I originally intended this piece to be part of the anti-science week, but the week has passed, and so I suppose I should extend the theme to the entire month, or simply until I am exhausted.
Somewhere in the comments section of one of my previous anti-science posts, I remarked that, as a writer, it is usually my job to step back and try to see the bigger picture – the God's-eye-view panorama that you will find in most novels. I also remarked that that was precisely what I was not doing in my criticisms of science. However, this time I certainly would like to look at the bigger picture – a bigger picture, in fact, than that usually descried through the microscope of science.
I am in the bad habit of reading too many books at once, perhaps another sign of my reprehensible generalism, and one of these at present is James Lovelock's Gaia.
In his preface to this work, Lovelock writes:
"When I started to write in 1974 in the unspoilt landscape of Western Ireland, it was like living in a house run by Gaia, someone who tried hard to make all her guests comfortable. I began more and more to see things through her eyes and slowly dropped off, like an old coat, my loyalty to the humanist Christian belief in the good of mankind as the only thing that mattered. I began to see us all, as part of the community of living things that unconsciously keep the Earth a comfortable home, and that we humans have no special rights only obligations to the community of Gaia."
I was particularly struck, in reading this, by the phrase "humanist Christian belief". I do not know whether Lovelock ever considered himself, in adult years, a practising Christian, but my guess is that, like the majority of British scientists, he did not. What I took his phrase to imply was as follows. Christian belief has in many cases been superseded by atheistic humanism. Atheistic humanism, however, is really only an extension of Christianity in that it places human beings at the centre of creation.
If this interpretation is correct, and I believe it is, then this is quite an interesting statement for a scientist to make. In fact, it resembles confession or repentance. This impression is strengthened by Lovelock's talk in the next paragraph of a possible future science that "transcends its own limits" and "finds itself on the border with myth".
Lovelock remains loyal to science, but his preface deals largely with the difficulties he has encountered in having Gaia theory accepted by the scientific community. Tellingly, much of this difficulty seems to centre around language. He relates that, "[n]ow most scientists appear to accept Gaia theory and apply it to their research, but they reject the name Gaia and prefer to talk of Earth System Science, or Geophysiology, instead… the new science of Gaia, Geophysiology, must be purged of all reference to mystical notions of Gaia the Earth Mother."
Lovelock, being among the ranks and used to such institutional discipline, submits to its concomitant absurdities. I must admit, as an outsider, I am not so forgiving. I am reminded of the story in The Little Prince, of the Turkish astronomer whom Western scientists did not take seriously because at first he wore traditional Turkish costume instead of a suit and tie. It seems to me that one of the fundamental tyrannies of science is linguistic. One must speak the language of science in order to engage in conversation with scientists, and in so doing one finds it is impossible to disagree with the scientist, since the language is already steeped in the assumptions of his philosophy.
However, although Lovelock does not exactly break ranks with the institution of science, considering it more important to have the power of science behind Gaia – even if he must change its name to something more serious-sounding like 'Geophysiology' – he does give us a glimpse of the possibility that there may indeed be something outside of science, and hints that his alliance with it is at least partly one of expedience:
"The community of environmentalists include many who claim an ownership of Gaian ideas and they have a case. Jonathan Porritt put it well: Gaia is too important as a focus for Green thought and action to be conscripted by science. Some accused me of betraying Gaia. Fred Pearce, in an entertaining article in the New Scientist of May 1994, captured the spirit of that Oxford meeting when he asked for Gaia to be acknowledged by science and the humanities both."
Quite an idea that – that something might be "too important" for science, or, to put it another way, more important than science.
Why does science demand such absolute authority that it can decide that we should take the word 'Geophysiology' seriously, but not the word 'Gaia'? Is it not, by insisting on such authority, placing itself at the centre of all things, declaring itself universal, and, yes, omniscient?
Herein we may discover the underlying hypocrisy of science.
