Pathfinders: Nothing but animals (2023)

The Pathfinders Column from the November 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the more depressing clichés that socialists hear, especially in response to outbreaks of homicidal violence like that in Israel and Gaza, or Ukraine, is the lazy claim that humans are just wired that way – just look at chimpanzees.

A recent online comment stated that ‘chimps are our direct ancestors, closer than bonobos’, two untrue statements that could easily have been checked. Bonobos and chimps are actually so closely related they can interbreed, and both share around 98 percent of their DNA with humans, making them equally close cousins. Yet their behaviour is markedly different, which ought to prove right away that behaviour is not dependent on genetics.

Bonobos are famous for being egalitarian and promiscuous, but chimpanzee violence is what usually gets all the attention. However, according to Jane Goodall, chimps are not the incorrigible hooligans people think: ‘ … it is easy to get the impression that chimpanzees are more aggressive than they really are. In actuality, peaceful interactions are far more frequent than aggressive ones… and serious, wounding fights are very rare compared to brief, relatively mild ones’ (tinyurl.com/4x864sx3). In fact, serious and wounding fights are very rare in all species. There’s a lot of posturing (what’s called ‘agonistic behaviour’), but animals are generally not daft, and know when to call it a day.

Ethologists, who study animal behaviour, are always learning interesting things. For instance, that animals are very far from being heteronormative. A group of Spanish researchers have recently reviewed previous studies of same-sex sexual behaviour (SSSB) in 1,500 vertebrate and invertebrate species, and come up with interesting conclusions (tinyurl.com/3p7yvmwv).

It seems that SSSB is widespread and nearly equally frequent in males and females, appears to have arisen many times, spontaneously and independently, and is more often found in social species. It’s been found in 261 mammal species, and 51 primate species, from lemurs to great apes. Other studies report similar findings in birds, reptiles, frogs and fish (tinyurl.com/yhxdxj42). Nobody is sure why it happens, but many hypotheses exist. In sum, anyone claiming that human violence is natural but homosexuality is not, has a big problem.

Or take inequality. Human society is naturally unequal, runs the argument, just look at the animal kingdom. Clue’s in the word ‘kingdom’.

A new study published by the Royal Society gives the lie to this too. Data for 66 mammal species suggest that ‘mammalian societies run the gamut from egalitarian to hierarchical’ and that while sexual and resource competition are often drivers of inequality, strategies for combating inequality are also common. These include sharing, cooperation, conflict resolution and organised insurrection. It turns out that scientists have extensively studied the evolution of animal hierarchies but paid little attention to the evolution of ‘fairness’ and how it works. The researchers argue that ‘mammals rely upon a suite of mechanisms to balance the costs and benefits of equality for group living, and evolution does not necessarily favor hierarchy… The evolution of fairness has played as big a role in the evolution of mammal species … but it has been understudied’ (tinyurl.com/49zvhh9a). Could capitalistic bias be the reason for this oversight?

In addition, what’s called ‘hierarchy’ isn’t a monolithic construct, but more of a dynamic and shifting gradient, going from the harsh and tyrannical at one end to the mild and benevolent at the other. Primate hierarchies, including chimpanzees and gorillas, generally occupy the middle ground. There is a dominance hierarchy, but it is offset by countervailing trends: ‘Factors that work to promote fairness among mammals include food sharing and adoptions, revolutionary coalitions, conflict resolution, and an aversion to inequality’.

Vampire bats share blood-food with weak and infirm relatives, chimpanzees share the produce of a hunt with the whole troupe, and elephants adopt orphaned young. Lionesses gang up on male lions to stop them killing their young. Even baboons, axiomatic as primate Nazis, have been known to adopt more peaceable and egalitarian lifestyles if their circumstances change, as observed by Stanford primatologist Robert Sapolsky in the 1990s (tinyurl.com/bdd4s5ya).

The Royal Society report adds that many species, particularly primates, have a sense of fairness, or ‘aversion to inequality’. Capuchin monkeys who have to work to get a reward are liable to go on strike when they see other monkeys getting the same reward for doing nothing. This behaviour makes sense in terms of social species who have to get along together, and has also been observed in dogs, rats and corvids.

