Science &

technology

November 1996
ESSAY
4 The sibling theory of
civilisation
MATT RIDLEY
According to a new theory, conflict
between siblings is a more significant
force in human history than class
struggle. Do first-borns conform and
younger siblings rebel?
December 1997
DEBATE
8 The place of genes
STEVEN ROSE VS LEWIS WOLPERT
DNA may explain everything from
sexual orientation to the egg-laying of
parasitic wasps—or it may not. Just
how important are genes?
February 1999
ESSAY
12 Waste is good
GEOFFREY MILLER
Evolutionists used to be puzzled by
the wastefulness of the peacock’s tail.
Now they believe that almost
everything in nature that we find
beautiful or impressive is shaped by
wasteful sexual display. Sexual
display also lies at the root of culture,
consciousness and consumerism.
January 2000
SPECIAL REPORT
18 The universe is savage
OLIVER MORTON
Every year there are at least 500
gamma-ray bursts in the universe.
They destroy everything within a
few hundred light years of the
source. What do these extraordinary
explosions mean for the prospect of
intelligent life in the cosmos?
2 PROSPECT 100 best articles CD
contents
October 2000
ROUNDTABLE
22 The meaning of the genome
NANCY CARTWRIGHT, PETER
GOODFELLOW, STEVE JONES,
GEOFF MULGAN, ROBERT PLOMIN,
STEVEN ROSE & JAMES D WATSON
Are we on the brink of great
medical breakthroughs? Is the patent
issue a problem? What can genetics
tell us about human behaviour?
January 2001
COLUMN
28 Reflections
JIM HOLT
Why do mirrors reverse left and
right but not up and down?
July 2001
OPINION
30 Is Bush right?
BJORN LOMBORG
A big reduction in carbon emissions
is a costly and unrealistic response to
global warming. Time to rethink.
PLUS
May 2002
ESSAY
32 Bjorn again
ADAIR TURNER
Bjørn Lomborg is the hero of
respectable environmental scepticism,
but he is wrong on global warming.
October 2001
SPECIAL REPORT
38 Organic fraud and
anti-science
DICK TAVERNE
Most of the claims made for organic
food—that it is tastier, healthier and
better for the environment—turn out
to be dubious or false.
science & technology
January 2002
WITNESS
44 The beauty of maths
KARL SABBAGH
Could one of the greatest problems
of maths be on the verge of a
solution? Mathematicians dream of
proving Riemann’s Hypothesis—not
just for the prize money, but to
glimpse the deep beauty of
prime numbers.
January 2002
SPECIAL REPORT
48 The science of eternity
MARTIN REES
This century may be a defining
moment for the future of the cosmos.
If humans do not destroy themselves,
they may spread beyond the Earth,
into a universe that may well last
forever. But eternity is very, very
long, especially towards the end.
June 2002
DEBATE
54 Biotechnology: our
slippery slope?
GREGORY STOCK VS
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
What will happen when humanity
changes? Should we be afraid of
tampering with human nature?
January 2003
PORTRAIT
60 Bill Hamilton
ANDREW BROWN
He was the greatest biologist of the
20th century yet, to the dismay of his
many friends and admirers, he
believed that only a radical
programme of infanticide and
eugenics could save the human race.
 The sibling theory
of civilisation
Conflict between siblings is a more significant force in human history than class
struggle, according to Frank Sulloway, a Harvard psychologist. He believes
that first borns tend to be conformist and younger siblings rebellious—and offers a
pile of statistics to support his case. Matt Ridley is intrigued but sceptical
IBERTE, EGALITE, FRATERNITE!” However
L successful the French revolution may
have been at generating liberty and
equality, it was a terrible failure at the
practice of fraternity. Not only did real
brothers find themselves divided against each other
by the revolution, but ideological brothers-in-arms
guillotined each other with relish. The Terror of
1793 is often described as “fratricidal.”
This description may be closer to the truth than
historians have realised. The battles between the
Girondin and the Montagnard deputies to the
National Convention, which led to the Terror when
the Montagnards gained the upper hand, was
largely a battle between younger and elder brothers.
Most of the Girondins were younger children in
their families, and most of the Montagnards, elder.
Indeed, among the deputies were 16 real brothers
who grew up together, including Maximilien and
Augustin Robespierre. No
SIBLING STRIFE, NOT younger brother sat to
CLASS CONFLICT, LAY the left of his elder
brother, the left being the
AT THE HEART OF side of the hall associated
THE FRENCH TERROR with greater extremism
and repression. Here then
is a new history of the French revolution: royalist
elder brothers were overthrown by progressively
more younger-child revolutionaries until 1793 when
elder brothers grabbed back power in the violent coup
of the Terror. The tolerant interlude of 1789-92 was
characteristic of a period of rule by younger brothers.
A new and curious insight, or farcical sociological
simplification? This analysis comes from a new
book, Born to Rebel (Little, Brown), by Frank Sul-
loway, published in November. Sulloway is neither a
sociologist, nor a professional historian. He is a psy-
chologist at Harvard, and an odd one at that because
4 PROSPECT November 1996
he is a closer disciple of Charles Darwin than Sig-
mund Freud (although he has written a biography of
Freud). His book is a long exploration of the idea
that a Darwinian understanding of sibling conflict
explains a great deal of human history, politics and
sociology.
Of the French revolution, he writes, “Sibling
strife, not class conflict, lay at the heart of the Terror.
The ultimate failure of the French revolution resided
in the participants’ inability to grasp this fact.”
Sulloway’s theory is that radicalism, openness to
new ideas and gullibility are generally characteristic
of younger siblings, whereas reaction, orthodoxy
and intolerance are characteristic of their elder sibs.
He demonstrates this with a mountain of statistics
taken from several historical revolutions in both sci-
ence and politics. During the Reformation, for exam-
ple, he finds that two thirds of Catholic martyrs exe-
cuted in Protestant countries were eldest children,
while an astounding 96 per cent of Protestant mar-
tyrs in Catholic countries were younger children.
We are quite used to the idea that age and social
class may influence people’s political views, so there
should be no difficulty in accepting that birth order
matters, too. Sulloway, however, wishes to go further
and persuade us that birth order is a much stronger
influence than either age or class. In 1520, for
instance, a typical 70 year old second born was as
likely to be of the new Reformed faith as a 30 year
old first born—at least in Sulloway’s sample of his-
torical figures whose views are known. And in the
19th century, argues Sulloway, there was a much
stronger correlation between birth order and sup-
port for radical evolutionary ideas than there was
between social class and views on evolution. Evolu-
tion was espoused by wealthy gentleman Darwin (a
fifth child out of six) and lower-middle class Alfred
Russel Wallace (the eighth of nine children). “Oh

what a scheme is primogeniture,” wrote Darwin to
Wallace, “for destroying natural selection.”
Sulloway’s theory, if it stands up to scrutiny—and
he has amassed astonishing amounts of material over
25 years to support it—is a fascinating attempt to
clear the Marxist hangover we all suffer from. His-
tory, he says, is not so much about the conflict between
classes as about the conflict between siblings.
Although most of his case histories are of men,
the same patterns apply among women, and men
who are eldest sons but not eldest children still
behave largely like later-borns. Gender undoubtedly
matters, but an elder sibling is an elder sibling
whether male or female. As an example of an inflexi-
ble and dogmatic first-born woman, who devoted
her life to pursuing the intellectual faith of her men-
tor and took care not to let facts get in her way, Sul-
loway cites Margaret Mead, who was virtually a par-
ent to her younger sibs. As an example of a daring
and radical later-born woman, he cites Darwin’s
ESSAY R I D L E Y
brother’s “girlfriend,” Harriet Martineau, the cham-
pion of mesmerism and political economy and the
person who introduced Darwin to Thomas
Malthus’s work. Sulloway also interprets the vary-
ing success of Henry VIII’s six wives in keeping
their necks intact according to their birth order.
“Those wives who lost their heads tended to be late
in birth rank and outspoken in their opinions.”
But the effect on history is nothing to the effect
Sulloway’s ideas will have on biology. They re-open
enthusiastically a stale old debate called nature-nur-
ture. These days, the conventional wisdom on
nature-nurture goes like this. It is a false and mis-
leading debate because there is no dichotomy to be
easily drawn between somebody’s genes and their
environment. Genes are as meaningless without
environments as cake recipes are without ovens. The
same genes can produce different results in different
environments, and the same environments can pro-
duce different results if genes differ. Tall people
ILLUSTRATION: ALEX GREEN
PROSPECT November 1996 5
 grow tall because of an inextricable mixture of tall
genes and good childhood nutrition. A person of
medium height might have had medium genes and
medium nutrition, tall genes and poor nutrition or
short genes and good nutrition.
This little sermon usually precedes a stern
injunction to ignore the blandishments of geneticists
trying to claim that they have found the gene for
some aspect of behaviour. It is utter nonsense, we are
told, to say that somebody’s sexuality or violence is
the product of their genes, and those who do so are
being mischievous or evil. True enough, in many
cases. Yet the very same people who write this kind
of thing are then happy, sometimes in the very next
paragraph, to speculate wildly about the influences
of upbringing on personality. Their stern sermons
seem to apply to genes but not environments.
This is unjust. A biographer who claimed that his
subject was the way he was because of the genes he
inherited would be chastised. A biographer who
claimed that his subject was the way he was because
of his family background would be considered quite
normal. Yet we have just heard that nature and nur-
ture are inextricable, and that family backgrounds
have different effects on different natures as well as
vice versa. It is a widespread double standard. The
scandal of the nature-nurture debate is not that the
champions of nature claim too much but that the
champions of nurture say it is a false dichotomy and
then proceed to ignore their own advice.
Into this debate parachutes Frank Sulloway’s
theory of birth order. It is a theory of nurture, self-
evidently; but it is a theory of nature, too. Sulloway
uses the logic of evolutionary adaptation to arrive
at his ideas. He argues that people are designed
to have natures (genes) which respond to birth
order in specific, predictable and universal ways. You
have a genetic programme that says, in brief, “if born
first, conform; if born
YOUNGER CHILDREN last, rebel.”
PREFER MORE That programme evol-
ved as part of our natures
DANGEROUS SPORTS because it made sense in
THAN THEIR our distant evolutionary
ELDER SIBLINGS past. It gave eldest chil-
dren their best chance of
hanging on to their natural head start in inheriting
the territory or possessions of the parents, and it
gave younger children their best chance of avoiding
or winning conflict with elder siblings and striking
out on their own. That way younger siblings became
risk-seeking and elder siblings risk averse. Literally:
Sulloway finds that younger children prefer more
dangerous sports than elder children.
Sulloway’s ideas are squarely in the mainstream of
evolutionary psychology, a Darwinian science that is
usually considered very “nature”-obsessed because it
searches for evolved, universal human nature rather
6 PROSPECT November 1996
than emphasising cultural differences. Yet it sees
genes very differently from the way most geneticists
do. Genes are far more about creating individual
similarities than individual differences: similarities
in the way people respond to environmental differ-
ences. Thus, monkeys have higher serotonin levels in
their brains because they are high in social rank not
vice versa—a clear case of an external, non-genetic
influence. Yet why do their serotonin levels rise
when they rise in rank? Because they have genes
that instruct cells to produce serotonin in response
to cues of high rank.
Sulloway’s theory is a parallel idea. The family, he
reckons, contains a series of different niches. The
first born’s niche is to align himself with the parents
and dominate his younger siblings; the younger child’s
niche is to differentiate himself from the eldest by
experimenting, diverging and rebelling. Sulloway
does not choose to recognise how close he comes to
echoing economists on this point, but I think the
resemblance of their arguments is remarkable.
Ever since Adam Smith, economists have empha-
sised the role that the division of labour plays in cre-
ating prosperity: the more divided labour is, the more
wealth a society can generate—because each person
specialising in his own task will produce more than
if he has to be self-sufficient in everything. Although
many of them do not know this, that is why econo-
mists like markets and global free trade. The greater
the market, the greater the division of labour it
allows. I argue in my new book The Origins of Virtue
(published in October by Viking) that so important
have divisions of labour been in human history and
prehistory that they have left their imprint on our
developmental strategies. Unlike virtually all other
species, we do not try to be good at everything our
species does. From an early age, human beings
become specialists in what they find they are good at:
tennis playing, mending cars, telling jokes, poring
over figures—we can in retrospect discern our own
speciality from the age of ten or even less. We hone
our skills at what we excel in and neglect our skills
in other areas—knowing we can buy such services
from others. We find our niche.
Sulloway is saying the same about families. Each
individual seeks an empty niche. For eldest children
this means the orthodox route, for younger children
it means searching more heterodox routes. Differen-
tiation is the goal.
How do Sulloway’s ideas mesh with Freud’s? Sig-
mund Freud clearly believed that family dynamics
were vitally important in determining personality,
but he emphasised more the dynamics between par-
ents and offspring than between siblings. He also
placed far too much emphasis on the juvenile libido.
None the less, stripped of its placebo quackery and
self-fulfilling prophecies, psychoanalysis is right to
go back to childhood in search of formative influ-