Ancient peoples believed that the Sun and all the celestial bodies revolved around the Earth. In this, the Ptolemaic model of the universe, the physical centrality of the Earth also placed mankind at the symbolic centre of creation. This anthropocentric view was to prove one of the supporting pillars of the Christian church. It is a view implicit in the creation myth of Genesis, and in many artistic depictions of the Garden of Eden over the centuries. Typical of such depictions, for instance, is a certain Florentine miniature, in which the foreground is occupied by the figures of Adam and Eve, standing either side of the Tree of Life, and bound by a circle that is the world.
We are often led to believe that it was the discovery of Copernicus, that the Earth revolves around the Sun, that was pivotal, so to speak, in bringing about the Scientific Revolution and the rational, materialist doctrine that was its concomitant. In other words, the foundation of scientific thought should be that, unlike the universe depicted in Genesis, we occupy a universe in which mankind has no central place. Lovelock's mention of "humanist Christian belief" contains within it the implication that this notion is a fallacy, and looking over the development of science, we may readily see this is so. All the early architects of science were Christian, and they chiselled the blocks which are its foundation with tools of Christian philosophy. Since the existence of God was not to be proved logically, God must be removed to a safe distance. Ockham's razor of reductionism severed God from the world, and also mankind from the world. We were left with a machine, and God was outside of the machine – deus ex machina. The machine itself was one of subject and object. The subject could not truly know the object, since there was now no God connecting them. Knowledge could only be attained by experiment upon the object – a method pioneered by the likes of Descartes, Bacon and Newton. To experiment upon the object – the basis of 'objectivity' – was entirely permissible, since, after all, the object, now devoid of God, was inanimate, dead. In fact, soon enough, within this model, god itself became superfluous, and deus ex machina became simply 'machine'. Even the subject now was no better off than the object, since both were only mechanical. However, the subject did possess one advantage in being able to dominate the object through means of experimentation.
"… and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heavens, and over every animal that moveth upon the earth."
Genesis 1:28
A single thread leads all the way from the arrogant anthropocentrism of Genesis to the forceful domination of nature by science that is the greatest determining factor of life on Earth today. Science, I would therefore suggest, is actually Christian. It is specifically Christian, too, in the dichotomy it creates between body and soul – similar to the dichotomy between God and devil – except that, where Christian religion simply divides the two, science in its contemporary form takes this division futher by declaring one real and the other unreal.
If we are to judge by the disapproval a term such as 'Gaia' garners for its 'overtones' of mysticism, there can be little doubt of the scorn in which science must hold any philosophy that is mystical through and through. And yet it is to just such a philosophy that I turn now to provide us with an example of the kind of model of the universe that science supposedly (though not actually) gives – a model in which humankind does not take centre stage. The philosophy in question is Taoism. In terms of written texts, the first source of Taosim of which we have knowledge is the Tao Te Ching (pronounced 'Dow Der Jing'), supposedly written the Chinese sage Lao Tzu. We only have to consult the Tao Te Ching to see the extent to which Taoist philosophy differs to that of ostensibly objective science:
"Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.
"The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it."
However, more than Taoist writing, it is the painting that I now wish to consult to highlight the difference between scientific philosophy and Taoist. Traditional Chinese landscape painting is, indeed, infused with Taoism. Chinese painters believed that the 'qi' energy of the Tao was communicated from them to the painting via the brush. Moreover, the very landscape they painted was a natural expression of the Tao. Here we see the connections severed in Western philosophy still intact. The subject is indeed one with the object, whether that object be brush, painting or landscape, and the landscape itself is alive with Tao, not the dead machine of science and Christianity.
One feature of such Taoist painting is the way in which human figures very rarely take up the foreground. They might occupy a hut in the corner of a scroll, or be shown as a dot on a mountain trail. The explanation for this is that, in Taoism, the human being was not seen as central and dominating, but simply another tiny part of vast nature, such as the bee that pollenates the flowers. Here disanthropocentrism is acheived much more elegantly – and humanely – than it ever was by science, if science acheived it at all.
