"Evolution is in large measure cumulative and has been running three billion years longer than our current efforts. Our most glittering improvements over nature are too often a fool's solution to a problem that has been isolated from context, a transient, local maximisation that is bound to be followed by mostly undesirable counter-adjustments throughout the system." - Davd Ehrenfeld, "The arrogance of humanism" (1978)
"Palumbi sees the overall effect of human-induced accelerated evolution as analogous to "the tragedy of the commons", where uncontrolled individual access to a common resource quickly leads to over-exploitation that eventually nullifies any short-term gain, the common resource here being time until evolution of resistance." (item below)
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review of books by Palumbi and Tokar
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One absorbing volume on evolution
The Canberra Times August 18, 2001
IN AUGUST 1999 the Kansas State Board of Education banned questions about evolution from high school graduation tests. Concurrently, at least 10 weed species in Kansas had evolved resistance to at least one herbicide. So anti- evolutionist Kansas farmers have to take counter-evolutionary measures to prosper. The more thoughtful among them may be inclined to wonder at times if life is one long irony. For many years after Darwin's theory gob-smacked a startled world, evolution was popularly seen as a process that occurred over many millennia, crawling slowly forward by means of minute but beneficial changes to an organism's morphology, physiology or behaviour until a new species or sub-species - Darwin tended to move easily between the two - appeared; natural selection saw nature gradually adapt to nature.
Now, with rapid scientific and technological advances permitting much of nature to be speedily brought to heel - after a fashion, anyway - we have become aware that nature is being forced to adapt to humanity equally quickly. And in the struggle for survival of the fittest, humanity is increasingly coming off second best in a fight it chose to start. Harvard biology professor Stephen Palumbi believes that evolution is best taught when its principles and facts can be related to daily life. He makes the association clearly and depressingly evident - from microbes that dine on antibiotics and insects that shrug off pesticides to HIV strains so uncommon that diagnostic tests can miss them and the 200 species of weeds capable of resisting one or more herbicides, ". . . evolution marches onward despite the best intentions of human industry."
Benefits accruing from such best intentions have largely been relatively short-lived. Twelve months after the Naples citizenry had been dusted with the new wonder pesticide DDT in 1944 to prevent a typhus outbreak, DDT-resistant insects were reported; bacteria resistant to penicillin first appeared three years after its 1943 introduction; weed resistance to herbicides has generally taken several years longer to evolve than drug or pesticide resistance. Neither does any of this take into account concomitant ecological harm when massive amounts of pesticides or herbicides have to be applied to be effective. Palumbi sees the overall effect of human-induced accelerated evolution as analogous to "the tragedy of the commons", where uncontrolled individual access to a common resource quickly leads to over-exploitation that eventually nullifies any short-term gain, the common resource here being time until evolution of resistance. An engagingly allusive author who sprinkles his writing with touches of pertinent levity, overall he has probably not said much that is not generally known to the informed lay person, but by collating it all into one absorbing volume he may have gone some way to enlightening the kind of mindset evinced by the Kansas chemical engineer who told the Washington Post that "evolution is just somebody's nice theory and doesn't impact my life".
His publisher tells us that Brian Tokar has been an activist since the 1970s in the peace, anti-nuclear, environmental and green politics movements, has written two books and numerous magazine articles, and has a masters degree in biophysics - yes, there is such a discipline - from Harvard. With such credentials, it would not be surprising if the anti-genetic engineering movement, feeling itself in need of a bible, found that the collection of 32 papers he has either written or edited completely satisfied all their philosophical, factual and emotional requirements.
Comprehensive almost to a fault, the jaundiced eyes of Tokar and his fellow contributors have ranged over aspects of genetic engineering associated with three major areas of concern - first, health, food and the environment; second, medical genetics, science and human rights; third, patents, corporate power and the theft of knowledge and resources - and found them all deserving of the direct action detailed in the book's last section, The Worldwide Resistance to Genetic Engineering. By and large, and with the notable exception of the impenetrable prose of the last chapter's ranting Marxist feminist, the individual contributors, backed up by a plethora of references to scientific papers, informed opinion and media reporting, put up a fairly plausible case condemnatory of much of the biotechnology that has been lauded - not least by those major corporations hoping to profit from it - as offering a burgeoning world's population best hope to solve problems associated with the environment, human health and food production. The authors make no pretence about attempting to offer a balanced view on the advantages or otherwise of genetic engineering.
Other than briefly citing the potential benefits claimed for their technology by various companies and researchers, their attack offers no truce and takes no prisoners. Case after case of corporate, academic and government perfidy, some well known, others less so, where claims offering a technological New Jerusalem have turned out to be at best highly overstated and at worse life-threatening, is analysed to emphasise the hazards of a technology lacking the predictability usually associated with the word "engineering"; exactly how a foreign strand of DNA will interact with a given cell's subtle genetic regulatory processes, and its overall effect on an organism, is rarely predictable. The biotechnology industry's persistent claim that genetic engineering is essentially no different from traditional breeding, bread-making or brewing is countered by pointing out that breeding involves gene exchange between organisms that can mate naturally, genetic crosses in nature involve the natural recombination of analogous DNA fragments that lie in the same location on the same chromosome of each parent, and finally that genetic engineering has the potential to access portions of the genome not usually subject to the processes of natural selection. A three-eyed breed of dogs would owe nothing to Darwin. A drug injected into dairy cows to increase milk production up to 20 per cent has adverse effects on their health and contains a raised level of a growth hormone linked to cancer; tomatoes bred for mechanical harvesting lost 15 per cent of their vitamin C content; potatoes bred for food processing lost 50 per cent of their riboflavin and 40 per cent of their potassium; soy beans engineered to produce more protein proved potentially fatal to people allergic to Brazil nuts; some genetically engineered crops have proved harmful to beneficial insects like ladybirds and monarch butterflies; transgenic plants can transfer engineered traits to neighbouring organically grown crops and wild relatives; patenting of gene sequences by particular institutions has precluded further research elsewhere; law suits to prevent food processors accurately labelling their products as non-genetically modified; pro-eugenics scientists who have "traded the Ku Klux Klan's white sheets for white lab coats"; all just a small proportion of the cases that make Redesigning Life one long catalogue of proven and alleged perversity by biotech researchers, corporations such as Monsanto, Aventis and Du Pont, and the government agencies they have apparently captured. Many of its claims are more speculative than supported by conclusive data. Still, the fact remains that, given the interconnectedness of an organism's biological processes, and its relationship with its environment, the long-term effects of splicing foreign DNA into it will frequently be uncertain. Redesigning Life may be alarmist in tone, but it comprehensively draws attention to the risks.