It has been fashionable for a century or more to regard animals as remote and unknowable, and any attempt to identify human-like behaviour in animals as vulgar anthropomorphism. This may be a relatively modern phenomenon though, the result of an increasing alienation caused by mass urbanisation as well as by the industrial factory farm system, which encourages a view of animals as ‘mere meat’. Darwin however had no problem seeing human morality as an extension of similar social behaviour amongst animals, and the well-known Russian anarchist and naturalist Peter Kropotkin produced volumes of evidence to show that cooperation was as important a driver of animal evolution as competition, indeed he argued in Mutual Aid (1902), more so.

But still, it may be argued that animals are animals, and humans are, well, different. And indeed, it’s fine to argue that humans are not bound by what other animals do. That means that if we want to establish a cooperative world society of shared resources and mutual aid, there’s nothing in our genetic heritage to prevent us. But what our detractors can’t do is cherry-pick their arguments, basing human behaviour on animals when it suits them, and ignoring other known animal behaviours when it doesn’t.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Patent nonsense (2023)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Suppose that, under capitalism’s property laws, you could patent the human genome. Then, in theory, you would own the ‘rights’ to 8 billion people and their descendants, in perpetuity.

You can’t, of course, but not because people haven’t tried. Almost as soon as the DNA double helix was discovered, its co-discoverer James Watson was asked if he intended to patent it.

He thought the idea ridiculous, but was largely alone in that opinion, as every half-baked geneticist that followed saw it as a gold rush and filed patents left, right and centre. Watson, for all his dodgy views on other matters, was convinced this technology ought to be available for the common welfare, and fought the claim-stakers, including through the courts. He couldn’t stop the rush though, and about 20 percent of the human genome, around 6,000 genes, were indeed patented. But then, in 2013 the US Supreme Court made a landmark ruling that human DNA could not be patented as it is a ‘product of nature’, which is to say, a thing which human labour has not appreciably changed or modified. This is, by the way, in line with what socialists say about human labour being the only real source of value. If it’s had no human labour usefully expended on it, you can’t patent it.

Fast forward to the MRSA antibiotic crisis, which caused over a million deaths worldwide in 2019, more than malaria or AIDS (tinyurl.com/yuasm6zw ), and could even lead to a resurgence of plague (tinyurl.com/2ucn7etk).

Antibiotics were such a wonder drug when they were first used in the 1940s that they came to be gobbled up like smarties for just about everything, including as a disease prophylactic in meat, bird and fish farming, and with scant regard for the tendency of bacteria to fight back in a ceaseless evolutionary arms race. Common interest, in a socialist society of democratic common ownership, would very likely have raised the alarm early on, but for the atomised actors of capitalism, this was another tragedy of the commons scenario. But the folly doesn’t end there – capitalism’s patent system, which defenders say drives innovation, actually prevented crucial innovation, in not one but two ways.

Firstly, the flip side of patents is that when they expire, anyone can use the technology, or copy it, for free, making the patent worthless to the holder. Since most antibiotic patents were taken out in the 1940s, they have now expired, so the big pharma companies – the ones with all the R&D cash – see no prospect of further profit and have abandoned antibiotic research, just when we need them to step up the gears.

At the risk of labouring the obvious, drug companies are not in business to cure people, but to make profits, exactly like the arms industry, the car industry, in fact any industry. If they can make more money out of hair restorer and slimming drugs, that’s what they’ll invest in. Capitalist logic is what it is, even if it kills us all, which is why we advocate a socialist system of production for needs instead.

Secondly, antibiotics aren’t the only way to treat bacterial infections. You could use bacteriophages – viruses that ‘eat’ bacteria – to target and destroy the offending bacterium. Phages are very specific so you’d need the right one, culled from a huge database. This makes them harder to use than broad-spectrum antibiotics, but the advantage of phages is that they evolve, right along with the bacterium they target, meaning the bacterium can never develop permanent resistance.

Phages are proven and effective, and have been used for a century at the Eliava Institute in Tbilisi, Georgia. The Institute has been treating patients with phage therapies since the 1920s, and is so successful that people fly in from all around the world to get treatment for bacterial illnesses their own doctors have pronounced incurable (tinyurl.com/m28sfm6e ).

So, given this, have phages been enthusiastically seized upon in the West, as the technology that can rescue us from the MRSA crisis? Er, no. But surely the west is planning to use them, and scale up mass phage production? Again, no. Well, there must at least be a million phage studies currently underway by western universities and drug companies? Actually, there are almost none.

WTF?

