BIOLOGY 103 FALL, 2003 FORUM 9

To steal an example from my recent debate tournament... imagine there's a box with a button. If you press this button, somewhere, someone you don't know will die. The argument is that pressing the button is the same as shooting the person in the head. The fact that you don't know him and his death can't be traced back to you is irrelevant. His death is still *your* responsibility.

It seems that genes work in the same way---only with genes, the proteins that produce disorders like sickle-cell create an easily-identifiable trail back to the defective gene. My point is, there *is* a specific gene (or at the very least, specific part of a gene) that causes disorders like sickle-cell. The fact that the gene wasn't created to cause sickle-cell is irrelevant; if it's shaped a certain way, it inevitably leads to the disorder. Thus, it's ultimately responsible for slicing those red blood cells into little half-moons. So it uses proteins as its medium to do this; so what? Saying it's the protein, and not the gene, that's responsible for the disorder is like saying it's the gun, not the criminal, that's responsible for the murder.

Another thing I think you may be doing with your criminal/gene vs. gun/protein analogy is tying ethics too closely to pure, raw biology. Not that ethics are not useful in the study of science -- they often are -- but in this case, I think the analogy doesn't quite fit. The reason is that two people may have the exact same gene combination (let's say theyr'e identical twins) that codes for the sickle-cell-producing proteins, yet only one of them gets sickle cell anemia. Environmental factors -- originating outside of the body, then transferring their influence into the body and mind -- alter the proteins that are actually produced in one twin and allow that guy to get off scott free. Great! Now, the twin with the sickle cell disease is the only one people are worried about, because the other guy, predisposition or no predisposition, doesn't have the proteins for sickness and is going along just fine. It's the equivalent of us pardoning the criminal whose gun malfunctioned (environment interfered with normal functioning of gun when trigger pressed) which would be morally ridiculous ... a criminal is a criminal is a criminal! However, this genetic problem is not moral in that way, and it's the PROTEINS we care about more than the genes themselves because it is the PROTEINS that manifest themselves as the illness. What matters, as far as I'm concerned, is whether or not someone actually GETS sick -- and genetic predisposition is only one thing we can use to try to predict, and prevent, this. In other words, it isn't always necessary to get to the very "bottom" of the source of something -- sometimes, the most directly-linked and obvious cause is actually the most important.

Along the same lines, I think your "box-with-a-button" analogy is also too simple. Though parallels exist, of course, with genetics, it is NOT a specific gene that codes for a disorder, and the series of genes that does code for it can be taken in many combinations, all of which result in different proteins and different physiological manfestations. There is not, ever, just one "button," and that is why a simple trace-back from protein up to gene doesn't always work.

Okay ... this is so long already! But I was just thinking about life and the double-movement-struggle towards diversity and towards homogeneity. The way I see it (as of this evening) is this: the process of pure biological evolution tends toward SAMENESS. Natural selection intends to, eventually, destroy all who do not fit the perfect standard for their particular community, environment, and time. In fact, if only one environment existed on earth, only one species(not that this is possible with life!), the force of natural selection really WOULD cut out all diversity, eventually -- because it is true that, in a given environment and among a given species, there is ONE SPECIFIC TYPE SPECIMEN that is more "fit" or adapted to its conditions than any other! Well! Fortunatley for us, this will never happen. It will never happen because of the second great force, environment, which tends toward DIVERSITY. Environment includes physical location and ecology; it includes the chemical and physiological environments that cause genes to randomly mutate; it includes the cellular environment that causes gametes to recombine. The variations initiated by biological environments -- recombination, mutation, forms of "imperfectification," if you will -- are then supported and perpetuated by the ecological environments to which they are best suited. ...So natural selection's movement toward homogeneity is bound to fail because of the changing nature of living being's environments. This is all very long-winded, but I guess what I've just realized (dawn breaks on marble head!) is that life is NOT the only thing that is diverse, and, in fact, in order to BE and remain diverse, living things depend upon the great diversity of their environments. (Not that living things don't also change their environments ... it's a two-way road!) If you stuck us all in a place without any variety, it is a matter of course that we, too, would eventually become homogenous.

Good points, Nomi, but the reason I brought up sickle-cell anemia as an example is precisely that it is *not* a "gene combination." It's the single misfire of a single protein on a single gene (or gene pair, as they come in pairs, and the gene does require dominance to create the disorder). But there's only one gene that can cause sickle-cell; environmental factors can't. See, the protein that sickles the sickle-cell is actually a *part* of the RBC itself---it's not something you can inject into the blood to temporarily stave off the problem. You can't catch the disorder, or cure it; you can only inherit it. There's no way that one individual in a pair of identical twins could have it and the other could not. The same goes for Down syndrome. It can only be caused by an extra chromosome 21. Nothing else---not environmental factors, not outside agents---can cause it. These disorders, and others, *are* "boxes with buttons." Sure, not *all* disorders function this way. But sickle-cell, Down syndrome, and several others (especially sex-linked disorders!) definitely do. I guess my point is that, while in some cases you're right and you *can't* specifically link a gene to a disorder, in other cases, the relationship is crystal-clear, cause-and-effect, a single bullet from a single gun.

