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    Science and Ethical Values
    Science and Ethical Values
    Science and Ethical Values
    Ebook114 pages1 hour

    Science and Ethical Values

    By Bentley Glass

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    About this ebook

    Bentley Glass, one of the world's leading investigators in the field of human genetics, is concerned with the moral absolutes and ethics involved in experimentation with human life in the laboratory. He feels that with the development of knowledge must come wider recognition of consequences. His book indicates that we are responsible for all living things.

    Originally published in 1965.

    A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe University of North Carolina Press
    Release dateJun 1, 2012
    ISBN9780807835920
    Science and Ethical Values

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      Book preview

      Science and Ethical Values - Bentley Glass

      1

      THE EVOLUTION OF VALUES

      [A Natural History of Value]

      To examine the problem of values—their origin, their permanence, their absoluteness or relativity—from the point of view of a biologist may yield insight, even though treatment of human values strictly from a biological, evolutionary viewpoint cannot promise any final resolution of the problem. A natural history of values may be possible, in spite of the fact that values cannot be measured in strictly quantitative terms nor defined and treated in strictly scientific fashion. Charles Darwin, in the Descent of Man, opened up a consideration of this subject; and John Dewey in an early essay on Evolution and Ethics did so too.¹ Many persons—scientists, sociologists, philosophers, and others—have reached diametrically opposed views on the matter. Let us not prejudge it, whether we lean toward Thomas Henry Huxley’s outcry against the cruelty of nature and the blindness of natural selection, or prefer the roseate belief of Julian Huxley in indefinite cosmic progress toward higher levels of social co-operativeness and idealism. Some may hold with Darwin’s own belief that the differences between man and other animals are but matters of degree, capable of explanation by natural selection. Others may agree with David Lack, a noted modern student of evolution, who holds that an essential part of human experience and human nature lies outside the terms of reference of science.² Can both be right?

      It would be hard to find any biologist today who questions that natural selection is the principal agent of evolutionary change. Doubts about this assailed many thinkers in the first three decades of the twentieth century because of a seeming inconsistency, or even conflict, between ideas of evolution by means of genetic mutations, on the one hand, or by natural selection, on the other. These doubts have been resolved through fuller knowledge gained from experimental studies of mutation and selection. Both processes are in fact essential, but mutation provides only the raw material, the grist for the mill of evolution. Without hereditary variations, as Darwin clearly recognized, natural selection would have nothing transmissible to work upon, nothing permanent to shape into the adaptations of living organisms. The mutations of the genes and chromosomes supply those hereditary variations, in a way Darwin did not suspect. Nevertheless, there is no impulse toward improvement that is in any way inherent in the mutations themselves. By far the great majority of them, perhaps as great a proportion as 99 per cent of all new genetic changes, are detrimental. They are fated to be eliminated from the population, quickly in some cases, more slowly in others, but inevitably in all.

      Today it is more clearly seen why this must be so. Each gene controls some particular step in the chemical machinery of the cell. It does this by preserving and transmitting the special chemical information needed for the synthesis of a particular protein, most often one of the enzymes that govern some particular reaction such as a transformation of some particular substance into another. When a gene mutates, the enzyme under its control either cannot be made at all, or else is made in some abnormal configuration that either lacks activity altogether or is partially impaired. The chemical step is then wholly or partly blocked. Now if, in the eons of time during which organic evolution has proceeded, inadequate and unnecessary chemical processes have been eliminated through natural selection and have been replaced by more efficient and better-controlled processes, there should be very little superfluous chemistry in the make-up of the vital machinery of life. This is indeed what the biochemist finds, whether he examines the metabolism of a bacterium or a yeast cell, a green plant or a man. Superfluous chemistry has been eliminated; the steps which remain are all vital and necessary to the well-being of the organism. That is, we do not possess, to any significant degree, useless enzymes and unnecessary chemistry. It follows that almost any conceivable alteration of the genes that control the enzymes, that regulate the chemistry, will be highly unfortunate in effect. Indeed our analyses show that a large proportion of them—one quarter or more—are so drastic in effect that they would be lethal were it not for nature’s wisdom in generally providing us with two genes of every sort, so that incapacitation of one of them is not fatal so long as the other is able to keep the chemical machinery in operation. It is therefore very significant that mutation is a rather random, undirected kind of natural event. Of two exactly similar genes in the nucleus of a cell, the mutation of one is practically never accompanied by mutation of the other.

