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Pick up this slender book and its title, at least on first glance, will give you little indication of its contents. Its subtitle likewise offers no clear answer: Charles Darwin: Nature’s Secret War and the Future Inhabitants of Santa Rosalia does point in a certain direction, but one still cannot say precisely what it is about. Thus we are all the more curious to discover what awaits us in the attractively designed little volume.
Gabriele Werner-Felmayer is a professor of biology at the University of Innsbruck specializing in ethical questions in the natural sciences. Her book comprises three essays dealing with such questions, but the tortoises — having now become wary — appear only in the first. There, in twelve chapters and an epilogue, Werner-Felmayer provides an ingeniously constructed and often surprising introduction to the world of Charles Darwin.
Under pleasingly un-academic headings like “First of all, we could have met at the London zoo,” or “Fifthly, scientists also get hungry,” the author weaves together thoughts on the ethics of making soup (“Is a veal stew less reprehensible than turtle soup? Certainly not for the calf.”) with commentaries on Darwin’s voyage to Tierra del Fuego and Galápagos; his adventures and experiences in the pampas; and his enormous collection of specimens, which at final count included 39,907 items from the animal, plant, and mineral realms.
More than once, the author refers to characters from two novels: Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary and Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos, though without giving any explanation for the references, which makes them a bit puzzling at first. It takes a while before one sees that the characters she mentions are fictitious ones, but then Werner-Felmayer’s play of ideas develops fascinating connections with her scientific reflections on evolution.
In the first of her three essays, she does a splendid job of describing the inner conflict that Darwin had to contend with as a result of his scientific findings. Though his own grandfather has already published a pioneering study on the mutability of species, the young Charles Darwin sets out on his voyage as a firm believer in Creation. He has, after all, just completed his studies in theology. However, after five years of intensive research and the interpretation of the specimens he has brought back with him, he is compelled to revise his religious position.
During the years following his return, he writes a series of books, but more than another twenty years pass before he publishes his pivotal work, The Origin of Species. The first printing of 1,250 copies was sold out within hours and famously set off a huge debate (which some, to this day, do not consider finished). To be sure, Darwin himself absolutely regarded humankind as standing “at the very pinnacle of the order of living organisms,” but man’s superior position was, in his opinion, the result of long development and clearly not — as had been unquestioningly assumed up to then — the result of divine choice in the act of Creation. This active role of humankind in the process of its own development is, at any rate, reason enough for Darwin to take an optimistic view of its future course.
In the third essay, “We, the Others, and Life,” Werner-Felmayer is concerned with the supposed “decoding” of the human genome and its consequences. Today, while government ethics commissions deal with questions of what shall be permitted or forbidden in genetic research, private companies are already promising people a look not only into their own future but into their children’s as well. Yet, up to now, only a small part of the genetic material has actually been decoded; the function of large parts of the human genome (98% is considered “junk’) has still not been studied in any detail. Portions of the “junk,” for example, have regulating functions and are responsible for promoting or inhibiting the expression of genes into proteins.
Thus, when the genetics industry announces today that a look into our personal genetic makeup will enable us to learn something about our individual potentials and risks, it is true only in small part. For, in reality, our genome is 98.6% identical with that of the chimpanzee and 99.9% with that of Neanderthal man. How nearly identical is it likely to be with that of our next-door neighbor, then? And do we really want to know?
With all this “decoding,” one has the feeling that the crucial questions are precisely not those being answered by the genetics industry: What makes a person an individual? What enables us to make the best of the genetic structure we inherit? Why are so many people convinced that it can make them happier to know in advance whether they or their children will ever have cancer?
This volume brings together three articles, all of which have to do — in the broadest sense — with questions of evolution and the place of humans in relation to the rest of the natural world. In the first of them, the subject is Darwin himself, his voyage on the Beagle, and the conclusions he drew from it — some only after exhaustive study of the specimens he brought back — and did not finally publish until twenty years later. The middle essay, a very short one, deals with the curious tendency people have to give names to the organisms in the world around them, thereby frequently expressing their deep-seated mistrust of their fellow creatures in the naming process.
And in the third essay, Gabriele Werner-Felmayer discusses not only the opportunities and risks of current genetic research but also, and most importantly, the relationship of reality and fiction in this area. It is surely the most straightforward and the least witty of the three essays. The competing interests of rapid marketing strategies on the one hand and serious, meticulous basic research on the other are not, according to Werner-Felmayer, without their ethical and medical dangers, particularly in the field of genetic research.
Werner-Felmayer’s book is meant as a call to pause and reflect. She asks us to trust more in our own knowledge, in our individuality, and she is skeptical of modern society’s passion for the norm. At the same time, she remains optimistic — like Charles Darwin.
Heike Friesel
June 2008
[Translated by Michael Ritterson]
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