THE PLAUSIBILITY OF LIFE: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma
by Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart
Yale £18.95 pp314
In an attempt to lure the 64m-strong Roman Catholic vote away from its Democrat bias in America, George W Bush made a pledge to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2000. “Taxpayers’ money,” he said, “should not underwrite research that involves the destruction of live human embryos.” Few topics have exercised Americans in recent years more than the status of the human embryo, which Bush as well as numerous religious groups (and many of no religion) regard as off-limits for experimentation.
But there was a problem with Bush’s pledge. A powerful lobby in scientific medicine had urged that stem cells (which can be turned, in theory, into any kind of replacement human tissue) depend on embryonic research. To ban funding could lose America billions in revenues for potential therapies. Biotech business and medical science were in collision with reproductive ethics.
So, in 2001, Bush announced a “compromise”. He would allow federal funding for research on some 60 stem-cell “lines”. These “lines” were types of stem cells stored in IVF clinics. They were from embryos that no longer had potential for successful implantation. They were fragmented, frozen in liquid nitrogen, and useless for research purposes.
Advertisement
Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science indicts Bush and his party for “polluting science”. He cites Republican claims that condoms fail to prevent HIV infection, abortion increases breast cancer, passive smoking does no harm, environmental concerns are overstated, a missile shield can work, and that there should be a place for creationism in schools. But the central plank of his argument is the embryonic stem-cell issue. There is no doubt that Bush’s solution to his dilemma was based on atrocious science. Exposing that fact is one thing. But to question the right of anybody to oppose experiments on human embryos, as Mooney does, is quite another. Those who have ethical scruples about such research include a wide range of eminent scientists as well as governments of varied political hues around the world, although not in Britain. The EU is still preponderantly against funding such research. The starting principle is simply this: because scientists can perform certain research does not mean that they should.
Republican espousal of bad science is also at work in the evolution debate. Creationism argues, via the book of Genesis, that God made the universe, the earth and all its creatures in six days some 5,000 years ago. Having failed to impose this belief on state-school curricula, fundamentalist evangelicals have advanced the claims of Intelligent Design (ID). This argues that while selection in Darwin’s theory can be confirmed, there is a gap in demonstrable explanation for the variety and complexity of species. So God steps in as the impetus for novelty in nature. For this reason, ID proponents, including prominent republicans, want this more user-friendly creationism taught in science lessons.
The God-of-the-Gaps logic is similar to the so-called Anthropic Principle, which points to the extraordinary number of nuanced chemical conditions necessary for the universe to be hospitable to life: too many to be explained by pure chance. The distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson, formerly an agnostic, announced in 1976 his belief in a Designer God as a result of this phenomenon, inexplicable, as he insisted, in normal science. Since then, however, physicists have posited a theory that takes care of the problem: an infinite series of universes, each with its own set of peculiar physical laws. Popping God into an explanatory scientific gap is an obvious hostage to fortune.
Now, two eminent biologists, Marc Kirschner of Harvard, and John Gerhart of Berkeley, California, have written The Plausibility of Life, which fills the explanatory gap in evolutionary variation. They call it “facilitated variation”. Applying recent discoveries in molecular biology and genetics, the authors show how novel traits emerge in development from a single-celled egg to a complex adult organism. Rather than being a passive target of natural selection, the individual organism is construct- ed so as to promote variation in every gen- eration. Hence organisms contain within themselves the reason for novelty in nature.
Just as gaps in a scientific theory are a poor basis for believing in God, so theories of many universes and “facilitated variation” are a weak basis for discounting his existence. The fact is that theology and science inhabit separate realms of discourse and the imagination. They are bad mixers; and the idea that fundamentalist religion can be imposed in a science class is as misguided as attempts to impose religious views on the laws of a democratic state. Which brings us back to Mooney’s book. For all that it is timely, The Republican War on Science fails to note a development under Bush that runs parallel to and, at points, overlaps with the administration’s contempt for science. America’s founding fathers established a separation between religion and government aimed at protecting a pluralism of freely held beliefs and values in society. Under Bush there has been a creeping preference for an evangelical fundamentalism that not only undermines science but erodes the essential secularism of the state. If separation of religion and the state protects the rights of Americans to pursue their lawfully chosen beliefs (including atheism), the erosion of separation places that protection in peril.
Advertisement
Available at Books First prices of £13.49 (Mooney) and £17.05 on 0870 165 8585
READ ON...
websites:
http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/nhmag.html
Views for and against intelligent design