I do not think it is any co-incidence that such a humane disanthropocentric view is acheived through the panorama of landscape – of Gaia, if you will – rather than by the microscopic investigations of science. This is, indeed, a bigger picture. It is the generalism that science scorns.
As Lovelock notes in his preface, "[t]he French Nobel Laureate Jacques Monod, in his book Chance and Necessity castigated holistic thinkers like me as 'very stupid people'".
This is the attitude that modern science must take, since it is a technocracy whose jealously guarded power is built upon esoteric specialisation.
HI Q,
I love reading your posts and this one was totally outstanding.
Thank you so much for an intelligent so well written piece.
now for my 2 cents. I believe the world was perfect and then came man.
the eco system was made to perfection and then came man.
God had a plan and the plan worked then came man.
It’s almost like let’s see what happens when we place MAN in the picture.. It all went down hill from this point ..
Just my 2 cents worth.
Ma Salaama ,
Eve
HI Q,
As I said before to City, while in Egypt I had to eat things I would not do here in USA.
I ate fish from the Nile and I was shocked .. it was very good and cooked very nicely.
I don’t eat fish as a rule unless its frozen go figure 🙂
I really believe fish in these times is risky too,
I don’t like the way I feel when I am away from beef, I eat alot of chicken in Egypt since it’s cheaper and I can cook it many ways to vary the taste.
I feel weaken and my mental energies are very poor, I need to have beef 3 times a week at least to keep my body and mind in a good position.
Q, do you feel this too? or you don’t eat meat at all?
Wishing you well and power.
Eve
Thank you.
I think most of my posts are written directly onto the computer, but I have been meaning for some time to use my preferred method of writing – that is, writing first on paper, and then transferring it to computer. That’s what I did with this post, so maybe it’s a bit more thorough and substantial than some of my posts.
Well, the idea of things going wrong with Man, or humankind, is, I suppose something like the idea expressed in Christian mythology with the Fall of man and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. It’s the tragedy of self-awareness, that destroys harmony and brings despair. But exactly how this self-awareness came about remains a mystery.
The yet-bigger picture, which I have still to grapple with – at least on this blog – is the one that includes man and science as part of nature, or, if you like, of the Tao. This is where a number of very tricky paradoxes creep in.
HI City,
You are so right, when you don’t have you will eat foods of lesser value.
while living in Egypt I didn’t have money since it was hard for me to find a good paying job and I had to eat foods I normally wouldn’t eat and I was happy to have that food better than zero.
You have no idea until you are walking in those shoes.
Eve
HI Q,
I feel when one writes on the pc it’s more rushed where as if it’s done on paper or MS word then it’s more slowly thought out.
I don’t want you to get the wrong idea of what I am about to say to you here however, I am getting a sense from your thoughts here that maybe if you could or would read the Quran you will find answers to alot of your questions about man and science.
I know so many people who love science and history and when I explain to them about how the Quran blends both they get interested and read it. They don’t convert so don’t worry about this part, I just feel there is so much to be learned from this one book and after reading it a few times myself, I had alot of questions answered .
Please understand I am not on a roll for converts or to spread Islam I am only offering you knowledge of science and history take it as you may.
thank you again for all your intelligent postings and so well written, I don’t have any one in my life that I can have intelligent converstations with so when I see writings such as yours it really makes me feel good and gives food to my brain.
Your fan,
Eve
Are you sure you’re not describing the Egyptians? they inhale their foods 🙂
I have heard of this puffer fish and as you stated it is deadly.
I hope you will have photos of your travel to Japan it would be great to see it from your eyes.
Eve
I have every intention of reading the Quran.
I’m not at all worried about being converted. I’ve tried to convert myself to many things over the years, and always failed.
