Karen, Thank you for pointing out Nicholas Wade's review article to us. Although I tend very much at the Nature end of the debate (though agreeing, of course, that Nurture is important, too) I'm rather bemused by the supposed antagonisms between their supporters -- just as I am of the Science vs. Non-science "debate".
I think the public is a great deal more discerning than the leading protagonists on either side (in both the above cases) are prepared to grant. The public tend not to get into a verbal lather about these matters. While the public is supposed to be anti-science, yet it will buy the most sophisticated scientific products when it suits them. While the public is supposed to be against genetic engineering, yet increasing numbers of parents to-be are electing to have genetic tests in order to weed out embryos with deleterious genes. While intellectuals are earnestly debating about the ethics of eugenics, it is already here and quietly growing in a voluntary way. And if it is outlawed in one country, then the parents will go to another country for such services. More mundanely, all this is rather reminiscent of the 1960s in England when Japanese cars were flooding into the country. Carworker trade unions would join in marches and protest vociferously against these foreign imports which were supposedly endangering their jobs, yet a casual inspection of the workers' car parks in those factories (as I personally observed in those days) would show appreciable numbers of the same Japanese cars. The public today deplore the demise of the corner shop and the conviviality to be found there, yet the same public vote with their feet in the direction of the supermarkets and their far wider (and cheaper) selection of goods. It's not the general public's attitudes that bother me but that of the intelligentsia -- or, rather, that portion of the intelligentsia who step outside their own expertise and make pronouncements which greatly influence enough of the public to create a great deal of distress, if not panic, which takes time to settle down. One current example of this is genetically-modified food. There is very good reason to be cautious about the wider environmental effects of large-scale planting of GM crops, and many of the underhand "experimental" plantings of such by the large agrichemical companies are to be deplored (as well as the way they steal plant genes from native peoples and patent them). Accidental transfers of genes between species in the natural environment could possibly be dangerous on occasion (even though this has been happening in nature since time immemorial, and the Victorians did this on a huge scale when it was fashionable to import thousands of exotic plant species from around the world in the penultimate century). But such has been the generalised clamour about GM food by pseudo-intellectuals in the West with no scientific training whatsoever that some African politicians have been frightened enough to prevent GM grain being imported by the aid agencies in order to cope with wide-scale starvation among their people -- even though, within the stomach, the variant genes within GM food are broken down and digested as thoroughly as all the others and are of absolutely no danger. Keith ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- Keith Hudson,6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel:01225 312622/444881; Fax:01225 447727; E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________