ences. Character and temperament are formed in the
competition between brothers and sisters to find a
suitable niche.
Sulloway stresses that a family is not a single
environment. It is a very different environment for a
child spending its formative years as the eldest and a
child spending its formative years as the youngest.
We all know this, as people and especially as siblings,
but we seem to forget it when we turn into histori-
ans or sociologists. We argue that a person’s class,
wealth and forebears make a difference to their per-
sonality, but omit their birth order.
Sulloway admits of only one factor that consis-
tently seems to mitigate the effect of birth order:
shyness. Shy people show less of the stereotype of
their birth rank. Shy elder children lack the confi-
dence and inflexibility of the tribe. Shy younger chil-
dren lack the rebelliousness and openness of theirs.
In Sulloway’s sample of scientists, all shy people
were just as likely to support revolutionary ideas,
irrespective of their birth order. The reason is that
temperament “is drafted into the service of sibling
strategies.” Our personalities are formed by a combi-
nation of innate temperament and family niche.
At this point, Sulloway is stretching the limits of
his method and samples, and risking attack from
more orthodox psychologists. The most powerful
test of any theory in something as mushy as the sci-
ence of personality is whether exceptions prove the
rule or not. There are plenty of exceptions to Sul-
loway’s thesis: elder sons who joined revolutions or
younger ones who reacted to them. Some of them
remain troubling, such as Martin Luther, an elder
child. Sulloway’s explanation for Luther is not very
convincing: he was in an area favourable to reform
and a member of the lower clergy, which generally
favoured reform. Likewise, Sulloway excuses first-
born Francis Crick and Jim Watson on the grounds
that their discovery of the structure of DNA was a
“technical breakthrough” rather than a radical revo-
lution. Perhaps, but it sounds like special pleading.
Other exceptions do seem to prove the rule, how-
ever. The Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, a leader of
the counter-Reformation, was a younger child reared
as a first born with a younger sister. He did not meet
his elder brother until his teens so he was in effect
psychologically an elder child; reactionary authori-
tarianism came naturally to him. Johannes Kepler, a
radical eldest child, had a terrible relationship with
his parents and especially his vicious and eventually
deserting father. So too did Mao Tse-tung. Conflict
with parents, Sulloway argues, breaks the pattern
and usually radicalises eldest children.
Exceptions aside, some of the cases that do fit the
rule are impressive. Voltaire’s elder brother was
pious, priggish and conventional, a striking contrast
to Voltaire. Moreover, the effect of birth order can
perhaps be cumulative. Darwin was a younger child
ESSAY R I D L E Y
for four generations in a row. The three most promi-
nent evolutionists of the late 18th century and early
19th century, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Erasmus Dar-
win and Etienne Geoffroy St Hilaire, had 27 elder
siblings between them. Benjamin Franklin, 15th of
17 children, was indentured at the age of 12 to a vio-
lent brother’s business before running away to
Philadelphia. Somehow, don’t you just know that
Franklin was a younger child?
If younger-childness is cumulative, then something
bizarre seems to happen to eldest children who are
radical. They have a habit of turning violent as they
marry their radicalism
(often, says Sulloway, in- CHARACTER AND
herited from later-born
parents) to their authorita- TEMPERAMENT ARE
rianism. It is no surprise FORMED IN THE
to find that Stalin, Musso- COMPETITION
lini and Carlos the Jackal BETWEEN SIBLINGS
were first borns. Hitler
was his mother’s oldest TO FIND A NICHE
child, but had two older
half-siblings, the youngest six years his senior. From
the age of seven, he was the oldest child in the house
in a family of three. He was, as a child, an expert in
getting his own way.
To test Sulloway’s theory, I went to Debrett’s
Distinguished People of Today and looked up six
prominent Tories of the 1980s, predicting correctly
the birth order of the three I did not know. Mar-
garet Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Nicholas Ridley,
radicals to the end, were second children. Douglas
Hurd, Ian Gilmour and Geoffrey Howe, conserva-
tives all, were eldest sons. How much of the political
revolution of the 1980s do we owe to Miss Muriel
Roberts bullying her younger sibling in Grantham
in the 1920s? It is an interesting thought, to say the
least. Margaret Thatcher was exceptional in one
respect. Younger children are generally too rebel-
lious to thrive in politics. American presidents and
British prime ministers, such as Franklin Roosevelt
and Winston Churchill, have been disproportion-
ately first born.
History is littered with contingency and con-
founding factors. It would be as absurd to turn Sul-
loway’s idea into a creed as it demonstrably was to
turn Marxist and Freudian ideas into creeds. If it
catches on, though, that will probably be its fate and
soon there will be legions of Sullowayists, all elder
children, inflexibly and dogmatically defending their
untarnished hero’s idea as the central and overarch-
ing theme of all sociology. Sulloway himself, of
course, is a later-born child.
I instinctively like Sulloway’s theory, but then as a
third child, I suppose I would. Some people I have
discussed it with automatically dismiss it with little
thought. I suspect they are mostly first borns. Psy-
chology, unlike physics, is plagued by subjectivity. ■
PROSPECT November 1996 7
 THE PLACE OF GENES
DNA may explain everything from sexual orientation to the egg-laying of parasitic
wasps—or it may not. Steven Rose and Lewis Wolpert discuss the
reductionist approach to science and the importance of genes in biolog y and life
30th October 1997
DEAR LEWIS,
You and I have fenced over one of
the central questions in biology—
and indeed life—for many years
now. It may be instructive to try to
set out our differences more sys-
tematically. The question is how
best to understand and explain liv-
ing processes, in particular the role
of genes within these processes.
You, in common with many molec-
ular biologists, are content to place
DNA and its replication at life’s cen-
tre. My book, Lifelines, is an attempt
to rebut the claims of this genetic
imperialism which, I contend, deri-
ves from mistaken metaphysics, mis-
understands the nature of living
processes and encourages poten-
tially pernicious claims about genes
for everything from violence on the
streets to sexual orientation, drug
addiction and compulsive shopping.
But let’s leave outcomes to one side
for a moment and confront two
issues: the limits of this reduction-
ism and the meaning of genes.
Reductionism is a portmanteau
word, but its thrust is summed up
by James Watson, co-discoverer of
the DNA structure: “There is only
one science: physics; everything else
is social work.” That is, the task of
science is to explain complex prop-
erties—such as cells, minds or soci-
eties—in terms of their component
elements, which will ultimately ren-
der unnecessary any “higher level”
explanations. By contrast, I argue
that there is a hierarchy of organi-
sation of matter which grows
increasingly complex; at each level,
new principles of organisation
emerge which are not reducible to
“lower” levels. Thus, temperature is
a property of a collection of mole-
cules, not a single one; living cells
possess a structural order and sta-
bility which can be explained not in
terms of component molecules
alone, but in terms of organising
8 PROSPECT December 1997
relations between them; genes can-
not be “selfish”; memory is a prop-
erty of the interacting network of
nerve cells which compose
brains/minds, not of individual
nerve cells; violence is a social
process, not the property of an indi-
vidual within a society.
Reductionism converts dynamic
GENETIC IMPERIALISM
MISUNDERSTANDS
LIVING PROCESSES
AND ENCOURAGES
PREJUDICE
STEVEN ROSE
processes into static properties and
structure into composition. Its me-
thods may describe a living system,
but they cannot explain it. Biologi-
cal explanation takes many forms.
To explain why a frog jumps into a
lake, we may invoke a causal chain
running from visual information
arriving at the retina, travelling to
the brain and on to motor nerves
which trigger muscular contraction
in the frog’s legs. We may say that
the frog jumps to avoid being eaten
by a snake. We may also say that it
jumps because of the protein fila-
ments, actin and myosin, in its leg
muscles and their capacity to slide
across one another. Each explana-
tion is legitimate and self-contained;
none can be eliminated in favour of
one true causal description. We live
in one world, but there are many
ways of knowing.
The genetic determinist claim is
that the goal of living organisms
is the replication of their genetic
material—organisms exist as DNA’s
way of making copies of itself. Fur-
ther, that DNA forms a “blueprint”
which development processes pas-
sively follow, albeit in some measure
modified by the environment in
which this development occurs.
DNA explains everything from the
egg-laying of the parasitic wasp to
the heroism of fire-fighters risking
their lives to rescue people from
burning buildings.
Such genetic imperialism fails,
not only because it ignores the
validity of other types of biological
explanation, but also because, even
in its own terms, it magnifies the
role of a single molecule within the
self-organising homeodynamic life
processes. Organisms have four di-
mensions: three of space and one of
time. DNA is a one-dimensional
inert molecule. Far from being self-
replicating, it requires an entire cel-
lular orchestra of enzymes, ions and
so on to order the synthesis of pro-
teins on which all life depends. Dur-
ing this protein synthesis, DNA se-
quences are shuffled, carved into
sections and reinterpreted to meet
cellular needs in such a way that the
route from a single piece of DNA—
once regarded as “a gene”—is mul-
tiply determined. You cannot read
the four dimensions of life from the
one dimension of DNA. Organisms
are not merely created on instruc-
tion from their DNA or by selection
in their environments, rather they
construct themselves. This makes
the future, of individuals and
species, radically indeterminate. It
is our biology, then, that makes us
free, though in circumstances not of
our own choosing.
Over to you,
STEVEN ROSE

1st November 1997
DEAR STEVEN,
Your characterisation of reduction-
ism is misleading. James Watson’s
dictum that everything that is not
physics is mere social work, and that
biologists should try and explain
their phenomena in terms of
physics, is not a view which the
great majority of reductionist biol-
ogists would accept. It is not even
a view that physicists would agree
to. However, we would all accept the
fundamental reductionist idea that
all phenomena in the universe are
controlled by one set of fundamen-
tal physical laws. (I cannot believe
that you would disagree.) But that
is not the same as wanting to
explain everything in terms of
physics. As you rightly say, there
are different levels of organisa-
tion—this has long been recognised
by biologists. The reductionist
approach is to try and account
for the phenomena at one level in
terms of the properties of the com-
ponents on the next level down. It
is unnecessary to go down to fur-
ther levels, but there must be noth-
ing in one’s explanations that con-
tradicts laws that hold at lower
levels—such as the laws of physics.
The trick is to find the right level at
which to explain the phenomena—
no one would attempt to deal with
economics in terms of the behaviour
of molecules.
The language of cells is, as
Sydney Brenner once put it, mole-
cules. Cells are extremely compli-
cated organisms. But our progress
in understanding their behaviour
has been astonishing. We know that
the way to understand cell pro-
perties is to understand which pro-
teins are present in the cell and how
they interact with each other and
other molecules. For instance, we
can now understand muscle con-
traction in terms of the interaction
between the proteins myosin and
S T E V E N RO SE VS LEWIS WO LPERT
actin—the head of the myosin
exerts an active force by moving
back and forth when it binds to the
actin molecule. We do not really
need to understand this in terms of
chemistry unless we want to. It is,
I have to admit, largely a matter of
aesthetic and scientific judgement
as to which approach will give you
ALL GOOD SCIENCE IS
REDUCTIONIST
BECAUSE IT ISOLATES
THE KEY ELEMENTS
FOR EXPERIMENT
LEWIS WOLPERT
a satisfactory explanation.
I take exception to your claim
that reductionism converts dynamic
processes into static properties.
Please give me a good example. The
conduction of the nerve impulse, so
elegantly explained in terms of ion
movements across the cell mem-
brane, is one of a host of counter-
examples. Would you deny that this
is both reductionist and dynamic?
And what about the way that cells
break down food molecules to gen-
erate energy—are not those flow
diagrams dynamic, and is that not
pure and beautiful reductionism?
I cannot understand your hostil-
ity to genes. The development of the
embryo is determined by the behav-
iour of its cells—a reductionist posi-
tion in itself. The behaviour of the
OPINIONS D E B AT E
cells is in turn largely determined
by which proteins are present and
how they interact. Which proteins
are present is determined by the
genetic information in the cells—
the DNA. Genes are turned on and
off during development, and so the
proteins, for which they provide the
code, are made or not made. They
are not a blueprint, but the pro-
gramme for development. The dif-
ference in development between all
animals lies in the genes. Genes are
the controlling elements. This is not
to say that the machinery they con-
trol is not in itself complex. You
really must distinguish between the
two. The machinery of your com-
puter is complex—but this does not
mean that you do not control what
you type and print.
I do not know what you are talk-
ing about when you introduce seem-
ingly mystical concepts such as
“self-organising homeodynamic life
processes.” We do not need them,
because we actually have an extre-
mely good understanding of the
principles which govern the embry-
onic development of organisms at
the cell and molecular levels. The
early development of the insect
embryo—the system we understand
best—is a cascade of gene actions.
So too is the development of a struc-
ture like the limb; the gene products
control pattern and form.
All good science is essentially
reductionist because it isolates the
key components and makes experi-
ments possible.The enemy of reduc-
tionism and science is holism.
Regards,
LEWIS WOLPERT
4th November 1997
DEAR LEWIS,
Let us agree, first, that no property
or process in complex systems con-
tradicts the principles of physics,
chemistry and so on; second, that
there are many, equally appropriate
PROSPECT December 1997 9
ways of explaining biological phe-
nomena; third, that reductionist
methods and explanations can be
perfectly legitimate, within limits;
and finally, that we are always inter-
ested in finding the right level at
which to explain.
But what is the right level? You
say it is the one you feel most com-
fortable with—a somewhat individ-
ualistic position, as your preference
is presumably determined by phi-
losophy, history and social context
(or would you say genes?). This
brings you close to those social con-
structionists whose views on science
you deplore. A mere matter of opin-
ion or aesthetics? Surely not. If your
right level is different, for personal
reasons, from that of a chemist or a
physicist, you really have no
grounds to dismiss Jim Watson—
who is after all a molecular biolo-
gist—in such a cavalier manner. I
don’t think that the right level is to
explain alcoholism in Russia or vio-
lence in the US in terms of the mol-
ecular genetics of individual “alco-
holic” or “aggressive” persons—yet
significant funding is put into
research programmes working
along these lines. This, incidentally,
is precisely what I mean by con-
verting a process—social violence,
for example—into a property, a
lump of aggressive biochemistry
inside an individual.
As for genes, of course I am not
“hostile”; how could any biologist
be? What I am hostile to is the
quasi-religious view which you
espouse when you describe genes as
first causes and unmoved movers, a
philosophical position which locates
you somewhere in the
17th century. Genes in
their place, as I explain
in Lifelines, means
dynamic portions of
DNA participating in the orches-
trated metabolism of the cell. Mol-
ecules—including those of DNA—
may be the language of the cell, but
understanding the meaning of that
language requires knowing the his-
tory and culture in which it is
embedded. That, for individual
organisms, evolving species and—
above all—humans, is what homeo-
dynamics is all about.
Affectionately,
STEVEN
10 PROSPECT December 1997
YOUR QUASI-
RELIGIOUS VIEW
OF GENES PLACES YOU
SOMEWHERE IN
THE 17TH CENTURY
STEVEN ROSE
5th November 1997
DEAR STEVEN,
No, I cannot agree with all you sug-
gest. There are not many equally
appropriate ways of describing bio-
logical phenomena. There is just
one way to understand, for example,
how proteins are synthesised, and
that is in terms of the molecules and
their interactions. Tell me, please,
another one. (You seem to be remar-
kably reticent in giving examples to
back up your claims.) You say reduc-
tionist explanations are alright
within limits—such as? And why
should I not dismiss Watson: he was
not really talking about how one
practises science or reductionism,
merely praising physics as underly-
ing everything.
But at last you have come clean
about what you object to regarding
genes. It really relates to your prej-
udices about human behaviour. You
seem unable to tolerate the idea that
much of our behaviour is genetically
determined. This is not a philo-
sophical or political issue, it is a sci-
entific one. Either intelligence is
determined by a large genetic com-
ponent or it is not. One has to try to
find out. Your political prejudices
make it hard for you to accept
research into this, or into the pos-
sible genetic bases of criminality or
homosexuality. Your homeodynam-
ics appear to me like a political man-
ifesto. And while your motivation
may be noble because you think that
such research can be used for what
you see as unacceptable social pol-
icy, that is politics and has nothing
to do with reductionism. Moreover,
all knowledge can be put to bad
use—just think of fire.
I smell a relativist in your re-
marks about needing to understand
science in its cultural context. Do
you seriously believe that science is
just a social construct and that there
are other ways of describing cell
behaviour from a different cultural
standpoint? Nonsense. Genes are
the controlling elements; this has
nothing to do with mystical ideas
such as prime movers. Dawkins’ con-
cept of selfish genes is excellent and
enables us to make sense of nume-
rous complex aspects of biology, not
least altruism. You should approve.
Regards—and not really hoping to per-
suade you,
LEWIS
5th November 1997
DEAR LEWIS,
You are backing away from points
which I thought we had agreed on.
I used the behavioural example
because it flowed from our discus-
sion, but “politics” and “preju-
dices”—either yours or mine—are
absolutely not the issue. What is at
stake is the nature and purpose of
explanation in biology and how
we conceive of living processes. Nor
do I believe that science is “just” a
social construct, although I cer-
tainly do not think that our scien-
tific explanations are free of cultural
preferences any more than you do,
with your references to which
types of explanation make you feel
“comfortable.” For instance, your
assumption about the need to find
out whether intelligence is or is not
“determined by a large genetic
element” presupposes that it is
possible to quantify intelligence
along a linear scale and measure it
by IQ. I do not agree with either of
these presuppositions—nor, actu-
ally, do many neuroscientists. Of
course we all accept that brain pro-
cesses are necessary for intelligent
behaviour and that genes help shape
brain processes.
So to your protein example. If we
want to know the molecular steps
by which the amino acid sequence of
proteins is built up from its individ-
ual molecular building blocks, we
need explanations on the biochem-
ical level, in terms of enzymes and
coding sequences (derived, of
course, from sequences of DNA).
This is a “within level” explanation.
If we want to know why these syn-
thetic mechanisms take the form
they do, we need to understand first
the chemistry of amino acids and
proteins, as well as details of their
physico-chemical interactions and