I think I said somewhere on this blog that I don’t really have any beliefs, and it’s perfectly true (as far as anything is true). Of course, most people think that not having beliefs means being atheist, but atheism is very definitely a system of belief. It’s not even that I’m determinedly and rigorously skeptical. I just don’t think I work on a believe/disbelieve sort of basis. Ideas are interesting (or attractive) to me, or not. I seem to be capable of thinking anything is true while someone is talking to me about it, and when they stop talking about it the feeling fades, or I move on to something else.
Actually, I’m not even explaining myself very well, which is why I prefer (and think I’m better at) writing fiction rather than so-called fact (or opinion). Fiction, it seems to me, more closely resembles experience than, for instance, the form taken by an essay. An essay is less ambiguous, but also, somehow, less direct. A story is more ambiguous, but also more direct – like life itself. We receive very direct impressions through our senses, and experience ‘direct’ emotions constantly, but all of this, it seems to me, is ultimately ambiguous. That’s why I much prefer the ambiguities of fiction. Whenever I write something outside of fiction I always feel immediately that it’s not true. At least fiction can always live up to its claim to be fiction. I don’t know if fact can ever live up to its claim to be fact.
Well, I went off on one there. Do excuse me.
Well, I don’t have much of a background in the area, really. I suppose it’s never been ‘uncool’ to me to eat healthy food the way it is to many people, as I was brought up vegetarian and on wholemeal bread and so on. I have strayed from vegetarianism a number of times, and I’ve never really been fanatical about eating healthy food, either. But recently I have been increasingly aware of how unnatural our eating habits are. We don’t know anything about the food we eat – this is a very unnatural situation. I do not trust the people who produce our food. I would simply much rather it was tampered with as little as possible. Of course there are all sorts of issues connected with this. I live in a house where there are two other people much more strict about eating organic foods. In fact, if at all possible, they eat nothing else. But this makes it very difficult for them when they are guests at someone’s house. It’s comparitively easy to declare yourself vegetarian, but to insist that you only eat organic food would probably be considered very rude. Which perhaps says a great deal about our eating habits generally – that it is so very difficult to eat a diet of food that has not been tampered with in some way.
HI Q,
I only stated this due to most people thinking if they read the Quran they will be converted,
Yes you did state in previous posts that you weren’t locked into one belief.
And I do understand why you drift, you are not alone.
Did you get the mp3 yet? I sent it to you on Thursday night I didn’t hear your review of it so I am hoping you didn’t get it in junk mail.
When you write from your heart, it speaks very loud.
I enjoy your writings written from any part of you.
Eve
I think eating is a subject that is of increasing interest to me. Somehow it seems to me the root of all evil. I quite realise that a statement like that, when unexplained and unqualified, must seem deranged, but I’m a bit low on energy at the moment, so don’t know if I can explain it adequately.
Basically, the need to eat, to consume, is the basis of competition, since resources are limited. You can see this struggle everywhere, but especially in the sickening struggle of celebrities for the limelight, in order to validate their perfect genes, one supposes, and ensure that they can have the pick of equally perfect genes, and that their genes will have the lion’s share of resources at their disposal. All of life is tainted by this struggle.
Moral vegetarians are often accused of not being life-affirming, because of their inability to assimilate the basic evil of existence, but I’m rather suspicious of people who can embrace the evil of existence all too readily, using the ‘affirmation of life’ as their excuse.
Anne Rice is very preoccupied with this question in Interview with the Vampire. Louis and Lestat represent the two sides of the argument. I suppose I would be Louis rather than Lestat.
I was going to say more, but my mind’s gone blank.
Yours was an amazing essay.
While I absorbed your philosophy, I was struck with the idea, OHMYGOD, I wish I could write like that. Being a writer myself I was dumbfounded when I read: “I think most of my posts are written directly onto the computer, but I have been meaning for some time to use my preferred method of writing – that is, writing first on paper, and then transferring it to computer.” That is what I do… type my fingers raw, pounding out word after word ont he computer screen–rather like the reporter fromt he good ole days who had a deadline to to meet and had to get the story written on his or her Royal.
