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ISIS Report 21/07/10
ISIS Scientific
Preprint
Nurturing Nature
How Parental Care Changes Genes
Essay in honour of Ruth Hubbard By Mae-Wan
Ho
To appear in Myths of the DNA
Paradigm: Essays on the Uses and Misuses of
Genetic Explanation (Sheldon
Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber eds), Council for Responsible Genetics,
Washington, USA.
Please circulate widely and repost, but you must give the URL of the original and preserve all the links back to articles on our website
Ruth Hubbard a leading light against genetic determinism
It has been 30 years since I first met Ruth Hubbard and her
husband George Wald at a conference on Towards a Liberatory Biology in
Bressanone in the Italian Alps [1, 2]. Ruth was already a leading light in the
radical critique of genetic determinism – the idea that organisms are hardwired
in their genetic makeup - from a broad socio-political perspective. As a
research scientist who had worked on visual pigments for many years, she was by
no means unaware of hormones and enzymes encoded by genes that enable an
organism to transform energy, grow, and develop in a certain way. But she
insisted that there are social determinants for what people are, or perceived
to be, much more powerful than biology and genes.
I suspect that she was getting rather impatient
with the anodyne and frequently opaque rhetoric of sociologists that fail to
come to grips with the real issues, not to mention the obfuscation by ‘bio-ethicists’
who were a contradiction in terms. The unsuspecting public was left to the
mercy of slick propaganda from vested interests intent on profiting by blaming
people’s ills on their genes and selling them both the diagnosis and
appropriate remedies: abortion for the unborn, gene drugs and gene-therapies
for adults scared witless after having tested positive for genes that will give
them incurable diseases. Ruth Hubbard’s book co-authored with Elijah Wald - Exploding
the Gene Myth: How Genetic Information is Produced
and Manipulated by Scientists, Physicians, Employers, Insurance Companies,
Educators and Law Enforcers [3]
- is admirable for delivering its important message clearly, succinctly, and
with punch and panache, true to how she is in real life [4].
How scientific and social critiques converge
My own critique of genetic determinism [2, 5] (see also [6]
Genetic
Engineering Dream or Nightmare? The Brave
New World of Bad Science and Big Business) is
much more based on science, which I take broadly to be reliable knowledge of
nature that enables us to live sustainably with her (see [7] Towards a Convention
on Knowledge, ISIS discussion paper). That is
certainly not to understate the large influences that society and
politics have on science and more to the point, what passes as science, which
can be very much mistaken and unreliable as is the case of genetic determinism.
Science as what I have prescribed is what we live by, and hence has large
implications on how we live, and choose to live.
Our two critiques converge, because social and
environmental influences are indeed powerful determinants on how we grow and
develop, precisely as Ruth has been saying; so much so that they can mark and
change our genes for life. That’s what the Human Genome Project to sequence the
entire human and other genomes has ended up telling us, despite the fact that
it was inspired and promoted by genetic determinism.
The new genetics of the ‘fluid genome’ had
already emerged by the early 1980s, long before the human genome project was
conceived [6, 8] (see Living with the Fluid Genome
, ISIS publication). It belongs in the organic
paradigm of spontaneity and freedom (see [9] Quantum Jazz Biology,
SiS 47) that defies any kind of determinism,
biological or environmental.
The complete fully referenced article
can be downloaded here
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