constraints (the reductionist level),
but also the evolutionary steps
which have led both to the enzymic
mechanisms concerned and to the
cellular requirement for this partic-
ular protein (among the squillions
of other possible combinations). If
we want to know why this particu-
lar protein and not one of these oth-
ers is produced at any particular tis-
sue and time in the life of the
organism and the cell, we have to
ask what part the protein plays in
the overall cellular economy. That
question cannot be answered from a
knowledge of the molecular mech-
anisms of protein synthesis alone. It
is of a different order, but it is, you
must agree, as interesting and
important a question to biologists
because it is one which you and I, in
different contexts, have spent part
of our own research careers trying
to answer.
Yours ever,
STEVEN
7th November 1997
DEAR STEVEN,
When we talk about cells you seem
to be a reductionist just like the rest
of us, even going so far as to wish to
explain molecular interactions in
terms of chemistry. But there is one
EITHER INTELLIGENCE
IS DETERMINED
BY A SIGNIFICANT
GENETIC COMPONENT
OR IT IS NOT
LEWIS WOLPERT
point where I cannot go along with
you. I know it has been said that
nothing in biology makes sense
unless it is related to evolution.
However, your insistence that we
need always to understand the evo-
lutionary origin of process seems
unnecessary to me. We can talk
about—and understand—cellular
mechanisms without understanding
their evolutionary origins. This is
particularly true in medicine when
we want to understand the origin of
a disease. We can try to unravel the
molecular mechanisms of, say, Aids,
without an evolutionary perspec-
tive. Our area of disagreement
remains, in fact, in the problem of
human behaviour. To talk about the
process of intelligent thinking is not
to reify it. I do not think that you
would deny that some people are
better at maths than others, and that
OPINIONS D E B AT E
some are very gifted. It seems log-
ical to ask to what extent such dif-
ferences are caused by genetic or
other factors. Intelligence is difficult
to measure, but that should not stop
us trying to do so—provided that
we recognise the limitations of our
research. The evidence for a genetic
contribution to what we think of as
general intelligence is now over-
whelming. But I must admit that an
illness such as depression does raise
for me some difficult reductionist
problems. I still do not
know what I would regard
as a satisfactory explana-
tion, or at what level of
organisation I would look
for it. It is not easy to sort out the
relation between the biological
processes in the brain and the psy-
chological ones. It may be necessary
to link, for example, the emotions
associated with depression with the
action of serotonin on complex net-
works of neurons in the brain. At
the moment we cannot even easily
explain the behaviour of quite sim-
ple neural networks in reductionist
terms. However, in the end a reduc-
tionist explanation will remain the
most satisfactory.
Regards,
LEWIS
 Waste is good





by Geoffrey Miller






Evolutionists used to be puzzled by the wastefulness of the peacock’s tail.
Now they believe that almost everything in nature that we find beautiful
or impressive has been shaped by wasteful sexual display. Sexual display also
lies at the root of culture, consciousness and modern consumerism
of Sennheiser’s range is the
A
T THE TOP
“Orpheus Set,” stereo headphones which
retail for £9,652. They are finely
crafted headphones, no doubt. But to
most ears, they deliver a sound quality
not greatly superior to a pair of £25 Vivanco
SR250s, which have received several “best value”
awards. As an evolutionary psychologist considering
contemporary human culture, I wonder this: why
would evolution produce a species of anthropoid ape
that feels it simply must have the Sennheisers, when
the Vivancos would stimulate its ears just as well?
The standard Darwinian account of consumerism
is that natural selection shaped us to have certain
preferences and desires which free markets fulfil by
providing various goods and services. For example,
sugars were rare and nutritionally valuable in Pleis-
tocene Africa, so we evolved a taste for sweets, which
chocolate and cola manufacturers now fulfil—or per-
haps exploit. This theory can explain many features
of many products, and seems to give the Darwinian
seal of approval to free-market consumerism.
However, this theory of evolved preferences can’t
explain the Sennheiser effect. The nominal function
of stereo headphones is to deliver a private sound-
scape, an acoustic virtual reality. We might expect
headphones to be judged and priced in proportion to
their sound quality. But they are not. The marketing
people at Sennheiser know that Orpheus Sets are
bought mainly by rich men, young or middle-aged,
who are on the mating market, openly or tacitly.
Their 400-times greater cost than the Vivancos is a
courtship premium. While the Vivancos are merely
This is the winning entry for the Vivus Essay Prize.
Vivus has awarded £5,000 for the best essay on any
aspect of sex. Geoffrey Miller is the author of “Courting
Minds” (Heinemann, forthcoming)
12 PROSPECT February 1999
good headphones, the Sennheisers are peacock’s tails
and nightingale’s songs. Buyers of many top-of-the-
range products understand that their price is a bene-
fit, not a cost. It keeps poorer buyers from owning the
product, thereby making it a reliable indicator of a
possessor’s wealth and taste. We want Sennheisers
not for the sounds they make in our heads, but for the
impressions they make in the heads of others.
Thorstein Veblen understood all this a century
ago, with his theory of conspicuous consumption,
outlined in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Yet
Veblen’s sociological insight did not connect in any
obvious way with natural science. This missing link
can now been made via a branch of evolutionary biol-
ogy called sexual selection theory.
From this biological viewpoint, consumerism is
what happens when a smart ape, evolved for sexual
self-promotion, attains the ability to transform the
raw material of nature into a network of sexual sig-
nals and status displays. It transmutes a world made
of quarks into a world of tiny, unconscious courtship
acts—every signal becomes sexual. Yet most sexual
signals go unrecognised and unreciprocated. The
result is the phenomenon we call modern civilisation,
with its glory and progress, to be sure, but also with
its colossal waste and incalculable alienation. The
alienation of the modern consumer, the disappoint-
ment that sets in when the Sennheisers fail to deliver
what they promise (not good sounds, but good mates)
is not new. It may simply represent a deeper alien-
ation of our selves from our sexual displays.
UNDERSTANDING CONSUMERISM REQUIRES under-
standing a little bit about the evolutionary process of
sexual selection. Sexual selection is basically what
happens when sexually-reproducing animals pick
their sexual partners according to criteria which are
consistent across generations. Darwin first realised
that if peahens consistently prefer to mate with pea-
cocks which have tails brighter and longer than aver-

age, then peacock tails must evolve to be ever
brighter and longer over evolutionary time. Peacock
genes, no matter how useful for survival, can only
make it into the next generation if they are carried in
peacock bodies with long, bright tails. Thus, sexual
selection can be even more powerful than selection
for survival itself. Evolution is driven not just by sur-
vival of the fittest, but reproduction of the sexiest.
Many sexually-selected traits, such as peacock
ILLUSTRATION: MICK BROWNFIELD
tails, whale songs and male human aggressiveness,
are so costly in time, energy and risk, that they
severely reduce survival chances, but evolved, none
the less, for their reproductive benefits. Until
recently, biologists assumed that these costs of sexu-
ally-selected traits were incidental to their courtship
function. But Israeli biologist Amotz Zahavi has
been winning many converts to his view that these
costs are an adaptive feature rather than a maladap-
ESSAY/ MILLER
tive fault of sexual signals. His book, The Handicap
Principle (1997), argues that sexually-selected traits,
such as peacock tails, must be costly handicaps in
order to be reliable indicators of an animal’s fitness as
a potential mate and parent.
Zahavi’s “handicap principle” identifies a tension
between natural selection (for survival) and sexual
selection (for attracting mates), and waste is at the
heart of that tension. Waste in sexual displays guar-
antees that there will be some correlation between
survival ability and reproductive success. On the one
hand, waste is the bridge between natural and sexual
selection: only the healthiest peacocks can develop
big tails. But it is also the chasm between them: the
tail’s wastefulness, its uselessness for survival, is pre-
cisely what makes it a sexual trait.
Zahavi’s logic is the same as Veblen’s conspicuous
consumption. If big, bright, peacock tails were cheap
to grow, easy to maintain and light to carry around,
any old peacock could sport one, no matter how
unhealthy, hungry or parasite-ridden he was. The
tails would carry no information about peacock qual-
ity if they carried no increased costs. In Zahavi’s view,
the real reason why peacock tails are so big, bright,
heavy and cumbersome, is that only very healthy, fit,
strong, well-fed peacocks can afford such tails. Because
very fit peacocks tend to have fit sons and daughters
which are more likely to survive and reproduce, pea-
hens benefit by choosing big-tailed peacocks. Peahens
which preferred shorter-than-average tails did not
leave many descendants, because their offspring were
less fit than average. Large peacock tails, like luxury
Sennheiser headphones, are specifically designed not
to be affordable by every individual. So, sexual selec-
tion favours both the preference for costly sexual dis-
plays, and the displays themselves.
THE HANDICAP PRINCIPLE suggests that prodigious
waste is a necessary feature of sexual courtship. A
clever peahen who read Veblen would understand
that peacocks as a species would be better off if they
didn’t have to waste so much energy growing big
tails (which are useless for survival). But as individual
males and females, they have irresistible incentives to
grow the biggest tails they can afford, or to choose
sexual partners with the biggest tails they can attract
(in order to ensure mating success). In nature, showy
waste is the only guarantee of truth in advertising.
Conspicuous consumption is the modern human
analogue of the peacock’s tail: a handicap that reveals
quality by wasting resources. Consumerism is a sort
of ritualisation of conspicuous consumption, where
people display their wealth and taste by owning
widely recognised products of well-known cost.
Advertising based on image, as opposed to product
features, attempts to create a sexual-signalling niche
for each such product. This requires demonstrating a
three-way relationship between product, potential
consumer, and pool of potential mates appreciating
the act of consumption. The cola advert must show
the cola, the cola-buyer and the cola-buyer-watcher.
It must pretend that it is already common knowledge
that drinking the cola is cool, in order for the cola to
qualify as an effective sexual signal. The advertising
must lift the product from unrecognised thing to
consensual object of desire.
The difficulties in comprehending this leap of faith
are similar to the difficulties that evolutionary biolo-
gists had, for over a century, in understanding how
peacock’s tails could evolve. Logically, there seems
nowhere for the process to get off the ground. If pea-
hens didn’t already prefer long bright tails, why
should males evolve them? But if males didn’t already
have long bright tails, why should females prefer
them? Likewise, if women don’t already prefer men
who drive Porsches, why should any men buy
Porsches? But if no men drive Porsches, why should
women develop any preference for Porsche-drivers?
The history of sexual selection theory is the story of
how biologists solved this chicken-and-egg problem.
Details aside, the answer is that evolution does it
gradually, through continuous escalation of both
mate preferences (analogous to consumer tastes) and
courtship traits (analogous to product quality).
Yet the cultural evolution of products as sexual
signals need not follow the same gradual dynamics as
the genetic evolution of peacock tails. Mass advertis-
ing can jump-start the process by showing fake men
(actors) driving not-yet-available Porsches, and fake
women winking at them. The whole signalling sys-
tem based on the product can be posited, all at once, in
the virtual reality of advertising before a single prod-
uct is sold or a single sexual prospect is impressed.
When we buy a product because of image-based
advertising, we buy into a sexual signalling system.
But it is a hypothetical system, not a real one. It was
invented by a few advertising executives for a client’s
profits. It was not evolved over millions of years by
our ancestors to improve their children’s fitness. This
can create problems. Gullible people may act as if the
hypothetical signal system had already been accepted
as real. They may spend more time displaying virtual
signals (advertised products) than real, biologically
validated signals (wit, creativity, kindness). They may
become frustrated when their virtual signals are
ignored, and may increase their shopping rather than
improve their character. The result can be pathologi-
cal, a runaway consumerism in which an individual
gets lost in a semiotic wilderness, searching for sex-
ual signalling systems in all the wrong places.
This analysis raises another fundamental question:
what is the link between biological fitness and mone-
tary wealth in modern societies? Clearly, one’s ability
to buy things is a reliable indicator of one’s wealth,
but is wealth a reliable indicator of fitness? Politically,
the right has posited a tight relationship between
14 PROSPECT February 1999
monetary wealth and biological fitness, and the left
has denied such a link. The right views money as
liquid fitness, accumulated by virtue of innate, herita-
ble biological abilities such as intelligence and ambi-
tion, and translated into manifest symbols of success.
The left puts money in a domain of culture, class and
history supposedly divorced from biology. Scientifi-
cally, the relationship between wealth and fitness
remains unresolved. The right cites the high correla-
tion between intelligence and wealth, and the strong
contribution of genetics to intelligence. The left
points out that according to the standard biological
measure of fitness—number of offspring—the rich
and bright do not show higher fitness than the poor
or the uneducated; indeed, it is often the opposite. So
perhaps consumerism derives from sexual-display
instincts which evolved under earlier, more polyga-
mous, conditions.
AS WE HAVE seen, one problem with consumerism is
that advertising can raise unrealistic expectations
about the sexual signalling power of products.
Another problem is that even the most effective sig-
nals cannot improve everyone’s mating success. Sex-
ual competition is a zero-sum game. Some individuals
attract good mates; others don’t. Heartbreak is
inevitable, given that human mating requires mutual
consent, and given that people differ markedly in
physical, mental and social attractiveness. Not every
man can command a harem of 5,000 like the first
emperor of China. Not every woman can cycle
through eight husbands like Elizabeth Taylor.
Yet, if the costs of sending sexual signals become
very high, a society’s mating system can become a
negative-sum game, costing everyone more time,
money, effort and risk. Two generations ago, Japan-
ese couples did not bother with buying engagement
rings. Then the De Beers diamond cartel, through an
advertising campaign in the 1970s, convinced Japan-
ese women that they deserved a ring just like western
women. A new standard was imposed: Japanese men
must spend at least two months’ salary on a colour-
less lump of carbon to demonstrate their romantic
commitment. Japanese marriages are probably no
happier than a generation ago, but De Beers is richer.
In thousands of such cases, consumerism leads to
costlier signals of wealth, more taxing signals of
taste and riskier signals of physical courage. They are
endless treadmills of personal mating effort, often
without social benefit. Sexual competition is one
domain where improved technology does not usually
improve average human welfare.
The sexual-signalling imperatives of consumer-
ism introduce another form of waste: they give con-
sumers little incentive to get good value for their
money. Britain seems strangely comfortable with its
oligopolies, cartels and retail-price-maintenance
agreements. These artificially inflate the price of cars,