Years ago, I did all my writing on paper. I have hundreds of journals full of thoughts and ideas. About 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 years ago, I put the pen down and write, nearly exclusively, on the computer.
I may be missing something grand.
Lately, my work seems to be shallow and I blamed many things. It could be that I am not taking the time to SAVOR the words that I am laboriously producing.
This requires more thought.
K4
Q,
Please be careful what you eat there too, some Susi is not good or prepared well. I guess you know that since you have been there before.
Eve
Thank you.
Before I go further, I should say that I honestly have not forgotten the story that I said I would comment on. Honest!
I do think each writer finds the methods with which they are most comfortable. I suppose I feel that – like the Chinese painters I mentioned – something flows through the pen to the paper. I don’t feel quite the same flow with a computer. Perhaps that sounds a bit crackpot, but that is how I feel.
There’s something about creative flow states http://www.wishfulthinking.co.uk/articles_creview.html">here</a>.
I hope it is of some interest.
Thank you. That is, indeed, of interest. I think you mentioned Latour before. Sounds like the guy to read.
esp the Taoist part.
The residue of Christianity that remains (remained?) in Science is well-known and comes via the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment took the Christian notion of Providentialism, and swapped God The Provider for Rationality The Provider. Providentialism in Christianity comes from the path to the promised heaven, that awaits the true believer, guaranteed by faith. In Science it’s the utopian future, guaranteed by rationality. Obviously such an idea is now obsolete, and in its place we have pervasive doubt and the postmodern diagnosis of a loss of faith in Grand Narratives. Although there are some whom argue that pervasive doubt was a part of the project of the Enlightenment, but this is an obscure position.
The only attempt in the social sciences and related-philosophy nowadays to rescue a view of rationality as Utopian is Habermas’s. His view is that rather than apply rationality instrumentally to ends upon the earth, it must be applied to the processes of human communication – he goes to great length to show that discursive rationality is possible and what its various benefits offer. This rescues a widespread role for rationality without dreamy, providential trappings.
I often wonder about the older Kantian binary of Nature:Society, where Nature is the Kingdom of Necessity, and Society the Realm of Human Choice. The fear is obvious, that the Realm of Choice is a Hall of Mirrors, an illusion, a mist before our eyes – and that actually Nature demands us to act urgently and in one way only, ie, to take emergency action re the environment, which is Nature, which is everywhere – except in the insulated figments of our self-comforting minds – and that to not do so, as we don’t, is perilous.
HI Q,
You are so right about alot of the organic foods being scams and also most people taking the advantage of others as usual.
Here in Connecticut we have farms which we know are organic and the produce states where they are from . So this is verified thru us and the health organizations.
In Egypt they use so much fertilizers and they don’t wash it off so you are paying for the weight of the crap besides the weight of the potato 🙁
I would be interested in hearing more about your background in this area if you will share it.
Eve
Thanks for the comments. I know nothing about Habermas, actually, and no doubt will have to read some of his stuff if I get time.
I think doubt is all-pervasive in modern society, and I certainly don’t think I’m presenting anything especially new in the above post, but I also think doubt remains, in many ways, an unconscious part of our society. How many people are truly questioning concepts such as ‘progress’ that philosophers will tell us were debunked long ago? How many people have consciously assmilated such a debunking? Concepts such as progress or Providentialism persist. What else is the furious work to achieve mastery over genetics if not a belief in some kind of technological Utopia?
Free will remains an intriguing question, as to whether it is possible, or even desirable. I don’t have much to say about it at the moment, though, except that much of the definition of free will seems to rest upon the underpinning definition of individual identity. If you are saying that something else compels your decisions, you are defining yourself as separate from the ‘something else’.