You see, here’s the rub. Phages are a ‘product of nature’, which means… you guessed it. They can’t be patented, and therefore, there is no potential profit.

Currently, some western biotech companies are working on ways to get round this restriction, using CRISPR gene-editing to tweak phages just enough to be able to claim that they are a human artefact and therefore patentable. If the tweak does something useful that’s lovely, but beside the point. The problem with this workaround is that you can’t be sure what effect the tweak is going to have, so there will be all kinds of clinical trials and regulatory hurdles to negotiate. But not to worry, capitalist regulators are not as independent as they pretend. Bodies such as the UK’s NICE and America’s FDA are subject to a degree of ‘regulatory capture’ by drug companies, who finance the bodies via required registration fees, and also promise cushy industry jobs tomorrow on the understanding that regulators play ball today (tinyurl.com/537m35am). So tweaked phages might end up being approved by fair means or foul.

Meanwhile it’s not entirely game over for antibiotics. A new class of synthetic antibiotics is able to combat drug-resistant bacteria by targeting several key proteins at once, meaning that the bacterium would have to evolve a defence against all points of attack simultaneously, a highly unlikely feat (tinyurl.com/4evjaryr). Good news, for those who can afford it.

The take-home from all this is that, in the ongoing war on MRSA, insofar as capitalism gets it right, it’s doing exactly what socialism would do. But, unlike socialism, it is critically hampered by its own profit-chasing logic, first in solving problems, and second, in not preventing them from arising in the first place.

Paddy Shannon

Monkey Business (2005)

Book Review from the March 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard 

‘What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People and Their Genes’, by Jonathan Marks. (University of California Press. Paperback)

Marks’s answer to the finding that humans share 98 percent of so of their DNA with chimps is that it doesn’t mean much more than we already knew and certainly not what some read into it. It confirms that millions of year ago (7 million is the generally accepted estimate) humans and chimps had a common ancestor. More generally, since all life-forms are built up of DNA, it confirms Darwin’s view that all those that exist and have existed on Earth evolved from a single original form. On the other hand, it does not mean that humans are 98 percent chimpanzee (any more than the fact that we share 35 percent of our DNA with daffodils means that we are 35 percent daffodil) and that therefore the study of chimpanzee behaviour is relevant to the study of human behaviour. As Marks puts it succinctly, “you can’t get at human nature from chimpanzees. They’re not human.” We are not naked apes, but clothed humans; which makes all the difference.

Marks goes for those who think that genes are the most important factor in human behaviour (the Social Darwinists and the eugenicists in the past and the behavioural geneticists, sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists today), making the simple, but often ignored, point that we don’t actually know how any gene works. We know that genes produce proteins for the cells that constitute the body but not yet how this translates into a person’s physical attributes let alone (if it does) into any mental traits. What we know at the moment is that certain defects in certain genes result in certain abnormal conditions (such as cystic fibrosis), but not how a non-defective gene produces a normal condition.

This is why, Marks insists, when someone makes a claim to have discovered a gene for something, for instance homosexuality, they can’t just point to statistical correlations or even similar brain structures, they would need to produce a verifiable and verified causal explanation of precisely how the gene in question translates into the particular behaviour pattern. As he puts it, “what is widespread is not necessarily innate” and “genetic conclusions require genetic data”:

  “The fact that something is consistently observed does not imply that it has a genetic cause. We know that. If you want to argue about science and about genetics, you need controlled data and genetic data.”

He warns modern geneticists about the dangers of making claims that go well beyond the existing (genetic) evidence, by pointing to the dominant view amongst geneticists in the 1920s which was racist and justified the forced sterilisation of “mental defectives” (not just in Nazi Germany but in America and even in Sweden). They were wrong and the practical consequences were disastrous. Seeing that we don’t yet know how normal genes translate into physical attributes, modern geneticists should, he suggests, show a little more humility before propagating their speculations about human behaviour being genetically determined as if it were an established scientific fact.

Marks is also good on the myth of race. “Race”, he says, “turns out to be an optical illusion”:

  “[W]e can, of course, make comparisons between groups of people and study their differences. The problem is invariably what meaning to assign to those differences. If we know that there are gradients, not boundaries; that human variation is patterned locally, not transcontinentally; that the extremes are not the purest representatives of anything, but simply the most divergent; that populations are invariably mixed with their neighbors, and in the last half-millennium with people from far away; and that clustering populations into larger units is a cultural act that values some differences as important and submerges others – then race evaporates as a natural unit.”