      The undirected character of mutation also relates to the fitness of the organism within its environment. If we suppose a completely static and uniform environment, natural selection should long ago have produced perfect adaptation, and evolution would then have ceased. In that case, no doubt, man would never have appeared on the earth, which would have been successfully and permanently pre-empted by some lowly but perfectly adjusted, non-evolving worm or maybe amoeba. In actuality, however, our terrestrial habitat contains many different kinds of environments, occupied and unoccupied, and the conditions of existence vary continuously with the cycle of day and night, the pageant of the seasons, and the greater cycles of geologic change. Earth, water, and air provide innumerable varieties of conditions; and adaptation involves ceaseless adjustment and readjustment to the altera tion of conditions. Yet since mutations are not inherently directed toward better fitness, we cannot expect that the right mutation will arise at precisely the right time. Instead, the mutation process is constantly infusing the populations of each species with every possible sort of mutation, the great majority of them being, as I have said, detrimental or even lethal. Yet one or more of these, in some particular combination, may produce a genotype that is better adapted to the new conditions of life imposed by the changing environment. In that case, natural selection will tend not only to eliminate the detrimental mutations from the collective genes of the entire population—from its gene pool, as we say—but will also tend to preserve and increase in number those genes that confer an adaptive advantage.

      Natural selection remains, then, the essential directive force in evolution, just as Darwin conceived it to be. Nevertheless, our ideas of what processes are involved in selection have been reshaped very considerably because of experiments on selection conducted in the past three decades. Darwin emphasized the struggle for existence, that often fierce competition for survival between members of the same species which results in death without reproduction. The differential survival of hereditary types in a population signifies the death of the less well-adapted and the less fortunate. It implies disease, hunger, and suffering—the cruelty of nature. It aroused Thomas Henry Huxley’s passionate protest against any tie between ethics and evolution. It has no less evoked the emphasis by others upon the evolutionary origin of mutual aid and co-operation, of social bonds and, eventually, of love. Yet this is only half of what natural selection involves. In quantitative terms of the frequencies of competing genes in successive generations, very often a gain in frequency by one gene and a loss by another depends not so much on the survival to maturity of their possessors as it does upon the possessors’ relative fertility—the abundance of their offspring—after they arrive at maturity. In a harsh environment, differential selection may play the lead. Many genotypes are eliminated in embryonic or fetal stages, many others in the period before reproductive maturity is attained. But in an abundant environment, when the food supply is ample and new and previously unoccupied environments open up, the survival rate of all offspring may be high; and then differential fertility becomes the leading type of natural selection. Far too little attention has been given to the importance of such differences until recently.

      Obviously, the two kinds of selection as a rule work hand in hand. In a situation where thousands of seedlings or hundreds of tadpoles perish for every one that survives to maturity, the parent generation must be very fertile or the species will soon disappear. Conversely, whenever on account of parental care a high proportion of the young that are conceived are able to become adult, demands on the fertility of the parents are greatly reduced. And in general, this less wasteful pattern of reproduction has proved more successful in the struggle between species for coexistence. Nevertheless, the differences in fertility of different genetic types become even more important within these less fertile species than they are in the more fertile species having a higher mortality of the young.

      Adaptation grows out of the progressive changes in the composition of the gene pool of a population or species as the mutations that occur are exposed to natural selection. Those genes and genotypes are perpetuated

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