Well – quite. I eat organic stuff sometimes, but I can’t be bothered being obsessed by it. I avoid cheap chicken because what I read about that is pretty scary, but I’m probably just enjoying the comforts of ignorance with much else. The general issue is trust – who can you trust to produce food, that’s both good for you and ethically good in general – and then trust’s peculiar social obverse; awareness of risks to self and society, that are everywhere, even on supermarket shelves.
But this is peculiar to our situation. People in crap holes like Africa, I bet they couldn’t care less where food comes from – just as long as it comes.
I think doubt is more a philosophical abstraction of something far more real and direct: risk-consciousness. We are all aware that modern man produces risks for himself of the most total and deadly kind, and have been so certainly since the era of MAD. So while we have many more opportunities in our civilisation than in pretty much any other – for knowledge, for travel, for comfort, for old-age, say, which definitely come from Progress – the risks we produce in living, and that no-one on the planet can in fact avoid, cast a shadow over such things, and these in fact come from the unanticipated side-effects of Progress. Thus doubt over Progress (or rather ‘Progress’) is a social product, expressing some very real contours of our existence. But it’s most often expressed in fears about risks. ‘Frankenstein Foods’, for instance. (What on earth does that even mean?)
So I agree that doubt can be unconscious, but I think it comes from risk-consciousness, which, by definition, is conscious! I think in England, however, most people are particularly stupid; the morons killing each other in the streets are returning to the time of violent tribes, whilst Observer readers avert their gazes and try to sniff out utility and function from their obscure corners of culture in the review section. We lack any real intellectual rigour in our thought, in fact acquired knowledge is almost a shameful badge to wear; what we are mostly left with is traces of 19th Century utilitarian thought in our institutions; ghosts of great men, become unconscious and simple.
“What else is the furious work to achieve mastery over genetics if not a belief in some kind of technological Utopia?” Well, knowledge certainly, which is independent of instrumental aims. There are also lots of aims that do not represent a social project, but merely for instance a medical offering, that society may or may not accept – for instance from stem cell research. Currently the US is rejecting such offerings on religious grounds, so by no means do scientists dominate in some simple way. Most of the EU is equivocating, whilst Britain is sailing a nuanced regulatory path through the ethics. (Apparently. My housemate is doing a PhD in the sociology of this particular stuff.) What technology associated with genetics – which is far from mastered – do you see in particular as being falsely declared as utopian?
Free will for me is one of those things that absolutely and obviously exists, and which the science shows no sign of appreciating. So be it. I meant more how frightening if the reality is such, the day so late, that upon the whole of mankind is a categorical imperative to realign ourselves with nature, and in fact realign nature itself. And that we are unaware of it.
HI Q,
I see the point about your organic food menu. I feel it’s stressful too which involves finding what you feel is organic and trusting what you eat.
In Islam there is food that is considered HALAL.. which means it was killed in the proper way to prevent any harmful bacteria or pain to the animals soul.
I once called this phone company MCI here in USA and the customer service rep I got happened to be a Muslim woman.
I explained to her I was new to Islam when she heard my name and we got off the subject of long distance and on to religion.
She asked me if I eat HALAL I said ” NO since there aren’t any places here that have HALAL meats” well……. she went off in a blast said I wasn’t being a good Muslim and bla bla even if I had to drive hundreds of miles bla bla .. well I explained to her that in the Quran there is stated from the Phophet that you can eat foods that aren’t HALAL as long as you bless the animal you will consume.
It’s a blessing for the soul of the beast not so much for the human who is consuming it.
I hope I didn’t bore you to much.. I just felt this was sorta on the same page as your organic food .
I feel both ways of eating is very difficult now a days.
sleep well,
Eve
Well, a lot to respond to in this, and I don’t have time to do justice to the issues at the moment – if ever.