We have to record, however, that in the last five of the book’s twelve chapters Marks embraces some strange positions, such as defending the right of a North American Indian tribe to veto research on a 9,000-year old skeleton found on their former tribal territory as this conflicted with their “spiritual” values (much as the Mediaeval Church had “spiritual” reasons for frowning on the dissection of human bodies).  Similarly, he defends the refusal of certain indigenous people in other parts of the world to have their DNA recorded. Here, if it true, they may have a legitimate point about it being patented and used by others to make money, but this is a distortion due to the existence of capitalism. In principle, there is nothing wrong with recording the DNA of peoples who have been relatively isolated from the rest of humanity.

Adam Buick

Pathfinders: Gene genies (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Revolutionaries tend to like science, and science loves revolutions. There’s one going on right now in something called proteomics. This studies the structures of proteins, collectively the proteome, which unlike the genome differs from cell to cell. The gist is that DNA makes RNA, and RNA makes proteins, but what do proteins make? That depends on the cell they’re in and the 3-dimensional shape they fold into. The hows and whys of this have up to now never been fathomed. But late last year Google’s DeepMind AI lab was able to predict the 3-dimensional folding of a protein (BBC Online, 30 November).

If this doesn’t sound very awe-inspiring, imagine you’re a kid with a basic Lego set, and one day your mum gives you a tool to design and create any individual piece you like, for any purpose, in any quantity. The potential limits go well beyond the sky.

But that’s building new things. What about debugging what already exists? Another revolution generating huge excitement involves the ability to cut and edit individual strips of DNA. Work is progressing so fast that textbooks, even if they existed, would be out of date as soon as they were printed. And as is so often the case, this breakthrough happened largely by accident.

Life exists in three domains (four if you include viruses): bacteria, archaea (a kind of alt-bacteria), and eukaryota (plants, fungi, slime moulds, us). Eukaryotes have fancy enhancements like a cell nucleus, but the other domains are much more rudimentary. Yet a few years ago it was discovered that the genomes of many bacteria (read also archaea) had strange repeating sequences in their DNA which nobody could account for. Fast forward to the revelation that these sequences were bits of virus DNA left over from attacks by bacteriophages, viruses that ‘eat’ bacteria. It turned out that the bacterium was able to use these DNA sequences as templates to peel off an RNA replica strand, a bit like an identikit portrait, that could be sent off round the cell to hunt for any matching DNA from other phage attackers, and bind itself onto it. Then came the killer surprise. The RNA strand came with a special weapon, a protein called Cas9, that was able to cut through the phage’s DNA at the binding point, thus dismantling the phage. In other words, bacteria and archaea had a hitherto unsuspected search-and-destroy immune system.

Imagine the squid-like blob attached to the astronaut’s face in the film Alien, all set to inject its loathsome babies into his innards to eat him from the inside out. But the quick-thinking astronaut pulls out a pair of scissors, aims it at the exact spot, and snips the squid-blob’s brain stem. The squid-blob drops off his face, stone dead. Bacteria do this to phages using these repeating identifier sequences. To describe these sequences, someone came up with the wonderfully recondite name of ‘clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats’, or CRISPR for short.

So far so obscure, but then it was realised that if you could tweak these sequences, you could use the process to quickly cut, or cut out, any bit of DNA, at any point you like. If a single faulty base-pair is known to cause serious conditions, such as sickle-cell anaemia, it should be a simple matter to edit it out. Because genes are passed on to descendants, the edit would be permanent. Other life-crippling conditions and diseases could follow, such as cystic fibrosis or Huntingdon’s Disease. Edit the genome of the carrier mosquito and you could in theory wipe out malaria and dengue fever.

CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing has been described as one of the biggest discoveries in the history of biology, potentially allowing us to control and rewrite evolution. The two leading researchers in this field, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, just recently shared the 2020 Nobel prize for chemistry, incidentally the first science Nobel ever awarded to two women.

But what to do with a frontier technology like this, that’s the big question, and it quickly becomes a political one. Professor Doudna is upbeat about the potential, especially for agriculture. But with capitalism, priorities are money driven, a trait discernible where the process has already been used – to create low-fat pigs, extra-woolly Cashmere goats, and gluten-free wheat, this last probably not for the few genuine Coeliac sufferers but more likely for the huge narcissistic food-fad market. Slightly alarmingly the professor also talks about creating mythological creatures like flying lizards and even unicorns (bit.ly/3oSvNTF). But, like many others including Professor Charpentier, she is quite aware of the Frankenstein potential, and an intense ethical debate is in full swing.