clothes, books and consumer electronics by up to 50
per cent above their prices in the US. If the point of
buying a Porsche is to get a good A-to-B machine for
the money, these cartels seem pathological. But if the
point is to advertise one’s wealth and status, it does
not much matter how the prices are set. As long as
the prices are common knowledge in the mating mar-
ket, each car model reliably signals the owner’s
wealth level. In sexual signalling, price differences
are much more important than absolute prices. But in
human welfare terms, the reverse is true. Sexual sig-
nalling undermines economic efficiency. Marketing
products as courtship gifts gives businesses and gov-
ernments great power over the buyers of those prod-
ucts, because it makes consumer activism look like
the economic equivalent of erectile dysfunction. Only
those who can’t afford them complain about the
unfairness of the prices and the taxes.
As one moves from courtship gifts to more prag-
matic consumption, prices drop, profits fall and free-
market competitiveness takes hold. Cultures differ in
the boundaries they draw between courtship goods
and ordinary goods. Yet
every culture retains a core
of courtship products or lux- The hidden irony of
ury goods with which people
fall in love, conspicuously
environmentalism is that
casting aside their roles as biodiversity and consumerism
rational economic agents.
Humans are unusual have the same root
because both men and
women buy these courtship products. In most
species, especially most mammals, conspicuous sex-
ual display is a male activity. The traditional biologi-
cal view can explain why men buy bespoke suits,
sports cars and country houses, but not why any
women would ever love to shop. However, biologists
are adding some nuances to Darwin’s view of the
active male courting the passive female. New
research reveals that male animals of many species
are choosier about their sexual partners than Darwin
suspected, and females of many species have evolved
their own versions of wasteful sexual display. The
female baboon’s bright red genital swelling serves
the same function as the peacock’s tail. In our species,
sexual choice is mutual and sexual display is mutual,
so both sexes can be seen at the January sales.
VEBLEN’S BIOGRAPHERS often argue that his contempt
for conspicuous consumption reflects the frugality of
his Norwegian ancestors encountering America’s
Gilded Age. Sub-Arctic, subsistence protestantism
meets Boston, bourgeois luxury—and shakes its head
in disapproval. Veblen claimed that he used “waste” as
a neutral term, but his indignation at consumerist
signalling shows through every example he analyses.
Must we follow his moral crusade against waste?
Evolutionary theorists did so for many decades
ESSAY/ MILLER
and, until recently, it kept them from understanding
sexual selection. Veblen’s peak was Darwin’s trough.
By 1900, sexual selection theory was viewed as Dar-
win’s worst blunder. Then, in the 1930s, the biolo-
gists of the Modern Synthesis combined Darwinian
selection theory and Mendelian genetics. The great
synthesisers such as Julian Huxley, Ernst Mayr and
JBS Haldane recognised that sexual selection could
produce extravagant, wasteful signals, but they did
not approve of such profligacy. They thought that it
was bad for the species, bad for evolutionary progress
and generally pathological. Their disdain for the bio-
logical waste of courtship was identical to Veblen’s
disdain for the cultural waste of consumerism. They
revived natural selection, but left sexual selection to
rot for another 50 years. Even when Zahavi first pro-
posed his “handicap principle” more than two decades
ago, biologists couldn’t believe that nature could
favour such wasteful signalling.
Like Veblen, most evolutionary biologists em-
braced a machine aesthetic that celebrated efficiency,
good engineering and form following function.
Veblen shared HG Wells’s
vision of a technocratic
utopia run by enlightened
engineers, from which all
traces of conspicuous sig-
nalling and invidious com-
parison were eradicated. But
the revival of sexual selection
has changed all that. Many
evolutionists now recognise that almost everything in
nature which we find beautiful or impressive has been
shaped for wasteful display, not for pragmatic effi-
ciency. Flowers, fruits, butterfly wings, bowerbird
nests, nightingale songs, mandrill faces, elephant
tusks, elk antlers, humpback whale songs, firefly
lights, fiddler crab claws, lion manes, swordfish tails
and human language have all been shaped by sexual
selection. Waste can be fun. Sexual signalling can be
sublime. Evolution for invidious comparison can be
creative rather than pathological. Modern evolution-
ists have become more comfortable in celebrating
wasteful signalling.
In fact, because each sexu-
ally-reproducing species can be
viewed as a different sexual sig-
nalling system, the proliferation
of these systems is what creates
biodiversity itself. Without so
many varieties of waste, our
planet would not host so many
species. There may be a hidden
irony in an environmentalism
which worships biodiversity but
despises consumerism: what if
both result from the same imp-
eratives of sexual signalling?
PROSPECT February 1999 15
CONTRA VEBLEN, CONSUMERIST waste has some over-
looked benefits. Courtship products bought in a
money-based economy have unusual features which
make them less wasteful than most sexual signals.
First, being material objects, they last longer than
the courtship dances, songs and ritual combats
of most species. Once our species started using mate-
rial culture for sexual display, we could accumulate
and even inherit large numbers of objects that
improve not just our status, but our quality of life.
Consumer durables such as houses, cars and appli-
ances, acquired partially for sexual display, stick
around long after courtship ends.
More importantly, consumerism entails a social
circulation of value rather than a solo act of waste.
Compare the peacock’s tail to a Porsche. Both are
expensive to their displayer. But when the peacock
pays the growth and maintenance costs of his tail, he
doesn’t transfer any value to any other member of his
species. He simply burns the energy, and the energy
is gone. By contrast, when the Porsche-buyer pays
for the car, he transfers money to the seller, who
transfers some to the manufacturer, and hence to the
manufacturer’s employees and shareholders. The
only real waste in the production of the Porsche is
whatever extra steel, leather, fuel, labour and human
ingenuity goes into its production compared to an
ordinary car. Its price premium is not waste in any
broader social sense, because the price is transferred
to others within society.
This is an important effect. Ever since the automa-
tion of agriculture and manufacturing, an increasing
number of us have been employed, directly or indi-
rectly, to produce wasteful consumerist displays for
other people. If an asexual species invented automa-
tion, most of them would lose their jobs permanently.
They would have no domain of waste to soak up the
material surplus their technology gives them. In our
sexual species, the demand for wasteful sexual displays
is unbounded, so we need never fear mass permanent
unemployment, as long as consumerism persists.
Consumerism redistributes not just money, but
status. Advertising posits products as sexual signals,
but the product-buyers are not the only people to
benefit from a product’s sexual status. The status
trickles out in all directions, along the entire chain of
production and consumption. Porsche advertises.
Buyers of new Porsches reap the status benefits of
that advertising. But so do Porsche salesmen,
Porsche executives, Porsche factory workers, Porsche
shareholders, Porsche mechanics, receivers of gift
Porsches, and buyers and inheritors of used Porsches.
Although a physical product can only be owned by
one individual, its sexual status value can be enjoyed
by anyone associated with its production, financing,
marketing or consumption. In this sense, con-
sumerism automatically redistributes sexual status
from the wealthy to the suppliers of their status. This
16 PROSPECT February 1999
lends consumerism an egalitarian aspect utterly alien
to sexual competition in most species.
This more positive attitude towards wasteful sig-
nalling may be good for the scientific analysis of
waste, but is it the best attitude for fostering sustain-
able human societies? Surprisingly, biology suggests
that the answer may be yes. All sexually-reproducing
animals face a trade-off between courtship effort and
parenting effort. The more time and energy you
waste on showing how sexy you are, the less time and
energy you have for raising offspring.
The same trade-off seems to hold for humans.
With the industrial revolution, urbanisation and the
rapid increase in consumerism came the demo-
graphic transition: a dramatic reduction in numbers
of children. Sexual competition intensified so much
that the products of sexual reproduction were
delayed. Consumerism is soaking up the time and
energy that our ancestors used to devote to having
large families. Instead of spending our 20s taking
care of our first six toddlers, as our ancestors would
have done, we spend our 20s acquiring a university
education, launching our careers, buying stuff, going
to movies, taking vacations and worrying about sta-
tus. Conspicuous consumption or conspicuous chil-
dren, it is difficult to attend to both.
A well-intentioned, Veblenesque reduction in the
waste of sexual signalling might reverse the demo-
graphic transition and create a population explosion.
People like to keep busy. If a state decided to eliminate
conspicuous consumption by outlawing luxury
goods, costly entertainment, status differences
between occupations and so on, people might just
marry younger and pump out more offspring. In fact,
eliminating conspicuous consumption and other
forms of wasteful sexual signalling would mean elim-
inating most of what we consider to be human cul-
ture. It would roll back the evolutionary clock a
couple of million years, trying to recreate an Aus-
tralopithecine lifestyle of small-brained primates
bored to death, and surrounded by babies.
It is not difficult for evolution to achieve mere sus-
tainability. Trilobites flourished for hundreds of mil-
lions of years, enjoying their low-consumption, low-
waste, sexually unsophisticated lifestyle. They were a
model of Veblenesque rationality and efficiency. But
waste is what makes things interesting.
For at least a million years, our species has been
engaged in a great evolutionary experiment: to
explore the wonderland of wasteful sexual signalling.
An increasing number of evolutionary psychologists
believe that many aspects of the human mind were
shaped by sexual selection. In my view, language, art,
music, humour and clothing were the first of our new
wasteful signals to evolve. Other varieties of sexual
waste—religion, philosophy, literature—followed.
The last century has seen a dramatic increase in a
new form of sexual waste: conspicuous consumption,

