Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > As the proteins catalyze all the biochemical reactions in our body,
> > the implication is that the genes ultimately control and
> determine all the
> > characteristics of the organism.
>
> There is room within this one odd sentence for whole libraries of
> idiocy. The
> leap from "biochemical reactions" to "*all* characteristics of
> the organism" is
> a non sequitur, [snip]
Carrol, you obviously did not read this before overreacting. It is the
introductory passage from a paper by a leading biologist, Mae Wan-Ho. If you
want to know more, go to the url I gave or try this:
http://www.i-sis.org/index.htm
Mae Wan-Ho is a leading *critic* of genetic determinism.
Mark
PS Tom Warren told me offlist (it's no secret anyway) that he is influenced
by Elisabet Sahtouris, E O Wilson and Garret Hardin. This is admirable, if
only because the Green-Left in an often unthinking way iconises one person
and demonises another. Wilson and Hardin are demons, Sahtouris an icon. That
is all absurd, and Tom is surely rate to take all 3 of them seriously. The
debate and the issues are much more complex, and we have to learn to do
justice to them and stop kneejerking around. The left has to stop supplying
postures in place of thought. This applies to genetics, biology, and also to
things like the Tragedy of the Commons, where a few slogans endlessly
repeated also serves as the left's substitute for thought.
A good example of posturing to no purpose is this:
http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~cscpo/arc.html
Here you can find archived for example, an attack on E.O. Wilson, by Steven
J. Rosenthal, of the Department of Sociology, Hampton University. It is
called: How Science is Perverted to Build Fascism: A Marxist Critique of
E.O. Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. This article is not
without interest, but it is an attack which mostly misses the target. We
need less of this kind of 'gramophone Marxism'. E O Wilson is not a fascist,
but even if he was, so what? Heidegger was a Nazi; but Heidegger is arguably
one of the most important 20th century thinkers. We have to stop labelling
and stasrt listening. E O Wilson is interesting, he can teach us and we
have to learn.
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