und neue Glaube).
It is not because I consider that the book in which it occurs has any
special importance that I quote this passage, but because it seems to me to
express the view to which the thinking of most of our contemporaries manages
to rise in this matter. Everyone who claims to have grown beyond the
kindergarten stage of science appears to know nowadays that freedom cannot
consist in choosing, at one's pleasure, one or other of two possible courses
of action. There is always, so we are told, a perfectly definite reason why,
out of several possible actions, we carry out just one and no other.
...in combating the concept of free will. The germs of all the relevant
arguments are to be found as early as Spinoza. All that he brought forward
in clear and simple language against the idea of freedom has since been
repeated times without number, but as a rule enveloped in the most
hair-splitting theoretical doctrines, so that it is difficult to recognize
the straightforward train of thought which is all that matters. Spinoza
writes in a letter of October or November, 1674:
I call a thing free which exists and acts from the pure necessity
of its nature, and I call that unfree, of which the being and
action are precisely and fixedly determined by something else.
Thus, for example, God, though necessary, is free because he
exists only through the necessity of his own nature. Similarly,
God cognizes himself and all else freely, because it follows
solely from the necessity of his nature that he cognizes all. You
see, therefore, that for me freedom consists not in free decision,
but in free necessity.
But let us come down to created things which are all
determined by external causes to exist and to act in a fixed and
definite manner. To perceive this more clearly, let us imagine
a perfectly simple case. A stone, for example, receives from an
external cause acting upon it a certan quantity of motion, by
reason of which it necessarily continues to move, after the
impact of the external cause has ceased. The continued motion
of the stone is due to compulsion, not to the necessity of its
own nature, because it requires to be defined by the thrust of
an external cause. What is true here for the stone is true also
for every other particular thing, however complicated and
many-sided it may be, namely, that everything is necessarily
determined by external causes to exist and to act in a fixed and
definite manner.
Now, please, suppose that this stone during its motion thinks and
knows that it is striving to the best of its ability to continue in
motion. This stone, which is conscious only of its striving and is
by no neans indifferent, will believe that it is absolutely free, and
that it continues in motion for no other reason than its own will to
continue. But this is just the human freedom that everybody claims
to possess and which consists in nothing but this, that men are
conscious of their desires, but ignorant of the causes by which they
are determined. Thus the child believes that he desires milk of
his own free will, the angry boy regards his desire for vengeance
as free, and the coward his desire for flight. Again, the drunken
man believes that he says of his own free will what, sober
again, he would fain have left unsaid, and as this prejudice is
innate in all men, it is difficult to free oneself from it. For,
although experience teaches us often enough that man least of
all can temper his desires, and that, moved by conflicting passions,
he sees the better and pursues the worse, yet he considers
himself free because there are some things which he desires
less strongly, and some desires which he can easily inhibit
through the recollection of something else which it is often
possible to recall.
Because this view is so clearly and definitely expressed it is easy to
detect the fundamental error that it contains. The same necessity by which a
stone makes a definite movement as the result of an impact, is said to
compel a man to carry out an action when impelled thereto by any reason. It
is only because man is conscious of his action that he thinks himself to be
its originator. But in doing so he overlooks the fact that he is driven by a
cause which he cannot help obeying. The error in this train of thought is
soon discovered. Spinoza, and all who think like him, overlook the fact that
man not only is conscious of his action, but also may become conscious of
the causes which guide him. Nobody will deny that the child is unfree when
he desires milk, or the drunken man when he says things which he later
regrets. Neither knows anything of the causes, working in the depths of
their organisms, which exercise irresistible control over them. But is it
justifiable to lump together actions of this kind with those in which a man
is conscious not only of his actions but also of the reasons which cause him
to act? Are the actions of men really all of one kind? Should the act of a
soldier on the field of battle, of the scientific researcher in his
laboratory, of the statesman in the most complicated diplomatic
negotiations, be placed scientifically on the same level with that of the
child when it desires milk: It is no doubt true that it is best to seek the
solution of a problem where the conditions are sinmplest. But inability to
discrinminate has before now caused endless confusion. There is, after all,
a profound difference between knowing why I am acting and not knowing it. At
first sight this seems a self-evident truth. And yet the opponents of
freedom never ask themselves whether a motive of action which I recognize
and see through, is to be regarded as compulsory for me in the same sense as
the organic process which causes the child to cry for milk
...This leads us straight to the standpoint from which the subject will be
considered here. Have we any right to consider the question of the freedom
of the will by itself at all? And if not, with what other question must it
necessarily be connected?
If there is a difference between a conscious motive of action and an
unconscious urge, then the conscious motive will result in an action which
must be judged differently from one that springs from blind impluse. Hence
our first question will concern this difference, and on the result of this
enquiry will depend what attitude we shall have to take towards the question
of freedom proper.