Genes can have multiple effects on other genes, and so on in cascading effects, most barely if at all understood. What if an edit causes an unexpected change, and the change ‘gets out’ and can’t be stopped? Home CRISPR kits are already starting to appear on the market, raising the spectre of some enthusiastic schoolkid accidentally creating a terminator gene that escapes into the wild.

Socialist society would also have to weigh up such risks. But capitalism raises the threat level far higher than it needs to be. Its entrenched class-divided nature could lead to this technology being hijacked by the rich in order to create designer babies and widen the class divide at the genetic level, a Brave New World scenario. Moratoriums on human genome editing do exist, and a Chinese scientist was jailed for three years in 2019 for carrying out illegal work on twins. Yet the money and the temptation are there, and covert work is probably continuing in other dark corners. The gene genie is out of the bottle.

Then there is capitalism’s compulsion to weaponise new technology. A genetic ‘bullet’ wouldn’t just disable a soldier, it would disable all that soldier’s descendants. Fortunately perhaps, work is already underway on how to limit the effects of CRISPR or even stop it in its tracks. Viruses, currently the world’s Public Enemy Number One, offer a solution. It transpires that, in the microbial arms race, many viruses have evolved a powerful anti-CRISPR mechanism, which we could exploit (New Scientist, 13 January).

It’s an indictment of capitalism that we even need to worry about weaponisation, or misuse by bad actors for commercial gain. No matter what technological benefits capitalism has fostered, fundamentally it doesn’t care about our welfare, only about money. Nobody in their right mind would trust a friend like that. We shouldn’t trust a social system like that either.

While science remains trapped in the service and thrall of capital, its revolutions will always be suspect, its achievements monetised and perverted, and its intentions derailed. The revolution needed to emancipate science for our collective benefit is never going to come out of a science lab. It has to come from the rest of us.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: La Dolce Vita (2006)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

La Dolce Vita

New Scientist of June 3 ran a cover page splash on nine different routes to health and long life, all supposedly based on the latest research. These nine ways were: 1: have a little of what’s bad for you; 2: socialise more; 3: consider moving to where people live longer; 4: enjoy your vices (er, same as 1?); 5: keep your brain active; 6: relax, have a laugh, kill stress; 7: be a hypochondriac; 8: eat healthier; 9: make life more exciting.

New Scientist clearly should have read their own magazine from the week before (May 27), because while there may be nothing wrong with these suggestions, there is one more way of staying healthy and living longer which the magazine inexcusably forgot to mention: don’t be poor, be rich. According to Michael Marmot, professor of epidemiology and public health at University College, London, and author of Status Syndrome (Bloomsbury, 2004):

  “There is a social gradient in health. It is not only that the poor have poor health: the lower someone’s social position, the worse their health is. During the period from the 1970s to the 1990s, the gap in life expectancy between men in the top and bottom socio-economic groups in England and Wales increased from 5.5 years to 9.5 years” (New Scientist, May 27). 

And as Marmot notes, it is not a question of absolute poverty, as for example in sub-Saharan countries, but relative poverty and lack of autonomy.

Marmot conducted a study of civil servants that showed that lower ranks, with less control, had a higher risk of heart disease. He argues that there is a causal relationship between low status and lack of control over decision-making and stress-related disease, and his solution is government legislation to redistribute income more equitably.

Socialists know there is a fat chance of this happening, and that within the framework of capitalism, any short term advantage thus gained would soon be wiped out anyway. All the indications are that common ownership and democratic control are the best way to long life and happiness.


A Whale of a Tale

When members vote in Socialist Party ballots, the votes are open, whereas in capitalist political elections, the votes are secret. In a society free of sectional interests, there ought to be no reason for an individual to keep their opinions and their votes to themselves. However in early capitalism, where votes were also open, huge pressures were brought to bear on individual voters. These pressures included bribery, blackmail, and threats of eviction, sackings, personal injury and death.

Eventually workers won the right to a secret ballot, and thus the situation remains, except in the Socialist Party, of course, where elections tend not to inspire such extreme responses, and where, besides, the feeling is that a democratic process needs to be as transparent as possible in order to see and understand what is going on. Thus, paradoxically, both open and secret voting can be seen as aiding, or inhibiting, the practice of democratic fair play.