which translates a primordial logic of how to show off
from biology to technology. This brings some prob-
lems, as we have seen. We may too easily forget our
innate biological capacities for display—language,
creativity, intelligence. We may rely too much on
Sennheisers. But perhaps our critiques of consumer-
ism go too far when they condemn waste in general,
as Veblen did. Sexual waste is what made our species
what it is. We are creatures of waste, evolved to burn
off our time, our energy, our very lives to show
that we can do so better than our sexual competitors.
The human brain, that most expensively wasteful
organ, that ultimate biological luxury, is our original
bonfire of the vanities.
Human consciousness itself may have evolved
partly through sexual selection as a sort of wasteful
display. Suppose, during the evolution of language,
that our ancestors chose mates who were better able
to articulate a wider range of perceptions and con-
cepts. That new criterion of mate choice would dra-
matically speed up the development of language and
consciousness. Such a process would not make the
mindless principles of sexual
signalling any more rational,
or conscious. But rather than There is a trade-off between
consciousness evolving as a
neutral executive that co- conspicuous consumption
ordinates our behaviour and
experiences, it may have
and conspicuous children. It is
evolved as a showpiece, an difficult to attend to both
amusement park designed to
entertain others. Full of
sound and fury, it may signify nothing more than our
biological fitness, to those who consider merging
their genes with ours.
If used vigorously and frequently, the mind often
delivers the courtship effects it evolved to produce. It
impresses potential mates with facts, memories,
hopes, ambitions, sensitivities, tastes, empathies
and—perhaps its greatest trick—the illusion of
boundless, authentic, conscious subjectivity. To work
this courtship magic, the mind convinces us that we
have an authentic, conscious subjectivity, and that the
contents of our consciousness are uniquely worth
communicating to others.
The human body is a patchwork of traits evolved
for survival (legs, lungs, teeth) and traits evolved for
sexual attraction (breasts, buttocks, beards, penises,
lips). But human consciousness may have evolved as
pure display, like a peacock’s tail which needs no pea-
cock body as its anchor. Perhaps human conscious-
ness evolved to have exactly the forms and functions
required for effective courtship. Perhaps the most
intimate parts of our minds evolved through our most
intimate relationships. In short, consciousness may
be a product rather than a factory, a wasteful status
symbol perfectly adapted to its consumers by sexual
selection, evolution’s ingenious marketing department.
ESSAY/ MILLER
WHERE DOES THIS leave those of us who value the life
of the mind? Perhaps equating ourselves with our
vain, babbling, concept-spewing consciousness is no
more authentic a lifestyle than identifying with an
expensive, well-advertised possession. Intellectual-
ism and consumerism may be equally alienated
modes of existence, if over-identification with one’s
sexual signals counts as alienation.
This seems especially true of intellectualism in
the style of the New York Review of Books,
wherein acquaintance with a few big names (Freud,
Nietzsche, Foucault, Bellow, Kristeva, Sontag,
Borges) suffices to display membership in a cultural
elite. These names have become the debased coinage
in the libidinal economy of the bespectacled.
Their ideas become mere gambits for coffee-house
courtship. Europe’s cultural icons are conveniently
packaged as American products. Their only distinc-
tion is that they are marketed by New York
book reviewers and essayists rather than New
York advertising firms, and their acquisition cost is
a university education rather than a price in
dollars. Intellectual alien-
ation no longer has any roots
in the existentialism of
Dostoevsky, Kafka or Sartre.
It has become the same
alienation felt by any other
consumer buying products
as sexual signals. And intel-
lectual debate, too often, is
carried out with the same
bombast as lunching bond-dealers debating the
merits of Mercedes versus Porsche, or the Sey-
chelles versus Mauritius: signallers signalling their
signals are best.
Perhaps it was always thus. Philosophy originated
in sophistry, competitive public displays of prowess in
reasoning and arguing. Universities were founded to
teach dead languages, useless rituals, and a nodding
acquaintance with Aristotle to a leisured class of
priests. As Veblen noted, an English degree from
Oxford was the premier badge of conspicuous leisure
for centuries. Only with the
rise of science have the intel-
lectual varieties of wasteful
display achieved any cogni-
tive link to reality or any
pragmatic link to social
progress. Most intellectual
display throughout history
may have been waste in
Veblen’s sense. Yet those
human achievements and
insights we most value would
never have been produced
without our sexual instincts
for waste. ■
PROSPECT February 1999 17
SPECIAL REPORT:
THE UNIVERSE
IS SAVAGE
by Oliver Morton
The author’s next
book is “Mapping
Mars” (St Martin’s
Press, forthcoming)
HIGH ABOVE THE earth’s atmosphere, in one of
Nasa’s most expensive spacecraft, sit eight crys-
tal discs of sodium iodide. Now and then they
are lit with the faintest of glows. The cause is
a sudden surge of gamma rays—electromag-
netic radiation like that which makes up visible
light, but of shorter wavelength—sleeting
through the spacecraft. Within seconds, if all
works according to plan, news of the gamma
rays’ passage bounces back down to Earth and
on to the internet, so that other telescopes can
seek out the rays’ source. To astrophysicists,
the source of such gamma-ray bursts is one of
the most enticing questions around.
For most of the earth’s other inhabitants,
gamma-ray bursts are a subject of only pass-
ing interest. As far as astronomy goes, the
public finds the search for new abodes of life
far more interesting than the peculiar emana-
tions of distant stars and galaxies. Following
the inconclusive suggestion of fossils in a
Martian meteorite and the discovery of ever
more, ever stranger, planetary systems
ILLUSTRATION: PETER CROWTHER
around nearby stars, the possibility of life else-
where is reasserting itself as a central theme
in the exploration of space, and gamma-ray
astronomy seems remote from these “astrobi-
ological” concerns. But, as we shall see, there
is a disturbing link between these two fields.
Gamma-ray bursts were discovered in the
1960s, when satellites looking for nuclear tests
started to see them regularly. They were a
surprise; unrelated to any objects or events that
18 PROSPECT January 2000
Every year there are at least
500 gamma-ray bursts in the
universe. They destroy everything
within a few hundred light years
of the source. What do these
extraordinary explosions mean for
intelligent life in the cosmos?
could be seen in any other wavelengths. Some
thought they came from inside our galaxy, the
result of disturbances on the surfaces of the
dense neutron stars into which some old mas-
sive stars collapse. Others thought that they
occurred further afield.
The Compton Observatory—the spacecraft
which carries those gently glowing crystals—
has ended this debate. Its detectors pick up
almost one a day, and it is estimated that they
miss one third of all gamma-ray bursts
because of the way the earth blocks the sky.
All told, there are some 500-600 gamma-ray
bursts a year. With this much data, it has been
possible to look for any patterns that they
make on the sky. If they came from old stars in
the galaxy it would be reasonable to expect
them to cluster in the galaxy’s central plane.
They don’t. The sources are scattered evenly
across the sky, and it is now accepted that they
can be found in distant galaxies.
The extreme distance—many millions of
light years—thus imputed to the bursts means
that their sources must be phenomenally
bright, briefly outshining all the hundreds of
billions of stars with which they share their
galaxies. Only by converting a star’s worth of
mass into pure energy in a very short time can
such fireworks be produced. Today’s theories
suggest that gamma-ray bursts represent not
the hiccuping of neutron stars, but their near
total destruction. Expert opinion is split as to
the precise nature of these catastrophes; they
could be collisions between neutron stars, or
the destruction of neutron stars by black
holes, or the creation of black holes through
the collapse of massive normal stars.
Such extravagance is best seen from afar.
Anything in the same solar system, or its near
neighbours, would be singed to a crisp. Even
many hundreds or thousands of light years
away, a gamma-ray burst could have a pro-
found effect on a planet. It would destroy any
ozone layer which the planet might have, and
convert hitherto stable atomic nuclei into
radioactive ones. Cosmic radiation which came
in its wake would add to the atmospheric dam-
age and might produce secondary showers of
radiation which could kill organisms living at
the surface—although those living deep below
the surface and in the oceans might survive.

IS THE EARTH SAFE?
We don’t know at what range such effects
might prove capable of wiping life from a
planet’s surface. One hundred light years seems
hazardous; 10,000 light years seems reasonably
safe. Suggestions that gamma-ray bursts might
destroy earth-like biospheres throughout an
entire galaxy—that is to say, across ranges of
100,000 light years—seem unduly pessimistic.
From the point of view of the earth, none of
this is a great cause for concern. With only
500-600 detectable gamma-ray bursts a year in
the observable universe, the rate of bursts in a
typical galaxy such as ours must be low (per-
haps once every 10m or 100m years). None
the less, the earth has, in all likelihood, shared
its galaxy with a fair few such bursts in the
half a billion years since multicellular life
evolved—and it is still here to tell (or, rather,
discover) the tale.
The fossil record shows that there have
been five mass extinctions during the past half
a billion years. While one of these is clearly
linked to the impact of a medium-sized asteroid
or comet, a nearby gamma-ray burst might
have caused one or more of the others.
Even if there has never been a gamma-ray
burst close enough to harm the earth, this does
not mean that there will never be one. Pairs of
neutron stars in orbit around each other have
been observed in our vicinity, and these orbits
are not stable. In the end the pirouetting part-
ners will meet; such meetings are thought to
produce black holes and give off gamma-ray
bursts in the process. In the case of the nearest
known pair of neutron stars, the pulsar PSR
B1534+12 and its companion, this coalescence
will take place in more than a billion years. If it
were to take place today, with the neutron stars
at their current distance from the earth of a few
thousand light years, the gamma rays from this
cataclysm would deliver an energy equivalent
to the yield of all the earth’s nuclear arsenals
into our upper atmosphere. While the sun deli-
vers a similar amount of energy every half hour
or so, such an influx of rays could still have a
serious effect. By the time PSR B1534+12 and
its companion meet, they will probably be
much more distant from the sun than they are
today—stars move a long way in a billion years.
But there is no guarantee that another such
pair may not pull into view in the meantime.
At some point in the planet’s future, a
gamma-ray burst will have some effect on the
earth. Since the chances of that point arriving
in the near future are very low, this need not
concern us all that much (a civilisation-
destroying meteor is much more likely). But
while planets may, on average, be spared from
the gamma-ray bursts for long periods of
time, every day some of them do fall victim to
the fires. If a gamma-ray burst’s deadly effects
SPECIAL REPORT/ MORTON
have a range of a few hundred light years, mil-
lions of planets could be affected by each
burst. The bursts might thus represent
spasms of destruction far greater in their
reach than single planet mass-extinctions.
Thus one of the first truths of astrobiology: if
life is common in the universe, so is its cata-
strophic disruption on huge scales.
The extinction of something you have
never seen might not matter much. Few weep
for all the species wiped out at the end of the
Permian period, 245m years ago—why worry
about extinctions even further removed from
us in space than the Permian is in time? One
difference might be if the extinctions involved
intelligent life. To astrobiologists, any life
beyond the earth would be of huge excite-
ment; but for most people it is the possibility
of intelligent life, not interesting lichens, that
feeds our curiosity. It is a possibility about
which almost nothing can be said for certain.
We have a limited understanding of how intel-
ligent life developed on earth, but not of how
likely that happening was—or of whether the
three and a half billion years it took should be
considered laggardly or precocious.
THE GREAT SILENCE
Intelligent life from elsewhere appears not to
have visited the earth while we have been in a
position to take note. This causes some of us
to worry. Enrico Fermi, the great physicist,
calculated the time it would take for life capa-
ble of travelling between stars to fill up a
galaxy and found that the answer was surpris-
ingly short: 100m years or so. “Where are
they?” he asked. This question is still unan-
swered. Not only have aliens—as far as we can
tell—failed to visit the earth; they aren’t even
trying to attract our attention from a distance.
Attempts to pick up intelligent signals have so
far failed to turn up anything at all, although
to be fair, we have not looked terribly hard.
Many explanations for this “Fermi Paradox,”
sometimes known as “The Great Silence,”
have been suggested, both in the academic lit-
erature and in science fiction. It may be that
most intelligent lifeforms find more interest-
ing things to do than to travel between stars
or expand their populations. It may be that they
frown on contact with the newly technologi-
cal. It may be that most intelligent species are
sea-dwellers, not land-dwellers, and thus do
not develop technology based on combustion,
without which an interest in space travel seems
unlikely. (This may, indeed, be the case on earth,
say those with a soft spot for whales.) It may be
that there simply is no one else out there.
Gamma-ray bursts have been called into
the great-silence debate by James Annis, a
physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory. He suggests that a gamma-ray
PROSPECT January 2000 19
SPECIAL REPORT/ MORTON
burst may be capable of wiping out land-based
higher life forms on all the planets of all the
stars of the galaxy in which it occurs. If the
frequency of gamma-ray bursts across the uni-
verse used to be higher than it is today—a
reasonable but unconfirmed assumption—and
if it takes about 300m years to go from com-
plex land-living organisms to technological
intelligence (which it did on earth)—then, up
until now, most land-based biospheres would
have been wiped out by gamma-ray bursts
before intelligence could emerge. Gamma-
ray-burst-free opportunities long enough to
allow the evolution of intelligence are only
now becoming available as the rate of bursting
drops. This, Annis suggests, would explain
the great silence: humanity may simply be one
of the first species to benefit from enough un-
irradiated time to get smart. Within a short
while, cosmically speaking, more creatures like
us will have evolved all over the now more
peaceable and more permissive universe. The
era of intelligence would finally dawn, with
humanity in the vanguard.
This is not wholly convincing. The earth
seems to shrug off mass extinctions reasonably
well, bouncing back, in a few tens of millions
of years at most, with living creatures just as
complex as their predecessors. Mass extinctions
have never set the clock back to zero here, so
why should they elsewhere? Indeed, by allow-
ing fresh starts on a regular basis, they might
open up new opportunities for the evolution of
intelligence. For Annis’s idea to convince,
gamma-ray-burst mass extinctions would have
to be much more complete than any of the
extinctions observed in the fossil record.
But by linking gamma-ray bursts to extra-
terrestrial intelligence, Annis does bring to
mind a sobering thought. When we profess an
interest in extraterrestrial civilisations, we are
looking for one nearby. A message from a
civilisation in another galaxy, or on the other
side of this one, would be of great interest,
but the fact that information cannot travel
faster than the speed of light would mean that
it could not be expected to dev-elop into a
conversation. Others reaching out to us could
not be answered or questioned if separated
© WWW.CARTOONSTOCK.COM
20 PROSPECT January 2000
from us by thousands or millions of light
years—distances equivalent to the lifespans of
whole civilisations, even species.
“Conversational” contact with extraterres-
trial intelligence requires that the interlocu-
tors be within 100 light years or so of each
other. Even that may be stretching things.
Anything further away than the old age of our
grandchildren seems far off to most of us.
Scientific questions are rendered moot more
quickly than that; basic human questions we
think of as timeless may well be unanswerable
or even unintelligible to basically inhuman
interlocutors. But, still, an answer received
today to a question posed a couple of centuries
ago might be interesting. And institutions for
talking and listening across the gulf could
survive for hundreds, even thousands, of years.
The Vatican has.
But if conversations are to occur even at
these slow speeds, we will need to find intelli-
gence within a few hundred light years of the
sun. There is no reason to think that this is
impossible. However, if there is another civili-
sation within that sort of range of the solar sys-
tem, then it is a fair assumption—based on sim-
ple probability—that there is such a civilisation
within a few hundred light years of any other
solar system in any other galaxy. So if there is
an extraterrestrial civilisation close enough to
us to be interesting, we have to expect that, on
average, there will also be such a civilisation
dangerously close to every one of the gamma-
ray bursts which the Compton Observatory
detects. At a range of 100 light years or so, we
have to assume that these civilisations are
severely disrupted and often wiped out by the
cataclysms. Some civilisations may span many
star systems and thus weather the storm; some
may avail themselves of early warning systems,
burrow deep, store things well and survive.
Ours, though, would be in no position to do
either, and we must assume that at least some
of the others are just as ill-prepared.
In his classic short story, The Star (see p42),
Arthur C Clarke describes the crisis of faith
experienced by a Jesuit astrophysicist exa-
mining the remains of a civilisation a bit more
than 2,000 light years from earth, a civilisation
destroyed when its sun exploded. The more he
sees of the ruins, the graver his doubts
become. The picture of gamma-ray bursts that
the Compton Observatory is producing is not
as affecting as the situation in Clarke’s story.
But it does present us with a melancholy
choice. We must either acknowledge that
there is little likelihood of ever contacting
other thinking, feeling beings close enough to
converse with, or accept that every day, when
the Compton detectors glow, there is a good
chance that a far-off civilisation has been con-
sumed by fire. The universe is savage. ■
roundtable
THE MEANING
OF THE
GENOME
Are we on the brink of great
medical breakthroughs? Is the
patent issue a problem? What can
genetics tell us about human
behaviour? Are the sceptics just
“full of social science crap”?
GEOFF MULGAN: Jim Watson, as one of the people most
responsible for the development of modern genetics,
how do you think history will rank the importance of
the Human Genome Project?
JAMES D WATSON: Having the human instruction book is
a seminal moment in history. We can read the ins-
tructions [the genotype] which lead to the develop-
ment and functioning of our bodies [the phenotype].
STEVEN ROSE: I am uneasy about this metaphor of the
instruction book. It doesn’t capture the way genes
interact with each other or with other components of
the cell. The implication of the instruction metaphor
is that the rest of the cell is simply there to carry out
the demands of the genes. This misses the dynamic in
which control of cellular processes is vested in the
cell as a whole, not just in one of its parts.
JW: So what else is the instruction book?
SR: It’s not that something else is the instruction book.
JW: You underestimate what’s been achieved. When
we began, in 1944, no one dreamed we’d get this far.
Now we have the code script: it’s a language written
in four letters, and we have the book (see page 27).
ROBERT PLOMIN: As a user, I think it will be very valu-
able at a basic science level. Of course there are many
questions about how we interpret these lists of letters,
but it’s a momentous occasion.
STEVE JONES: This is one of those rare things: a break-
through. But what we do with it is not particularly a
question for scientists.
NANCY CARTWRIGHT: I agree. We can’t progress without
knowing what the science is, so you scientists have to
be at the table. But scientists by themselves aren’t in
22 PROSPECT October 2000
a good position to judge how science will be handled
when it gets out into society. For that we need the
help of social scientists.
GM: Who should own this body of knowledge? With-
out a patent system which allows organisations to
benefit from their own inventions, there would be little
incentive to do scientific research for economic gain.
But the argument is that the genome is public prop-
erty—it needs a different structure of ownership.
SR: The argument against patenting the genome is
that it exists in nature—it is not an invention.
PETER GOODFELLOW: I am in favour of the patenting sys-
tem but I find it very confusing that, for example, if I
create a new variety of plant I am not allowed to
patent it, whereas if I invent a new paperclip, I can.
SJ: There is a consensus—with some noisy dissenters—
that there should be open access to this knowledge for
the scientific community. Most scientists are shocked
to find that it’s being hijacked. As Steven Rose says,
the distinction is between an invention—which
should be patentable—and a discovery—which
should not. Some people who want to patent DNA
are evading this distinction; they even try to patent
sequences of DNA without knowing what they do.
PG: There are two issues. The first is: do we have to
change the law? The second is: is the law we have
being applied? Successful patents must pass three
tests: the invention must be novel, useful and non-
obvious. These things can be shown in court.
SJ: Speaking as someone who has had patents infringed,
may I just say that testing the law is expensive. Keeping
a patent alive can cost hundreds of thousands of dol-
lars a year. This means that money will win in the end.
And that is what is happening.
SR: The US patent office has been making the running
on this. The US authorities are allowing too many
things to be patented, and many Europeans have been
dragged in directions they didn’t want to go.
JW: Because of the political implications of the
genome, I would have been happier with a system of
obligatory licensing rather than patenting. So, for
example, whoever discovered the breast cancer gene
would get a royalty licence, but not a monopoly on
the right to develop a breast cancer test. Likewise,
licensing could apply to all the genes which are tar-
gets for drug discovery, giving a 1 or 2 per cent roy-
alty—not affecting the price of drugs much, but pro-
viding some reward for the discovery. In retrospect, I
regret not raising the patent issue at the start, but I
suspect that no one would have listened until we got
into the mess we’re in now. I don’t think we are going
to get licensing. We will get a mixed bag of patents.
People are getting patents without having done a
single experiment; but patents should have to be
non-obvious. In the US, Harold Varmus and Francis
Collins have gone several times to the patent office to
argue for a more restrictive approach to patenting,
but they have been disregarded. That offends me.
 ROUNDTABLE/ G E N E T I C S