What does it mean to have knowledge of the reasons for one's action? Too
little attention has been paid to this question because, unfortunately, we
have torn into two what is really an inseparable whole: Man. We have
distinguished between the knower and the doer and have left out of account
precisely the one who matters most of all - the knowing doer.
It is said that man is free when he is controlled only by his reason and not
by his animal passions. Or again, that to be free means to be able to
determine one's life and action by purposes and deliberate decisions.
Nothing is gained by assertions of this sort. For the question is just
whether reason, purposes, and decisions exercise the same kind of compulsion
over a man as his animal passions. If without my co-operation, a rational
decision emerges in me with the same necessity with which hunger and thirst
arise, then I must needs obey it, and my freedom is an illusion...
What distinguishes man from all other organic beings arises from his
rational thinking. Activity he has in common with other organisms. Nothing
is gained by seeking analogies in the animal world to clarify the concept of
freedom as applied to the actions of human beings. Modern science loves such
analogies. When scientists have succeeded in finding among animals something
similar to human behaviour, they believe they have touched on the most
important question of the science of man. To what misunderstandings this
view leads is seen, for example, in the book The Illusion of Freewill, by P.
Ree, where the following remark on freedom appears:
It is easy to explain why the movement of a stone seems to
us necessary, while the volition ofa donkey does not. The causes
which set the stone in motion are external and visible, while
the causes which determine the donkey's volition are internal
and invisible. Between us and the place of their activity there
is the skull of the ass. . . . The determining causes are not visible
and therefore thought to be non-existent. The volition, it is
explained, is, indeed, the cause of the donkey's turning round,
but is itself unconditioned; it is an absolute beginning.*
(Die Illusion der Willensfreiheit, 1885, page 5).
Here again human actions in which there is a consciousness of the motives
are simply ignored, for Ree declares that "between us and the place of their
activity there is the skull of the ass." To judge from these words, it has
not dawned on Ree that there are actions, not indeed of the ass, but of
human beings, in which between us and the action lies the motive that has
become conscious. Ree demonstrates his blindness once again, a few pages
further on, when he says:
We do not perceive the causes by which our will is determined,
hence we think it is not causally determined at all.
But enough of examples which prove that many argue against freedom without
knowing in the least what freedom is.
That an action, of which the agent does not know why he performs it, cannot
be free, goes without saying. But what about an action for which the reasons
are known? This leads us to the question of the origin and meaning of
thinking. For without the recognition of the thinking activity of the soul,
it is impossible to form a concept of knowledge about anything, and
therefore of knowledge about an action. When we know what thinking in
general means, it will be easy to get clear about the role that thinking
plays in human action.
(Rudolf Steiner, *The Philosophy of Freedom*, from Chapter 1).
Materialism can never offer a satisfactory explanation of the world. For
every attempt at an explanation must begin with the formation of thoughts
about the phenomena of the world. Materialism thus begins with the thought
of matter or material processes. But, in doing so, it is already
confronted by two different sets of facts: the material world, and the
thoughts about it. The materialist seeks to make these latter intelligible
by regarding them as purely material processes. He believes that thinking
takes place in the brain, much in the same way that digestion takes place
in the animal organs. Just as he attributes mechanical and organic effects
to matter, so he credits matter in certain circumstances with the capacity
to think. He overlooks that, in doing so, he is merely shifting the
problem from one place to another. He ascribes the power of thinking to
matter instead of to himself. And thus he is back again at his starting
point. How does matter come to think about its own nature? Why is it not
simply satisfied with itself and content just to exist? The materialist
has turned his attention away from the definite subject, his own I, and
has arrived at an image of something quite vague and indefinite. Here the
old riddle meets him again. The materialistic conception cannot solve the
problem; it can only shift it from one place to another.
(Rudolf Steiner, *The Philosophy of Freedom*, from Chapter 2)
--
|
______________________________________ - O - ___________________________
http://home.earthlink.net/~johnrpenner | johnrpenner@earthlink.net
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Decyphering God (Score:3)
Re:(c) 2000 BigBioTech (Score:1)
Re:perverted genetics? (Score:1)
Even if we assume parents will usually make good decisions in these matters, where it really gets ugly is when the state decides what constitutes the master race.
and
I think the best uses of this would be to eliminate genetic traits that we can all agree are undesirable
and tell me what is the real difference between the two?
Fact of the matter is: all species engage in genetic selection, humans included. Every being wants the strongest possible offspring. Genetic knowledge just makes this a bit more precise.
Re:Free Will (Score:1)
For cripes' sake. You are rehashing cliches 1500 years old.
Re:The Morality Of These Questions . . . (Score:1)
Making a choice about what your kids are like by technology is no more immoral than making that choice by selecting a mate. The important difference is that it can be many times less painful and many times more effective.