A few points:
‘Frankenstein food’ may mean very little in the sense that this food may (or may not) be harmless to those that consume it. But can anyone predict the knock-on effects of the wide-scale introduction of genetically engineered crops? The only laboratory big enough to obtain such information is the world itself, and if we then find that the crops are in some way pernicious – for instance in disrupting the ecology of their surroundings by reducing insect populations – well, it’s too late.
Then we have to ask ourselves, do we actually need genetically engineered crops? Well, I don’t think so. And then there’s the issue of patented genes, which will mean a monopoly on the very food we eat by certain people you really don’t want to have a monopoly on such things.
The Utopias related to genetic engineering are those, for instance, of longevity and of a society that eugenicists were in favour of creating some time back. Somehow, even though ‘eugenics’ has become something of a dirty word, the ‘master race’ implications of genetic engineering don’t seem to have taken hold much on public discourse.
I’d be interested in reading your friend’s PhD.
Sometimes I really agree with you that free will obviously exists. Other times I’m not so sure. I suppose my doubts are something to do with the doubts of identity I mentioned. Do I exist as an individual identity? Also, is the universe itself predetermined?
I would prefer a universe of emergence and/or synchronicity.
Well, my very contradictory eating regime includes items such as the following:
Not eating meat.
Eating most fish (though thinking about giving up).
Eating organic where possible.
Not eating cod.
Not eating tuna.
I dare say that some of this will go out of the window for a while when I visit Japan again at the end of October. Ethical eating is not a concept with any currency there, and vegetarianism is little more than an embryo in the womb of social consciousness.
Ecology is already disturbed, badly. Two examples of GM research closed down by British protests.
1. An attempt to reduce the use of mass pesticides, by making tomato leaves resistant to their natural predators. Consequences for actual content of a tomato of the tech, literally on a cell by cell level: nill. Instead, we get to enjoy the chemicals. Which have been distrubing ecology for years, and which continue to do so.
2. Scottish firm trying to develop potatoes that could be grown in near-desert conditions (ie in the most needy of African countries) and that would also innoculate against several common disease. Instead, they get to die! Oh well. It’s true their need is no more, I suppose.
imo we should not be so precious, and we should be more nuanced. For instance, GM tech that reduces pesticide use is good. But GM tech that makes plants more resistant to pesticide use is bad. So why not legistlate accordingly? Because the British press has less professional science correspondents in total than the NY Times does just for itself, and accordingly, the British public operates at an grossly weak intellectual level. At a level that makes me want to puke shit through my eyes. The one piece of ground I woulc concede is that putting animal genes in plant genomes is ‘unnatural’ in a very real sense. Normally the term unnatural makes little sense, but here it does – because such a thing could never occur naturally. Whereas some fruits, flowers, are transgenic as a result of basic cross breeding within their domain, ie plant to plant, by comparison. Duram Wheat, for instance, is a natural transgenic product. (Is Duram Wheat something to kill off from fear? Look at across England’s fields…) Anyway what debate would you prefer? One like this, or one involving crass, emotional namings for mass-hysteria effects such as ‘Frankenstein Foods’?
Anyway the GM stuff is a pet hate for me. What happened with that still makes me mad, such a wasted opportunity, such a shame that that rare thing, genuine public action, was no more than the swiping fist of an agitated retard, and that it was effective. So I’ll polemicize whenever I can on the subject! My basically feeling is that given the debate, we missed an opportunity for nuanced regulation, and outright rejection has done no-one any favours.
Agree with you that longevitiy and eugenics = bad utopian projects. But I don’t think work on the genome (still a very new object of enquiry – as distinct from genes) is dedicated to such dangers. At present, here, anyway…
My friend’s PhD is, I can promise you having vetted a draft, an incredibly tedious read. If there’s a bottom line when she completes (probably within about one year) I’ll let you know! Er, remind me in a year. I could ask her for some key references if you’d like though. Lemme know.
btw book review is going a bit slower than expected. Prolly by next weekend.