A recent case illustrates both sides of this problem. The International Whaling Commission is, as most marine environmentalists know, about to have control wrested back from the whale-friendly conservationist ruling junta, who for the past twenty years have imposed a moratorium on all commercial whaling.

The country leading the coup, Japan, have been busily running around offering bribes of aid to small island countries in order to get their votes to resume whaling (New Scientist, June 17). Japan is not in a position to gain 75 percent of the vote to do this yet, but can probably secure over 50 percent needed for a simple majority to change current voting practice from open to secret. As small countries like the Marshall Islands face what Australia describes as ‘international outrage’ if they succumb to bribes and vote with Japan, the incentive to cast their votes secretly is clearly very strong.
But most of these countries, indeed most of the IWC members, are not whaling countries. So what are they doing in the IWC in the first place?

The original regulatory body of the IWC, established in 1946, consisted of just 15 whaling nations. Through a long and, some might say, heroic struggle by Peter Scott of the World Wildlife Fund, a loophole in the IWC’s constitution was exploited, allowing non-whaling nations to join. These new members outnumbered the original ‘butcher’s club’ and were happy, as a result of various ‘incentives’ by the conservationist lobby, to vote the whalers into retirement. All that Japan have done is to open the membership still further, to the present level of 70 countries, and change the nature of the incentives. However, the big discouragement to small countries is that they may lose more than they gain by supporting Japan, unless they can do it on the quiet. Hence, the first step to the resumption of whaling is to obtain a secret ballot.

The question of whether whaling would exist in socialist society is not the biggest that will face that society. However, a huge factor influencing the activities of countries like Japan and Norway is that a large proportion of their economies rely on it. At present the taste for whalemeat is in decline globally, even in Japan, so they may be fighting a losing battle in any case. But in socialism, where people’s lives and livelihoods won’t depend on this hideous practice, it is hard to imagine any justification for continuing it. Let the giants keep their deep. Humans can find other ways to provide for themselves.


Blueblood genes

Something even non-scientific readers of scientific developments quickly become wary of are bold claims. As Carl Sagan often insisted, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In the absence of this, one is entitled to take the proposition that entrepreneurs (capitalists) are genetically pre-dispositioned, with a pinch of salt (BBC Online, June 6). A study of 609 pairs of identical twins and 657 pairs of same-sex non-identical twins in the UK found that the rate of entrepreneurship between the two groups was the same as the general population, but the rate of entrepreneurship for both twins was higher in identical twins (sharing all their genes) than non-identicals (sharing about half their genes). This, announced the researchers, was evidence that genes play an important role in determining who is likely to succeed in business and who isn’t, which in turn may affect which students business schools might prefer to enrol on their courses.

Professor Tim Spector, director of the Twin Research Unit at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, is enthusiastic about genetics but plainly out of his depth in economics: “Although entrepreneurs are vital to the economy, as they create wealth and jobs, no-one knows precisely what drives people to become an entrepreneur.”

This illustrates something Pathfinders has noted before, that scientists have a tendency to one-dimensional thinking: while they may challenge every assumption within their own field of research, they are happy to base their work on any and every assumption in other fields, no matter how crude and unsupported. That capitalists create wealth is not simply an assumption fostered only by capitalists themselves, it displays an ignorance of the everyday world, of economics and of history, bordering on the crass. Moreover, the current craze of looking for genetic causes for every aspect of human behaviour is fast becoming as tedious as it is futile, and simply plays to the media obsession for simple soundbite science.

There is no capitalist gene, just as there is no fat gene, or violence gene, or possessive gene. Scientists who make public announcements of tenuous results of tenuous studies of tenuous premises risk immersing the debate in mud and obscurantiscism. The truth is, if you run your society in a violent and competitive way, it will inevitably produce violent and competitive people. Which particular DNA proteins or base-pair combinations were involved, is in one sense rather beside the point.

Paddy Shannon

Down the Millennia (2019)

Book Review from the November 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich (Oxford University Press. £10.99.)

The first ancient human genomes, involving analysis of DNA, were only published in 2010. But since then ancient DNA has had a revolutionary impact on the study of the past, revealing many surprises in what is known about human evolution. Here David Reich, who has played a leading role in such research, describes the state of the art. We cannot summarise the book’s contents here, just focus on some of the main points made.