I also have to disagree with your discussion of the biological trend towards sameness. A single environment will never reduce its occupants to a single species. Life just can't exist that way---organisms feed off one another, utilize one another, form symbiotic relationships with one another. And say earth *did* have only one environment; that environment would still have "niches" that different organisms could fill. Look at the Sahara. You can't get a more homogenous environment than that, right? And yet the Sahara supports a wide variety of organisms, all exploiting different aspects of the Sahara's harsh environment. Diversity is as inherent to environment as it is to life. Even in an environment that *appears* to be the same throughout, organisms adapt to different aspects of that environment in their quest for survival.

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It is appropriate, desirable, and indeed necessary to periodically examine the role that various institutions play in the broader human cultures of which they are a part ... and science in no exception. From this perspective, Science Times of 11 November 2003, and the lead article "Does Science Matter?" by William J. Broad and James Glanz, is very much to be welcomed.

At the same time, it is important to discriminate betweent those aspects of an institution that make it valuably unique in a culture and those that simply reflect the cultural commonalities that exert similar pressures on all cultural institutions. Science is far from the only institution asked by the culture "to resolve social ills". We ask that similarly of other quite different institutions - medical, political, economic, and religious - and it is not clear to me that the performance of science in this particular regard is dramatically any worse (or better) than any other institution in our culture. In this regard, I worry that Broad and Glanz (and the Science Times issue as a whole) might mislead readers by posing a set of benchmarks that might well be used for evaluating our culture as a whole but are not the appropriate ones for answering the specific question "Does Science Matter"?

The distinctive role that science has played in our culture, and can if it is valued continue to play, is not to resolve social (or individual) ills but rather to be the embodiment of permanent skepticism, of a persistant doubt about the validity of any given set of understandings reached by whatever means (including those of science itself). It is the insistence on doubting existing understandings, not the wish to eliminate humans ills nor to find "answers", that has always animated science and has always been the source of its power and successes.

Is that persistant skepticism, the perpetual unsettling of existing understandings, good for the culture of which science is a part? For humanity? That remains, of course, to be seen. The by-products of science have certainly contributed to alleviating some social ills but have also exacerbated or brought into being others. At the same time, a strong argument can be made that, on balance, human culture (like life itself) depends fundamentally on conceiving solutions to potential challenges before those challenges come into being. Doing so is what science is, distinctively, all about.

From this perspective, the fact that "two-thirds of the population believe that alternatives to Darwin's theory of evolution should be taught in public schools" is not an indication that science doesn't "matter" but rather an indication that it does. On a widespread basis, people are being provided with the products of skepticism, with alternative stories that haven't occured to them before and that are potentially relevant to future challenges. And I would argue that this is today occurring with unusual effectiveness in an array of areas of unprecedented scope, ranging from cosmological issues, to issues of the nature of human life, consciousness, and personal responsbility, to explorations of the place and meaning of humanity in the universe.

The key question, from my perspective, is not "Does Science Matter?" in terms of the standards we apply to all institutions in our culture but rather does science matter in terms of the distinctive role that it has to play in our culture? The answer, it seems to me, is demonstrably yes, and it is becoming even more yes as the decades and centuries go on. The remaining question, one that follows importantly from this, is whether our culture wants science to matter in the distinctive way it can and does. Here, I think, there is some grounds for concern, as evidenced by the recent shift in funding patterns from mostly public to mostly private and commercial support of research. I fear this reflects a misguided view of why science matters, one to which the Science Times issue could, however unintentionally, contribute. I hope not, because I suspect strongly that the future of humanity depends on our enthusiam for supporting the kinds of anticipations of change that will not occur without an institution committed to permanent skepticism.

I thought Nancy had a very good point. She raises a difficult balance that people must strike between ACCEPTING something and becoming RECONCILED to it. We need, of course, to accept homosexuality and obesity, as well as any other characteristics, and to stop judging them. Judging does nothing. It's never a matter of "fault!" I think people are correct in looking for "the gene" behind these characteristics if they do so in an attempt to erase the concept of fault. On the other hand, fault should not exist in the first place, and there is really no need to "explain" or "justify" what simply IS.

...That is not to say there is a huge, essential difference between being homosexual and being obese. There is! Homosexuality doesn't hurt anybody (unless involved with some sort of abusive relationship, but that can happen anywhere). As such, homosexuality is not what we term "pathological" -- that it, it exists in the normal range, and we don't have to do anything about it! Obesity, on the other hand, is very dangerous, and so is pathological and SHOULD be changed, if possible. We should not become reconciled to being fat just because we might be able to explain it genetically! What I really want to say is, it's hard to strike this mental balance, to fight both ends of the blame-vs.-change battle. On the one hand, we don't want people to blame homosexuals, or the obese, for their conditions. On the other hand, we want the obsese to try to lose weight -- and to have them understand that their condition, unlike homosexuality, is physically dangerous. I believe it is a matter of erasing what is "morally objectionable" -- a useless social judgement to make, really -- and focusing on what is "personally or socially harmful." (So there go religious ideals -- out the window!)