I haven’t eaten meat for some months now, perhaps a year. I’m not sure.
Just about to go to bed, so only a quick response:
“Anyway what debate would you prefer? One like this, or one involving crass, emotional namings for mass-hysteria effects such as ‘Frankenstein Foods’?”
Oh, I certainly prefer this kind of debate. I have no desire to be eristic. I think debate is precisely what we didn’t get. People – including myself – felt that something they had never asked for was being foisted upon them without explanation. Now, there may be benefits to GM foods, such as the ones you mention, but it is precisely debate that we need, not people trying to corner markets.
It would be ridiculous of me to claim I knew everything about the issue, but from what I have read, I am somewhat suspicious of the claims that GM crops might eliminate world hunger. There is a suspicion that this is propaganda by those eager to sell their crops to the Third World and thus have the Third World permanently in their pockets. If you can give me further information on this area, or point me in its direction, I would be very interested.
“btw book review is going a bit slower than expected. Prolly by next weekend.”
I look forward to it. Judging by your Joe Orton review, it should be interesting, favourable or otherwise.
There are usually a few cases of food poisoning in the summer in Japan, or so I’m told. I have no personal experience of it.
Japan, apparently, is full of dangerous food. It’s almost a national pastime. There’s fugu (pufferfish), which, if not properly prepared can be fatally poisonous, and even glutinous rice can be dangerous, as every year a number of old folks choke to death on it. I tend to blame this on the way they swallow without chewing properly, though. Can’t wait to get the stuff down them.
I took an outside option in biotech when I was at uni, so I don’t have any esp up-to-date references about that. I know several people who study such fields from a social science perspective; I’ll ask around.
I agree that biotech was not some panacea – instead it was lots of little things, some good, some bad. We should have banned the bad and welcomed the good. Instead we lumped them altogether. Although one nice byproduct of all this has been heightened consciousness about organic production methods.
Incidentally the world currently produces enough food to feed every single human satisfactorily. Unfortunately it’s just not distributed in such a way.
re our discussions and possible books about this stuff, I asked my housemate for references. She wrote back:
“As for your friend, I can think of some titles of Michael’s [an academic down at Goldsmiths I believe] books regarding social studies of science. I will check them (they are all in my house, I am
not) and I will let you know. I could also point to some of his articles if your friend is interested.
For biotechnology, Martin Bauer’s and Gerorge Gaskell’s books are more than enough I think. They will help him get an idea of the current issues at stake in Europe
while providing interesting comparisons to US and Canada.
Contemporary science, well, I think Latour and his Pandora’s book is excellent, but maybe too specialist. There is an edited book I think called handbook of
science and technology or something liket that (I have it home as well, I will check it). There are chapters offering an overview of contemporary science
theories, social studies of science, issues about the public sphere and science. Another nice book is ‘ What is this thing called science’ (again an
introduction to different philosophical accounts of how science operates: Kuhn, Popper e.t.c.).
Anyway, I will get back to you with more accurate info!!”
– and I will post another comment when she does. Hope this is of interest.
“I took an outside option in biotech when I was at uni, so I don’t have any esp up-to-date references about that. I know several people who study such fields from a social science perspective; I’ll ask around.”
Thank you.
“I agree that biotech was not some panacea – instead it was lots of little things, some good, some bad. We should have banned the bad and welcomed the good. Instead we lumped them altogether. Although one nice byproduct of all this has been heightened consciousness about organic production methods.”
I tend to buy organic as much as I can, but I have read recently that much of it is a scam – very depressing. It’s hard to know what to believe any more. Or what to buy.
“Incidentally the world currently produces enough food to feed every single human satisfactorily. Unfortunately it’s just not distributed in such a way.”
Yes, I knew that about food production, which was basically why I said I don’t think we actually need GM food. I’m planning to go to Africa when I can clear my debts. Maybe I’ll get a better idea of what’s going on with food production and distribution there.