Re:Not so fast! (Score:1)
This is roughly the one of themes of John Maddox's (the former editor of Nature) book "What Remains to be Discovered" (ISBN 0-333-65009-3). He makes several good points relating to the enterprise, the most important being that (to paraphrase) "nobody can even guess at what most of the genes do, even for the simple orgranisms that have been fully typed". Admittedly, it is early days. But the point is that the map of the genome just gets us to the start line.
The book, incidently, is very good. The three themes are: "Theory of Everything" type stuff: "The origin and detailed workings of life"; and "consciousness, artifical intelligence, and species survival." Anyone who thinks that we are running out of things to know should have a read.
Dawkins says genes determine our behavior???? (Score:1)
Re:What about genetic engenering? (Score:1)
Genome and Gnome (Score:1)
Mike Roberto
- roberto@apk.net
-- AOL IM: MicroBerto
Re:A question (Score:1)
5, 10, 20, or 0.01. That would surely reduce the number a little?
Re:Doesn't everyone say this? (Score:1)
"Every generation believes that it is the pinacle of civilization. The ones that came before were primitive and the one after will surely decend into barbary."
Be better if I could spell, but people have been saying "how could they have lived before X" and "The younger generation is out of control" since the ancient greeks, so why should they ever stop?
-Kahuna Burger
Select for what? (Score:1)
Dilbert: If you're so smart, how come you work here?
Egghead-type: Intelligence has less practical application than you'd think.
Would you choose to be hyperintelligent? Maybe being pretty/hunky and popular would be more fun. Maybe being normal rather than exceptional would be less disruptive to your parents' lives?
Avoiding or curing diseases and disabilities is not very controversial. Only the most die-hard type could object. But I do worry about people selecting kids in some sort of shopping list way: might we lose variety? In the same way the we now have peaches and tomatoes that bounce and taste of nothing, might we end up with a monoculture of humans that just aren't flexible and creative any more 'cause everyone is chosen from the same limited set of popular genomes?
Just my little science fiction story here. Hey, who's seen GATTACCA?
Re:Great choice of wording Jon! (Score:1)
My grandmother's dead so she'd have a lot of trouble reading it.
But she was a smart and well-educated woman. She got a degree way back in the 1920s, and taught school for many years. I imagine she could have taught Jon Katz a thing or two, especially about writing.
Re:Decyphering God (Score:1)
I'm really not sure, but I don't think that the main idea behind this project has been the development of thought in the lab. The first step for the human genome project has always been, AFAIK, to simply get a list of the genes that make up a human being. After that, by a slow and painful process, they will try to figure out what each of the genes that thay have sequenced does.
Adam
Re:Selfish Genes / Dawkins /Ridley (Score:1)
Dawkins' comment is recorded on the flyleaf of Ridley's "The Origins of Virtue" as follows.
"If my The Selfish Gene were to have a volume two devoted to humans, I think The Origins of Virtue is pretty much what it ought to look like".
Re:(c) 2000 BigBioTech (Score:2)
Re:Free Will (Score:1)
He had freewill and determinism worked out in the fifth century AD.
I'm not convinced, I'm afraid. I thought it was contradictory, Panglossian and entirely dependent on the existence of a God. Not, in fact, relevant to this discussion at all.
In my view, pre-industrial philosophy generally doesn't share enough of a conceptual basis with us to be directly applicable to empirical matters.
Re:(c) 2000 BigBioTech (Score:1)
But remember that without those corporations we would never have had enough money to start research on the genome project in the first place.
Without companies the economy wouldn't be where it is to support the work, indeed, but these companies are asking for IP protection far beyond anything previously on offer. The companies that develop drugs currently don't have patent protection on the enzyme systems the drugs act on, regardless of any research they've done on these systems to help their drug development. The argument that further pharmaceutical innovation is dependent on this has been repeatedly asserted, but never supported with evidence (or if it has been it's slipped past me entirely).
A very good book indeed (Score:1)
Another author, one who deals with one of the more amusing areas of EP, is Jared Diamond in his work 'Why is Sex Fun?'. (It's truly fascinating to know just how different people are in their sexual behaviour from most other animals, and to understand why. No I am not advocating bestiality, nor have I ever tried it or wanted to.) In fact, I'd recommend any of his work, although much of it's off-topic to this discussion. Rather like this comment, in fact.
Re:read b4 u write (Score:1)
But then it wouldn't have been as much fun as anonymously calling someone names without contributing to the discussion (a common problem with AC).
Of course as an ex-inorganic chemist and computer programmer I guess we ought to be glad I even knew what the topic was about.
Re:Decyphering God (Score:1)
Re:Does not produce knowledge (Score:1)
Sorry, the genome project produces DATA, not knowledge.
The sequence analysts I work with will be very interested to hear that.