PG: But the courts can sort out a misuse of patents.
JW: The trouble is that what is obvious to a judge is
not obvious to a DNA technician. There is a lot of
apprehension around. Some people who want to use
DNA knowledge are put off by the patent thing.
GM: Let’s move on to genetic medicine. So far, rela-
tively few techniques or products have come on to the
market. But are we on the brink of a flood? And what
are the implications for our health services?
PG: Healthcare is a very regulated environment. To
get a new medicine on the market we are talking
about cycle times of ten, 15, or 20 years, so the eupho-
ria several years ago about DNA cloning [which
allowed the expression of proteins in a test tube
which could be used as drugs] is only now producing
results. It will be at least ten years before medicine is
significantly affected by discoveries taking place now.
SJ: Do you include diagnostic medicine in that?
PG: For the monogenic diseases [diseases caused by
inheriting a single gene defect] there is already an
enormous impact. You can identify individuals who
are at risk of passing on such destinies, or identify
people who have inherited such destinies. In Britain,
but not in the US, this is regarded as a boon,
the incidence of cystic fibrosis.
PG: If you look at families with a history of cystic
fibrosis, screening is happening, and every family in
Britain which is at risk of Huntington’s disease has
been offered a test.
SJ: They’ve mostly turned it down. But people are,
actually, quite rational about this. On something like
Huntington’s, which is a late onset illness about
which nothing can be done, what is the point of
knowing? But on something like colon cancer, which
if diagnosed early enough can greatly increase your
chances of survival, most people accept the test.
PG: Looking beyond the monogenic diseases to the
wider morbidity and mortality issues, you start to get
into a more difficult scientific and cultural area. If you
go to your doctor and he takes your blood pressure
and it is high, or if he takes a sample of your blood
and it shows that you have very high levels of choles-
terol, then you are at greatly increased risk from a
variety of unpleasant diseases. Genetic testing for
these diseases will be rather similar—the result is not
your destiny, but it is indicating a particular risk.
RP: But this is where the genome project will be most
valuable. We didn’t need the gene sequence to find

PHOTOGRAPHS: LAI CHUNG

because it enables families to decide whether or not
they want to have another child afflicted by a partic-
ular genetic disease.
JW: Yesterday I was talking to Middlesex medical stu-
dents. I asked whether any of them had been screened
for cystic fibrosis. No one put up a hand. I don’t think
that what we have learned so far is having an effect on
most monogenic disorders. But it’s with the complex
disorders, involving many genes with small effect,
that the gene map and especially the SNP map [sin-
gle nucleotide polymorphisms, which reveal the
DNA variations among people] will be most valu-
able. But first you need the sequence, before you can
start talking about the variations.

“So far there “I now regret “We are not “Nothing is not “We can still “We need social “Genetic
have been few not raising going to see significantly tell more about scientists to medicine will
medical the patent issue designer babies. heritable, a person’s investigate the give us tools to
breakthroughs at an earlier That is beyond including destiny from implications of significantly
from genetics” stage” our competence” intelligence” their postcode” the genome” reduce suffering”

GEOFF MULGAN JAMES D WATSON STEVEN ROSE ROBERT PLOMIN STEVE JONES NANCY CARTWRIGHT PETER GOODFELLOW
works at the co-discovered the is professor of biology is professor at the is professor of is professor of is a senior scientist at
No 10 Policy Unit structure of DNA at the Open University Institute of Psychiatry genetics at UCL philosophy at the LSE SmithKline Beecham
GM: Some people predict that soon we will all be
screened in detail for our genetic predispositions, pro-
viding employers, insurance companies and so on,
with far greater potential knowledge about our fate.
SJ: We can already predict very accurately people’s
fate from one piece of information relative to their
birth: their postcode. There is an 11-year difference
in longevity between babies born in the richest and
the poorest postcodes in Britain. We know that and
we cope with it. It’s unfair, but we cope with it. And I
don’t actually see that multigenic genetics is going to
make much difference. Take heart disease. You can
make a better prediction about the likelihood of heart
disease from a cholesterol test than from a huge
screening for the many genes which have been found
to predispose for heart disease. So it may be that this
great map, telling us all our predispositions from our
DNA, may be a bit too optimistic.
SR: Yes, people have stopped being so optimistic about
gene therapy [the process of implanting a new gene
sequence to replace a faulty one]. Talk now is much
more about pharmacogenetics—looking at how
genes determine your response to different drugs.
Take blood pressure: at least three different
classes of drugs can be used to treat hyper-
tension, and we don’t know which one is The metaphor eral environment, so genetics is used as a
going to be effective on which person. The of the genome sort of forgiveness for certain behaviour:
argument is that if you know the polymor-
phism [the genetic variation between peo- as instruction “he
ple], you can predict which of those drugs book is
is the most appropriate.
PG: This comes down to whether we will be
misleading
able to use genetic information to get a bet-
ter definition of disease, and thus a better STEVEN ROSE
treatment. My fear is that, in many cases, it might
just be too complex.
RP: I think that the scepticism which some of you have
expressed is unjustified. In most cases of illness
or disability, we are talking about lots of genes
with very small effects. So I agree that it’s going to be
very difficult to pin down causes—there won’t neces-
sarily be many new drugs. But in terms of diagnosis
and prevention, there are potentially big—and hope-
ful—consequences from the new knowledge. Take
reading disability, or many other developmental
disorders. If you wait until children have such prob-
lems and their worlds start falling apart, it’s harder
to do anything about it. This applies to obesity and
alcoholism, too.
NC: If you could detect a dyslexic child in the womb,
what would you do that we don’t do now?
RP: The first point, which we didn’t know ten years
ago, is that dyslexia is highly heritable. If you didn’t
know that, you might think it’s something the parents
had done, and you’d be on the wrong track.
SR: You don’t need the sequence to know that.
RP: But we can do better than that. There is a specific
chromosomal region [6p21] linked to dyslexia in half
24 PROSPECT October 2000
a dozen studies. We don’t have the gene itself yet, but
it is one of the linkages which seems to be holding up
best. There will probably be lots of such genes—
many with very small effects. But, assuming you
could get enough of those genes to make a prediction,
it would be useful to be able to predict that a child is
going to be reading-disabled if we allow the normal
course of events to take place.
SR: I would simply reduce class sizes.
SJ: But Robert has a point. Take the alpha one antit-
rypsin enzyme deficiency in the lung. If you have a
rare form of this and you smoke, you will die horribly
at 40. In Sweden, now, they screen all children for this
at birth, and the incidence of teenage smoking among
those at risk is less than half the rate of those who do
not carry the gene. So we’re being too self-critical to
say that the new knowledge will have little effect.
GM: So much for medicine. But what can the new
genetic science tell us about genetic predispositions
towards certain kinds of behaviour?
SJ: I think most of us around this table have set exam
questions on that question and, with one or two
exceptions, it is almost impossible to answer. Genet-
ics is often used to reinforce existing preju-
dices. At the moment we live in a rather lib-
was born that way.” But it could swing
back the other way. The most dangerous
word in genetics is the word “for.” The
gene for this, the gene for that. It has a very
limited meaning. It has a meaning, but it
means much less than the word “for,” in gen-
eral parlance, because genes and environ-
ments work in consort. You can cure many genetic
diseases by changing the environment.
RP: We may not find specific genes responsible for
specific behaviours, but over the last 20 years we’ve
gone from thinking that, say, most mental illness or
reading disability or autism is environmental, to see-
ing them as genetic. I think that’s a dramatic dev-
elopment. Quantitative genetics consistently points
to substantial genetic influence—so much so that I
think the way forward in research is not to continue
demonstrating heritability, but to roll up our sleeves
and find some of the genes responsible for this
genetic influence. We are not looking for a single
gene which is wholly responsible for a disorder or a
behavioural predisposition. We may be looking for
many genes which have very small effects—perhaps
even less than 1 per cent.
JW: I think that 1 per cent is unlikely. I think we’re
looking for effects of 10 per cent and 20 per cent.
RP: Not for mental disorders. My bet is that, as a rule,
we won’t find any genes with effects as significant as
1 per cent. But there may be single genes which in a
very small number of people have a significant effect.
GM: So, how far are we from being able to shape the