An important issue which arises is the extent of large-scale migration over the millennia and the consequent mixing of peoples: ‘Most of today’s populations are not exclusive descendants of the populations that lived in the same locations ten thousand years ago.’ Most DNA among Japanese people is inherited from farmers who migrated from the East Asian mainland and mixed with local hunter-gatherers. Everyone in India today is a mix, in varying proportions, of West Eurasian ancestry on the one hand, and East and South Asian ancestry on the other. Mixture often involved men who exercised power and women from a subordinate population; thus Thomas Jefferson, third president of the US, had six children with his slave Sally Hemmings. For biological reasons, men can have far more offspring than women, and one man at the time of the Mongol Empire (maybe Genghis Khan himself) had millions of direct male-line descendants. European men made a far greater contribution to the genetic make-up of African Americans than European women. These are examples of ‘sex-asymmetric population mixture’.

The study of ancient DNA has even more to say about inequality. Around five thousand years ago, the Yamnaya culture spread from the eastern European steppe over northern Europe and central Asia. With wheeled vehicles, domesticated animals to pull them and the use of bronze, they were able to displace local people, and the powerful males among them could gain access to large numbers of women and so pass on their Y chromosomes to many subsequent generations. This did not apply to all men, only to a limited number, which implies a lot of social stratification.

Reich also confronts the question of race, and to what extent notions of ancestry overlap with race. Some people have objected to research along the lines sketched above, on the grounds that it just reinforces supposed racial ideas and categories. He is emphatic that race and ancestry are not the same, yet accepts ‘the possibility of substantial average differences in biological traits across populations’, which would include skin colour, height and the ability to breathe easily at high altitudes. It is hard to see how anyone could object to statements such as this, but claims that some genetic variations are more common in people with more years of education need a great deal more support in order to ascertain the role of other possibly relevant factors.

But all in all, a fascinating and informative, but fairly challenging read.

Paul Bennett

Pathfinders: The New Untouchables (2012)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists will greet with mixed feelings the news that a milestone in genome sequencing has been reached, enabling anyone to have their entire genome sequenced in one day for just £650 (Independent, 11 January). This task, until recently a hundred-million dollar enterprise involving tens of years and hundreds of scientists, can now be knocked off on a wet Wednesday by a single bored boffin using a machine the size of a microwave oven. In a year or two perhaps, the same feat will be achieved in ten minutes by licking the end of your smart phone.

That this is a testament to the awesome acceleration of science is undeniable. The benefits for the future management or prevention of diseases through individual designer treatments are also undeniable. Humanity’s drive to know itself, to know its essential nature is irresistible, the stuff of legends. There ought to be no down side. But this is capitalism we’re talking about. Information about your body and health prospects can be used against you as well as for you, and the fact that this information will be of interest to insurers and employers is not merely a probability but a racing certainty. As in the film Gattaca (1997), your life and career choices could well be determined and circumscribed by what’s in your genes.

Genome-profiling could be written into contracts everywhere from pre-school to pre-nuptial agreements. It could become the hot new style accessory, the ‘new black’, better than the sports car or the Rolex, better than the implants or the permatan.  Eyes won’t meet anymore across crowded bars, or pheromones traverse the stilly air, nor will courage have to be summoned for the first hesitant approach. Instead, iPhones will poll each other automatically, protocols will synchronise, alerting you to genetically suitable breeding partners according to matched genomic probabilities. Before you’ve even exchanged glances, your hardware will have exchanged financial histories, bought the first round of drinks and booked the dinner table. While nature remains red in claw, human nature will become blue in tooth.

Disability groups, accustomed anyway to being ‘second-class citizens’, have every right to worry about all this. From being chronically under-employed, they may soon become regarded as unemployable, a highly disquieting condition in a social system that only values ‘productive’ workers and which in the past has thought nothing of liquidating ‘unproductive’ ones. But this technology will have the effect of ‘disabling’ many more people than those currently bearing the label. The definition of ‘disability’ will also be extended forward in time to include anyone who is likely to develop a disabling disease in the future, creating a large subset of sell-by-date workers whom employers will not want to bother investing in, whom state institutions like health and education will neglect, whom mating partners will avoid, and whom insurers won’t touch with a barge pole.