I also want, before class tomorrow, to give my answer to the question about why cells have lower-limits for size. I think that, just as with upper limits, it is a practical, spatial reason. In this case, however, I think it has to do not with surface area but with molecular complexity. The smallest atom must still take up a certain amount of space. In order to perform the complex biological tasks for which they are responsible, the molecules within cells must contain a certain minimum number of atoms. Along the same lines, the proteins composed of these molecules must be a certain minimum size to hold up to their complex, varied jobs. Same goes for the lipids and carbohydrates, not to mention the highly complex cell organelles themselves. If, for example, a protein must perform 200 little separate tasks, then it needs to have, say 200 amino acids, each of which has 10 or so atoms -- my numbers may be way off (I'm sure!), but the point stands. Cells have so much they need to do! It's just way too much to accomplish using any fewer of the building blocks, atoms, in any fewer assemblies.

I believe nature tends towards the most efficient (hence, bubbles are round to maximize volume for a given surface area). Though cell functioning may seem unbelievably complex, it is really as simple as is materially possible, considering what the cell must accomplish!

Okay, enough for now!

I thought Nancy had a very good point. She raises a difficult balance that people must strike between ACCEPTING something and becoming RECONCILED to it. We need, of course, to accept homosexuality and obesity, as well as any other characteristics, and to stop judging them. Judging does nothing. It's never a matter of "fault!" I think people are correct in looking for "the gene" behind these characteristics if they do so in an attempt to erase the concept of fault. On the other hand, fault should not exist in the first place, and there is really no need to "explain" or "justify" what simply IS.

...That is not to say there is a huge, essential difference between being homosexual and being obese. There is! Homosexuality doesn't hurt anybody (unless involved with some sort of abusive relationship, but that can happen anywhere). As such, homosexuality is not what we term "pathological" -- that it, it exists in the normal range, and we don't have to do anything about it! Obesity, on the other hand, is very dangerous, and so is pathological and SHOULD be changed, if possible. We should not become reconciled to being fat just because we might be able to explain it genetically! What I really want to say is, it's hard to strike this mental balance, to fight both ends of the blame-vs.-change battle. On the one hand, we don't want people to blame homosexuals, or the obese, for their conditions. On the other hand, we want the obsese to try to lose weight -- and to have them understand that their condition, unlike homosexuality, is physically dangerous. I believe it is a matter of erasing what is "morally objectionable" -- a useless social judgement to make, really -- and focusing on what is "personally or socially harmful." (So there go religious ideals -- out the window!)

I also want, before class tomorrow, to give my answer to the question about why cells have lower-limits for size. I think that, just as with upper limits, it is a practical, spatial reason. In this case, however, I think it has to do not with surface area but with molecular complexity. The smallest atom must still take up a certain amount of space. In order to perform the complex biological tasks for which they are responsible, the molecules within cells must contain a certain minimum number of atoms. Along the same lines, the proteins composed of these molecules must be a certain minimum size to hold up to their complex, varied jobs. Same goes for the lipids and carbohydrates, not to mention the highly complex cell organelles themselves. If, for example, a protein must perform 200 little separate tasks, then it needs to have, say 200 amino acids, each of which has 10 or so atoms -- my numbers may be way off (I'm sure!), but the point stands. Cells have so much they need to do! It's just way too much to accomplish using any fewer of the building blocks, atoms, in any fewer assemblies.

I believe nature tends towards the most efficient (hence, bubbles are round to maximize volume for a given surface area). Though cell functioning may seem unbelievably complex, it is really as simple as is materially possible, considering what the cell must accomplish!

Okay, enough for now!

SO WHO'S THE STUPID ONE, ME OR THE COMPUTER?

Wait, don't answer that ... !

;) Nomi

This concept of genetic "predisposition" has been plaguing my thoughts recently. First, in response to Nancy, it leads me to wonder if these "explanations" presented to society are simply nothing more than an "myth" for our own understanding. This might be somewhat odd, but following the reasoning that for generations culture have used "creation myths" and other myths of sorts to explain the "unexplainable", it leads me to wonder this might just be a way to pacificy society with a short-term, easily accessible reasoning.

Is it possible to chalk up all that which we do not understand or tolerate as simply "the way it is"?

The explanation for predispositions is often sorted into one of two schools-- environment or genetic. Which is valid? Could it be that genetic issues are simply heredity and other the result of environmental factors? Here the example of identical twins seperated at birth becomes an interesting issue. While environment is often viewed as a formative force in the development of a child's personality and traits, many examples of identical twins, raised in opposite environments, show that despite differences in childhood and lifestyle, certain characteristics and preferences are identical. This, in its simplicity, is an example of the primordial argument of nature vs. nurture. It leaves me wondering if identity is really environmental or genetic.

[to see more about example of seperate identical twins go to following link: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/04/48hours/main581771.shtml]