genetic inheritance of a child, not just screening out
the various negatives?
SR: We are not going to see designer babies or breed-
ing for higher intelligence or for baseball skills or
whatever. That is beyond the competence of science,
and it’s also beyond the power of genes.
PG: But we can discover the sex of a child very early.
And we can check for monogenic diseases.
GM: So the rather unpleasant prospect is: ever more
sophisticated negative screening, plus abortions.
JW: Why unpleasant? It’s better than having a child
suffering from a serious genetic disease.
PG: Or a child you don’t want. About 95 per cent of all
abortions are carried out for purely social reasons.
SJ: There are tens of millions of abortions worldwide
each year, and if we accept that, then why not use our
genetic knowledge?
JW: I think it’s wonderful that we can diagnose a
Down’s syndrome child early and offer the choice of
aborting or not.
PG: If you allow people to have abortions for social
reasons, how can other reasons, based on genetics, be
judged any less acceptable?
JW: I think very few women will do it, but if
they want to, I wouldn’t prevent them.
GM: You would set no limits at all?
We allow
JW: No limits. Parents should decide. abortions for
SJ: In Britain the general public is more
willing to accept selective termination than
social reasons, laid
professional geneticists are. One survey so why not for genetic basis of behavioural differences
found that something like a quarter of genetic reasons? between the sexes—the fact that men pre-
British parents would accept a termination
for a foetus which has two missing fingers. PETER GOODFELLOW
NC: The views around this table about what
we should do about aborting foetuses with blue eyes
or Down’s syndrome are irrelevant. What we need is
a mechanism for taking these decisions in a serious
and informed way. At present, the decisions are taken
in a haphazard way.
JW: Do you want a committee of wise women like
yourself telling other women what to do? You want a
pseudo-consensus which, in practice, takes the deci-
sion away from individual parents.
NC: I want a serious study and a serious public discussion.
JW: You mean: more social science crap.
NC: More social science information. I think it is too
bad that biologists find social science so hard that
they fall back on taking decisions in an uninformed
manner, based on loose, abstract, moral ideals, with-
out a clue about what would really happen if a partic-
ular proposal were to be adopted.
GM: As a summary, would it be fair to say that what
has been learnt in the last few decades about genetics
has confirmed powerful views on difference between
sexes, destroyed any notions of difference between
the races, and said almost nothing about class?
RP: I am a behavioural geneticist, which means that I
focus on individual differences within groups. We
ROUNDTABLE/ G E N E T I C S
don’t have very good tools for determining the differ-
ences between group averages—even between the
genders. You can say it’s the X chromosome, but it’s
very difficult to pin down what is the genetic source
of difference between genders. Between class and
race it’s very difficult, too. Even if you had a bit of
DNA in a different frequency in two populations, how
do you prove that that difference is responsible for the
physical or behavioural differences you observe? By
contrast, we have very powerful approaches to
understanding individual differences within groups.
SJ: There is a tendency to rediscover the blindingly
obvious in a lot of behaviour genetics. The reason that
men are more violent than women, which is observ-
ably true, has something to do with the fact that men
have a Y chromosome and lots of testosterone. That
doesn’t seem to me a shocking or illiberal thing to
say. It is a genetic statement of difference between
sexes. But it’s also obvious that the levels of violence
within societies and between societies have got noth-
ing to do with genes. We are much less likely to find
biological differences between races, simply because
the genetic distances among them are so small.
SR: There is a tension here between the evo-
lutionary psychologists and the behaviour
geneticists. Evolutionary psychologists say
that there are human universals which were
down in the pleistocene epoch. They
claim, for example, to have established the
fer younger women, that younger women
prefer older and richer men, and so on.
JW: I don’t see what evolutionary psychol-
ogy has to do to with it. We know you don’t like it…
SJ: Evolutionary psychologists have a science of simi-
larity, of human universals. But as geneticists we are
interested in the science of difference. Why is human
A not like human B? But there is an interesting prob-
lem here which is seldom acknowledged. Evolution is
a comparative science, but when you come to things
which are human, nearly everything about being
human—as far as we can tell—is unique.
GM: When people see teenage delinquency or violent
crime, they increasingly look for a genetic or evolu-
tionary explanation rather than a social or historical
one. Are we saying that they will be disappointed 99
per cent of the time?
RP: No, I think people are right to have a greater
awareness of genetic causes, but I am still amazed at
how many people, even educated people, do not apply
it to their own lives. For example, several of my
yuppie friends are (a) infertile, (b) thinking about
adoption, and yet (c) not thinking about heritability.
At some level they still cling to the idea that tender
loving care is the only factor in raising kids. But some
of these friends, who have adopted, have been disap-
pointed to find their child is of only average intelli-
PROSPECT October 2000 25
gence—which in these families means almost
retarded. Genetic and evolutionary explanations are
accepted in theory at species level, but at the level of
how people live, they have not been taken on board.
GM: But, given the normal distributions of character-
istics of any kind, if you become a parent, whether
biological or not, you accept a randomness about
what your child will be like.
JW: No, I think we generally assume that more intelli-
gent parents have more intelligent children.
GM: But with wide variations.
JW: If you marry a stupid girl your children may dis-
appoint you.
NC: I want to go back to this question of the evolution-
ary psychologists. Some of you seemed sceptical.
JW: I’m not, I am one.
NC: But I want to ask you, Robert, the behaviour
geneticist, what kinds of things your studies show us.
Where are your success stories?
RP: My favourite story is autism. In the late 1970s
there was a review by geneticists which said:
“Well, here’s one disorder which doesn’t seem to
show any evidence of genetic influence,” but there
hadn’t actually been any good studies at
that point. Subsequently, Michael Rutter We are
compared identical twins [who are like
clones], to non-identical twins [who only frightening
share half of their genes]. He found that people off from in thinking about them. But I agree with
the identical twins were about 60 per cent
concordant; that is, if one is autistic, the the genetic
chance that the other is autistic is about knowledge
60 per cent. By contrast, the concordance
for non-identical twins was only about JAMES D WATSON
5 per cent.
NC: But autism is easier to describe in these terms
than, say, a behavioural characteristic such as aggres-
sion.
RP: The truth is we have found nothing which is not
significantly heritable, including intelligence, which
most geneticists say is about 50 per cent heritable.
PG: Everything has to do with both DNA and the envi-
ronment, unless you believe in God.
RP: Social scientists didn’t believe that in the 1960s.
JW: There still seem to be people around who believe
that it’s all due to the environment. I remember, a few
years ago, you, Steven Rose, saying that most of
schizophrenia is due to rampant capitalism.
SR: That’s absolutely not what I said.
JW: Everyone applauded because you were pandering
to their prejudices.
SR: I have never said anything as nonsensical as that
in my whole life. What I have said is that the diagno-
sis of schizophrenia is complicated and that the
genetic arguments so far have not held up. Some peo-
ple at Robert’s Institute of Psychiatry, such as Robin
Murray, argue that schizophrenia is disappearing.
SJ: What about velocardial facial syndrome [a dele-
tion of part of a chromosome, which gives a sweep of
26 PROSPECT October 2000
symptoms that can look like paranoid schizophre-
nia]? How can you deny that genes are involved?
SR: Who is denying that genes are involved? I’m not.
JW: You indicated that they were quite unimportant.
Incidentally, what is the concordance in schizophre-
nia in identical twins?
RP: It’s about 50 per cent.
GM: Some of you may have read Ronald Dworkin on
how genetic science dislocates the boundary between
chance and choice, which is the spine of our morality.
Is there a problem here?
SJ: I have faith in the public’s ability to get bored.
They are already getting bored: “Genetics, well, isn’t
that a bit 20th century?” It will be assimilated into the
corpus of knowledge and experience in the way that
medicine, or cars, or television, were. It won’t make
much difference to the way we live, or to our morals.
GM: Or to our commonsense ideas about personal
responsibility for behaviour?
JW: The main moral dilemmas are to do with the addi-
tional knowledge about disease and the hard choices
with which our knowledge will present us.
SR: The most sensitive areas are behaviour genetics
and the whole terrain of so-called smart
drugs—drugs to improve cognitive perfor-
mance. Such drugs could have important
consequences, and we need to be proactive
Steve Jones that our moral framework won’t
be fundamentally changed.
GM: So the arguments won’t be different in
kind from 30 years ago, when we might
have said that social factors explain behav-
iours and crimes, and excuse them, too.
SR: No I don’t think it will be any different from say-
ing that you are a violent criminal because of the way
you were brought up, or to say you are a violent crim-
inal because of your genes. It doesn’t alter the ques-
tion about responsibility.
PG: I have one caveat. Sometimes in history there is a
rapid rate of change. We may be undergoing a rapid
rate of change in our knowledge base now, and that
may be hard to assimilate. But in the end we will use
things if they are useful—and not use them if they
are not. Getting to that point may be a bit bumpy.
RP: At a science level I can’t imagine anyone disagree-
ing that having the genome sequence is going to be a
very useful tool. But at a practical level, it comes
down to how much of these complex traits and disor-
ders we can actually predict from our genetic knowl-
edge. A lot will come down to cost-benefit ratios. We
have been doing genetic screening for decades for
single-gene disorders such as PKU [phenylketonuria,
which causes severe mental retardation], because in
that case there is a simple intervention which works
pretty well. Now there is a lot of new information
which says that common disorders are not simply the
result of one gene—but hundreds of genes, each with
small effects. As Peter
said, it’s going to come
down to: is it useful?
Will our genetic knowl-
edge allow us to change
the environment in
some small way—
changing a woman’s
diet during pregnancy,
say—which makes a
difference for children with a certain genetic risk?
GM: There are two specific concerns about this
genetic knowledge, relating to health systems. One is
that the incentives for pooling risks may break down
because more people have reasons to opt out, know-
ing that they are healthy. Second, if you have the
knowledge about individual predispositions, is it
legitimate to expect greater responsibility on the
part of an individual to reduce a risk?
SJ: Insurance companies in the US hate the new
knowledge, because insurance of any kind depends
on the company having more knowledge than the
people it is insuring. In fact, the knowledge damages
both parties, because only those at risk buy
insurance; those not at risk don’t buy insur- Our moral
ance, so the whole thing collapses. And it’s framework
noticeable in the US that the insurance
companies are combining into larger and won’t be
larger consortia in order to diffuse risk. So fundamentally problems are not going to be affected
you end up with something like a national
health service. The question is: do you changed
want a police force which protects every-
STEVE JONES
body, or do you want a set of security
guards who only protect those who pay for them?
Genetics allows us to move towards a set of security
guards: because I know I am not going to get cystic
fibrosis, I am not going to get lung cancer, so I don’t
have to bother. But the experience is that a universal
police force is always better.
GM: Nancy, are we moving to a happy new collec-
tivism of pooled risks?
NC: No. But first I want to argue very strongly against
the tendency to pronounce casual opinions about
social implications—about what should be done, or
about who should decide various matters. All of you
sitting round this table have some pretty well-
founded guesses about some of the effects of certain
genes. But I am certain that no one around this table
has the kind of knowledge it takes to make well-
founded guesses about the social implications. Here
we need to rely on our social scientific knowledge
about our own legal and social institutions. Of course
social science has many gaps. But social scientists
know a lot more about these things than we do.
PG: Tell us what study you would commission which
you feel would help us resolve your difficulties.
NC: I don’t know. I don’t know enough about our legal
structures, our social institutions, our families, to
think about designing
a study, any more
than I know how to
design an experiment
identifying genes. That’s
why I want these
questions discussed in
detail by people who do
know what there is to
be known.
GM: Looking ahead ten or 20 years, do you think the
gap between the favourably genetically constructed
and the less favourable genetically constructed is
going to widen or narrow?
JW: If genetics is used properly, the gap will narrow.
There will be fewer children born with very serious
problems. The problem is that instead of society telling
people to use genetics, we’re telling them not to use it,
we’re making them feel that they’re doing something
evil, that they’re playing God. I don’t think you in
Britain are doing any better than we are in the US—
there is little screening except for Down’s syndrome.
SR: We would make more difference to the well-being
of the British population if we dealt with
the 20 per cent of children who are living in
poverty than if we invested in huge
screening programmes, desirable as those
programmes might be. Our main social
by genetics.
PG: I agree with Steven Rose. I worked for
13 years for the Imperial Cancer Research
Fund, and the biggest effect you can have
on cancer in our society is to ban smoking. But we
choose not to. So the social and political issues remain
more important than the new technologies, in the
short term. In the long term, I am an optimist. There
will be many discoveries under the heading of the
new biology, the new genetic medicine, which will
give us tools to reduce human suffering.
RP: Abolishing poverty and getting to the genetic
root of many developmental problems are not mutu-
ally exclusive. I would like to identify some more spe-
cific genes, and understand how they work on the
brain and on behaviour. I know that’s going to take a
very long time, but we can do it.
GM: Steve Jones, is this going to widen the gaps
between people’s life chances or narrow them?
SJ: Neither. Genetics, historically, was the science of
exceptions; it dealt with rare, inborn, diseases which
couldn’t be treated, and that’s what it will be in ten
years from now.
NC: Well, consistent with my view that one should
have systematic knowledge before coming to an opin-
ion on a serious matter, I don’t have an opinion.
JW: Where did you go to school? You don’t have an
opinion on anything.
GM: I think we better stop there. Thank you. ■
PROSPECT October 2000 27

THE OTHER DAY, as I was wandering
down an old tenement block on New
York’s Lower East Side, I chanced on an
odd little shop. It sold only one item:
mirrors which do not reverse left and
right—or True Mirrors, as the store
calls them. There was one in the shop
window. Looking at my reflection in it,
I was appalled by how crooked my facial
features seemed, how lopsided my smile
was, how ridiculous my hair looked
parted on the wrong side of my head.
Then I realised that the image I was
confronting was the real me, the one the
world sees. The image of myself I am
used to, the one I see when I look into
an ordinary mirror, is actually that of an
incongruous counterpart whose left and
right are the reverse of mine.
As any child will attest,
left/right is much harder to
master than up/down
There is nothing very strange about
the fact that ordinary mirrors reverse
left and right, is there? “Left” and
“right” are labels for the two horizontal
directions parallel to the mirror. The
two vertical directions parallel to the
mirror are “up” and “down.” But the
optics and geometry of reflection are
precisely the same for all dimensions
parallel to the mirror. So why does a
mirror treat the horizontal and verti-
cal axes differently? Why does it reverse
left and right but not up and down?
This question might seem foolish at
first. “When I wave my right hand, my
mirror counterpart waves his left
hand,” you say. “When I wiggle my
head, I should scarcely expect my coun-
terpart to wiggle his feet.” True
enough, but you might plausibly expect
your counterpart to appear upside
down, with his feet directly opposite
your head—just as his left hand is
directly opposite your right hand.
This article first appeared in
Linguafranca (www.linguafranca.com)
28 PROSPECT December 2000
Foolish or not, the issue has been
vexing philosophers for at least half a
century. As far as I can tell, it first arose
in the early 1950s, as a sort of sidebar
to discussions of Kant’s theory of spa-
tial relations. In his 1964 book The
Ambidextrous Universe, the science pop-
ulariser Martin Gardner stirred things
up by arguing that the puzzle has a false
premise. A mirror does not really
reverse left and right at all, he claimed;
instead, it reverses front and back along
an axis perpendicular to the mirror. In
his view, we merely “find it convenient”
to call our image left/right reversed
because we happen to be bilaterally
symmetric. In 1970, the philosopher
Jonathan Bennett published an article
endorsing Gardner’s supposed resolu-
tion of what by now had become the
“mildly famous mirror problem.”
His optimism was premature. In
1974, MIT philosopher Ned Block
wrote a long, diagram-filled piece for
the Journal of Philosophy arguing that
“Why does a mirror reverse right/left
but not up/down?” has at least four dif-
ferent interpretations. Block claimed
that the four interpretations had been
clumsily conflated by Gardner and Ben-
nett; he also insisted that in two of the
four, a mirror really does reverse left and
right. Three years later, in an equally
lengthy article in the Philosophical
Review, an English philosopher named
Don Locke declared that Block was only
“half right.” Mirrors actually reverse left
and right in every relevant sense.
Reading these papers, and others
published since, I begin to think that the
mirror problem defies philosophical
reflection. People can’t agree on the
most basic facts. For example: stand
sideways to a mirror, shoulder to shoul-
der with your image. Your left/right
axis is now perpendicular to the mir-
ror’s surface. Gardner and Bennett say
that in this case and this case alone, a
mirror really does reverse left and right.
Block and Locke say that in this case and
this case alone, left and right are the
same direction for you and your mirror
Mirrors reverse our left and our
right, right? So why are our
reflections not upside down?
BY JIM HOLT
image. (Having just dashed to the bed-
room mirror to try this, I think I’m in
the Block-Locke camp. My right arm
and my mirror counterpart’s right arm
both pointed east; on the other hand, he
was wearing his watch on his right
wrist, whereas I wear mine on my left.)
The clue to the mirror puzzle would
seem to lie in some subtle disanalogy
between left/right and up/down. Both
of these pairs of directions are relative
to the orientation of the body (unlike,
say, east/west and skyward/earthward).
But as any child will attest, left/right is
much harder to master than up/down.
The human body displays no gross
asymmetries between its two sides.
(There is, of course, the heart, but that
is hidden.) So “left” and “right” have to
be defined in terms of “front” and “head.”
Your left hand is the one which is to the
west when you stand on the ground and
face north. This would remain true even
if a surgeon cut off your two hands and
sewed them on to the opposite arms.
Left/right is thus logically parasitic
on front/back, whereas up/down is not.
And a mirror, everyone agrees, reverses
front and back. That must be why it also
reverses left and right—if indeed it
does, which to this day remains unclear.
Fatigued by the debate? Then visit
the little shop I discovered in New York
and get yourself a True Mirror. But
don’t try shaving in front of the thing—
your face will be a bloody mess. ■
“Sorry, Fritz, the football’s off—we
can’t agree on a manager”