Would this subset, driven by lack of opportunity and perhaps a cold sense of fatalism, turn in desperation to insurrection or to crime? Would they be categorised as a social problem at birth? Could two such individuals, the new genetic ‘untouchables’, be charged with criminal negligence if one got the other pregnant? Hard upon the arrival of the genomic ID card would follow the inevitable question of controlled breeding, forced sterilisation, and euthanasia. Capitalism’s quest for maximum return for minimum outlay could give rise to a new fascism in which only the genetically ‘perfect’ have any chance to succeed, or even survive. Eugenics, the dirty word of the Nazi era, could make a comeback.

Given what happened in Nazi Germany, people forget that the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century was not initially seen as some right-wing state-backed war on the underdog, but a forward-thinking, progressive and humane project based on good science. The Fabians supported it, as did Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, Darwin’s own son, in fact virtually all of the ‘right-thinking’ intellectuals. Who would not want a purer gene pool, they thought? What justification could there be for allowing pain and disease to proliferate? Wasn’t eugenics in the best interests of the whole human race?

The theory wasn’t entirely watertight even in its own terms. It had already been shown by 1915 that genetic mutation could jump heritability lines and that heritability was not a closed system but was subject to outside interference. Nowadays a lot more is known about horizontal gene transfer through viral drift. This won’t stop the modern eugenicists, however, since engineering can build by design what crude artificial selection cannot sculpt by elimination. Even if a mutation crops up in a previously ‘pure’ strain it can be engineered back out again. In theory, anyway. In practice, the codebook is open, but nobody knows what the letters mean, and we can only guess by inference when a letter changes. Even if they could read the code, geneticists may never untangle the complex webs of phenotypic effects influenced by one genetic ‘word’, nor identify all the genetic elements necessary to create one – and only one – effect. This unfathomable complexity – pleiotropy – yawns like an abyss between the engineers and their brave new world, but the bridges are being constructed.

There will of course be cries of moral outrage, appeals to civil liberties, and demands for ethical oversight. Capitalism will pay lip-service to these insofar as it has to, but its logic compels it to find out whatever can be found out about the ‘worth’ of each worker, each human tool, and stock its toolbox accordingly.

The argument that it won’t put in its toolbox is the one about putting all your eggs in one basket. Evolution is even more blind and capricious than capitalism. The last thing any thinking species ought to do, if it wants to survive, is confine itself to one tight genetic niche and thereby maximise its vulnerability. That’s the way to become beautiful – and extinct. Genetic diversity doesn’t lead to a shallow and polluted gene pool, as our elitist, narrow-minded and anally-retentive forebears conceived of it. It leads to the best possible defence against extinction in the event of future diseases. Even if one leaves aside every possible moral argument about the ‘right to life’ of all humans, the simple threat of evolutionary extinction alone ought to be enough to annihilate this silly notion of eugenics once and for all. Let all humanity prosper, and bugger the chromosomes.

It’s something of an indictment of capitalism that one even has to make this utilitarian argument in the first place. Moral outrage ought to be enough. But it isn’t, because capitalism has no brain, no heart, and no foresight. As long as the money rolls in, let the heads roll as they may.

Paddy Shannon

Possibility of change (1998)

Book Review from the June 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Doctrine of DNA by R.C. Lewontin. Penguin Books, £5.99.

Every socialist should read this book. In less than 130 pages one of the co-authors of the excellent Not in Our Genes brilliantly argues against the sociobiologists’ claim that all human existence is controlled by our DNA.

His book, subtitled “Biology & Ideology”, is a collection of radio lectures he gave on CBS. The language is simple and straightforward and demands no specialised knowledge of genetics.

He is devastating when dealing with the role of science in the modern world:

“Science uses commodities and is part of the process of commodity production. Science uses money. People earn their living by science, and as a consequence the dominant social and economic forces in society determine to a large extent what science does and how it does it.”

He shows that despite its limited medical application a great deal of money is being spent on the Human Genome Project. This programme makes great philosophical and social claims that he, as one of the world’s leading geneticists, shows are nonsense. He further claims that the programme is lining the pockets of companies. “No prominent molecular biologist of my acquaintance is without a financial stake in the biotechnology business.”

He is scathing in his attack on claims that there are genes that shape aggression, xenophobia, sexism and racism. His last chapter “Science as Social Action” is an excellent summation of the pointless “nature or nurture” debate because he takes a thoroughly dialectical view, one that could not be bettered.

Richard Donnelly