IS BUSH RIGHT?
B Y B J O R N L O M B O RG
A big reduction in carbon emissions is a costly and
unrealistic response to global warming. Time to rethink
LOBAL WARMING MATTERS.
G There is no doubt that
mankind is increasing atmos-
pheric concentrations of CO2 and that
this will influence temperature. Yet too
much debate is fixated on reducing
emissions without regard to cost or to
human welfare.
In the Kyoto Protocol, the world set
itself the ambition of cutting its carbon
emissions to 5.2 per cent below 1990
levels in 2010, or a reduction of almost
30 per cent compared to no interven-
tion. It was the implementation of this
deal that broke down in the Hague in
November and Kyoto was further
stymied by the Bush administration’s
near-rejection earlier this year. Next
month, the world’s governments will
be back at the negotiating tables in
Bonn, all facing intense political pres-
sure. The Europeans want to find a
way to save Kyoto even if it means
sweet-dealing the Americans, whereas
the Americans need to find a way to
tackle global warming without being
seen as irresponsible and uncaring.
However, it is not clear that carbon
emission cuts are the best way for the
world to ensure progress. Let us con-
sider some of the macro-statistics of
global warming. (For these purposes
I will accept the scientific models of the
UN Climate Panel, the IPCC.)
The IPCC tells us that the world
might warm as much as 5.8OC over the
coming century. Yet this high-end sce-
nario is unlikely. Reasonable analysis
suggest that renewables—especially
solar power—will be competitive with
fossil fuels by mid-century, and this
means that carbon emissions are more
likely to follow the low emission sce-
nario, causing warming of 2-2.5OC.
Moreover, most experts believe that
global warming will not decrease food
From “The Skeptical Environmentalist”
(CUP), published in September. Bjorn
Lomborg is a statistics professor at
Aarhus University, Denmark
30 PROSPECT July 2001
production, will probably not increase
storminess or the frequency of hurri-
canes, and will not increase the impact
of malaria or cause more deaths. It is
even unlikely to cause more flood vic-
tims, because a much richer world can
protect itself better.
However, global warming will have
serious costs—indeed, the total cost is
estimated at about $5 trillion. Such
estimates are unavoidably uncertain
but derive from extrapolating the cur-
rent cost of warming on agriculture,
forestry, fisheries, energy, water sup-
ply, infrastructure, hurricane damage,
drought damage, coast protection, land
loss caused by a rise in sea level, loss of
wetlands, pollution and so on.
Global warming will hit developing
countries hardest; the industrial coun-
tries may even benefit from a warming
lower than 2-3OC. Developing countries
are harder hit because they are poor—
giving them less adaptive capacity.
Despite our intuition that we need
to do something drastic about global
warming, economic analyses show that
it will be far more expensive to cut
CO2 emissions radically than to pay
the costs of adaptation to the increased
temperatures. Moreover, all current
models agree that the Kyoto Protocol
will have surprisingly little impact on
the climate. One such model by a lead
author of the 1996 IPCC report shows
how an expected temperature increase
of 2.1OC in 2100 will be diminished by
the treaty to an increase of 1.9OC
instead. Or to put it another way, the
temperature increase that we would
have experienced in 2094 will be post-
poned six years to 2100.
Yet the cost of such a Kyoto pact, for
the US alone, will be higher than the
cost of solving the single most press-
ing problem for the world—providing
the entire world with clean drinking
water and sanitation. It is estimated
that the latter would avoid 2m deaths
every year and prevent half a billion
people becoming seriously ill.
If it only imposes controls on the
industrial world the cost of Kyoto will
approach $1 trillion, or almost five
times the cost of worldwide water and
sanitation coverage. (Total global aid
today is about $50 billion annually.)
If the Kyoto ambition of curbing
emissions to 1990 levels embraces
developing countries too the cost rises
to about $4 trillion—almost as high as
the cost of global warming itself.
Most of the reporting and analysis
on global warming tells us all the bad
things that could happen from CO2
emissions, but few or none of the bad
things that could come from the reg-
ulation of such emissions. Instead of
using cool economic reasoning in the
face of the global warming problem,
the debate is more often carried out
with a quasi-religious fervour.
Consider the new 2001 IPCC
report. It tells us that we should build
cars and trains with lower top speeds,
and extols the virtues of sail ships and
bicycles. To reduce demand for trans-
port, it recommends that we shift to a
more regionalised economy. Essen-
tially, what the IPCC proposes is a
radical change in lifestyles: we must
share resources, choose free time
instead of wealth, quality instead of
quantity, and “increase freedom while
containing consumption.”
The IPCC acknowledges that such
a change in lifestyle is difficult to
achieve and blames media indoctrina-
tion for making it harder. Not surpris-
ingly, it wants to recruit the media to
its side: “Raising awareness among
media professionals of the need for
greenhouse gas mitigation… could be
an effective way to encourage a wider
cultural shift.” Is it appropriate for an
organisation which gathers scientific
information about global warming to
promote such a political agenda?
There are four important lessons
from the above for the global warming
debate. First, we have to realise what
we are arguing about—do we want to
deal with global warming in the most
efficient way or do we want to use
global warming as a means to realise a
broader political ambition?
Second, we should not spend vast
amounts of money in return for a tiny
cut in global temperature; the money
could improve human welfare far more
effectively in other ways. When we
spend money to mitigate global warm-
ing we are to a large extent helping
 OPINIONS/ LOMBORG

future inhabitants of the developing

world. But the choice may come down
to this: do we want to help the inhabi-
tants of today’s developing countries
100 years from now a little (when they
will be richer), or do we want to help
the inhabitants of those same countries
much more and now? To give a sense
of what is at stake—the Kyoto Proto-
col will cost at least $150 billion a year,
and possibly a lot more. Unicef esti-
mates that just $70-80 billion a year
could give the third world access to
health, education, water and sanitation.
Third, since the costs of global
warming and the costs of reducing
emissions are both large, we should
focus more effort on finding other ways
of easing emissions. This means that
we need to invest much more in R&D
for solar power, fusion and other power
sources of the future. Given a current
US investment in renewable energy
R&D of just $200m, a big increase
would seem a promising investment.
We should also be more open towards
other techno-fixes. Suggestions range
from fertilising the ocean to absorb
carbon; putting sulphur particles into
the stratosphere (thus cooling the
earth) and capturing CO2 from fossil
fuel use and returning it to storage in
geological formations.
Finally, we must acknowledge that
global warming is not the world’s most
pressing problem. What matters is
making the developing countries richer
and allowing the citizens of developed
countries even greater opportunities.
According to the new IPCC report
if we choose a world focused on eco-
nomic development in a global setting
(the most status quo of their four sce-
narios), total income over the coming
century will be some $900 trillion. If
we make our economies more green
but remain global we lose some $107
trillion; and if we go for the green plus
regional approach we could lose up to
$274 trillion. Moreover, the loss will
mainly be to the detriment of the devel-
oping countries. This should be seen in
the light of a total cost of global warm-
ing of a mere $5 trillion.
If we want to maximise the possi-
bilities for our descendants, in the
developing and developed world, we
must focus on economic development
and solving our problems in a global
context. To put it another way, what
matters most to our children is the suc-
cess of the WTO not the IPCC. ■

PROSPECT July 2001 31

 Bjorn again
BY ADAIR TURNER
Bjørn Lomborg’s excoriating critique of the green movement has been hailed
as a breakthrough for respectable environmental scepticism. But his analysis
only addresses the anti-modernist school of environmental thought. More
importantly, his arguments on global warming are flawed and inconsistent
JØRN LOMBORG’S BOOK The Skeptical Envi-
B ronmentalist has stirred huge controversy.
Hailed by free marketeers as a rigorous
counterblast to simplistic environmental-
ism, it has been attacked in Scientific
American, with a rejoinder defence in The Economist.
It is easy to understand its appeal. It explodes many
myths and overstatements of which the green move-
ment is sometimes guilty. It leaves the reader with an
encyclopaedia of useful facts and arguments on a
range of ecological debates. And it explores some of
the complex issues with clarity. Whether one agrees
with Lomborg or not, it is worth reading him.
But Lomborg’s book is not what it pretends to be.
It is not the work of a true sceptic, of a pragmatist
interested in the dispassionate assessment of real
environmental problems. Rather, it is a robust
polemic which attacks one strand of environmental
opinion, with which one can disagree fundamentally
whilst also finding some of Lomborg’s own analyses,
particularly on global warming, profoundly uncon-
vincing. Indeed, one good reason for reading Lom-
borg’s flawed but valuable book is that it helps, quite
unintentionally, to clarify an important distinction
between different schools of environmental thinking.
Lomborg’s success is based partly on the oldest
trick of the trade: seek out the extremists amongst
your opponents and quote them. To many environ-
mentalists his opening chapter—an attack on what he
calls “The Litany” of environmental myths—amounts
to a series of straw men effectively destroyed. Ecolog-
ical polemicists have said some demonstrably silly
things over the last three decades and Lomborg rum-
bles them in a fashion which is fun but of little import.
The more important charge against Lomborg,
however, is one of presentational bias. Far too often
Adair Turner is a former director-general of the CBI and a
trustee of the World Wide Fund for Nature. His book “Just
Capital” (Macmillan) is published in paperback in May
32 PROSPECT May 2002
(and most seriously in the chapter on global warm-
ing) he uses the same techniques he self-righteously
condemns in others—facts presented to fit his chosen
argument, not to enable the reader to make an
informed judgement. Strangely, he provides an illus-
tration of this technique in the very section devoted
to exposing his opponents’ tricks. Chapter one con-
cludes with an attack on how environmental polemi-
cists manipulate language and figures—absolute mil-
lions of tons emitted or thousands of species lost
cited when environmental impacts need exaggerat-
ing; percentages of very large aggregates such as
national income used to make costs of clean-up look
small; gross costs or net costs deployed according to
which best fit the argument.
But in discussing one of his key examples—a care-
fully constructed claim that recycling toothbrushes
can avoid a significant 45,000 tons of landfill waste at
a trivial cost of $17 per person—Lomborg cannot
stop himself playing the linguistic game in reverse.
He cites the huge cost of $4 billion versus the slight
benefit of a 0.02 per cent reduction in landfill vol-
umes, but omits to mention that if you express $4 bil-
lion as a percentage of US GDP you get 0.04 per
cent—and that if you use not the gross cost but the
net cost of recyclable toothbrushes versus ordinary
ones, you come down to around 0.02 per cent. Leav-
ing us with the conclusion which common sense
would have told us in the first place: both the benefits
and costs of recycling toothbrushes are trivial. In this
case, unlike on global warming, also a trivial fault
since the whole subject is de minimis. But the point is
made: this book should be read, but read with care.
OR SOME people, concern about the environ-
F ment is rooted in a worldview of anti-mod-
ernist and anti-capitalist pessimism. It is this
“anti-modernist” school that Lomborg demolishes.
The anti-modernists tend to express environmental
concerns in quasi-religious terms, rejecting a homo-

centric world view: environmental improvements are
not needed to make human life more pleasant, but
because they are in some absolute sense right. It dis-
plays a deep suspicion of the market economy and of
big business and is susceptible to conspiracy theory
and scare stories, with selfish actions forever threat-
ening health and the environment. But above all the
anti-modernist school is characterised by a belief that
the developed world model of ever-growing prosper-
ity is unsustainable and in any case tawdry, and that
fundamental reform of modern lifestyles is required
to restore balance to the world. This belief makes its
adherents highly suspicious of any assertion that
mankind has achieved real improvements, not only in
material conditions, but also in some aspects of envi-
ronmental quality. (As Stephen Budiansky pointed
out in last month’s Prospect, even scientists such as
EO Wilson lean towards this view.)
The anti-modernists, however, have no monopoly
on environmental concern. There are many other
people who are deeply concerned about environmen-
tal issues but untouched by the anti-modernism and
pessimism which Lomborg attacks. This school can
accept a largely homocentric attitude to objectives
and morality, but believes that mankind will under-
mine its own quality of life unless we carefully man-
age the environmental impact of rising prosperity. Its
adherents are well aware that the huge increases in
material prosperity achieved over the last 50 to 100
ILLUSTRATION: ANGUS MEWSE
ESSAY/ TURNER
years have been accompanied in recent decades by
significant improvements in local environments—
better urban air and cleaner rivers—but are con-
vinced that such improvements have only been
achieved through overt public policy. They make no
prior assumptions about the adequacy of raw mater-
ial reserves. And they are willing to use market
instruments to achieve environmental aims. They do
not see prosperity and environmental improvement
as alternatives: they want both.
To adherents of this school of environmentalism,
the greater part of Lomborg’s book is interesting and
well researched but largely irrelevant to their con-
cerns, while the chapters which address the environ-
mental impact of prosperity are the least convincing.
The chapters explaining that material prosperity has
risen are well presented but unsurprising and tan-
gential to environmental issues. Lomborg’s lengthy
section on “Can Human Prosperity Continue?” has in
turn a revealing pattern. The longer chapters argu-
ing that we will not run out of food or other non-
energy resources are convincing, but have little to do
with the environmental impact of prosperity. The
shorter chapters addressing specifically environmen-
tal issues—water and forest sustainability—are far
less convincing and marked by presentational bias.
The chapter on energy supply meanwhile is a suc-
cessful demonstration of the fact that there is no
shortage of energy and probably no shortage of fossil
PROSPECT May 2002 33
fuels for the next several centuries. This is presented
as a trump card against the environmentalist
“Litany,” but for environmentalists of the pragmatic
school its actual impact is to increase concern about
global warming. Indeed, the chapter demonstrates
the strange phenomenon of a debate between protag-
onists who are each undermining their own argu-
ments. If fossil fuels were likely to run out soon, we
should be much less worried about global warming,
since the free market consequence would be rising
fossil fuel prices and the rapid development of renew-
able energy. The problem is rather that fossil fuels
may be so plentiful that their prices will not rise until
significant environmental damage has been done—
the free market price failing to reflect the economic
externality of CO2 emissions. Lomborg’s illustration
of huge fossil fuel availability and of the tendency for
discovered reserves to overshoot predictions, while
prices undershoot them, undermines his later confi-
dence that free market forces will solve global warm-
ing without policy intervention. Conversely, the
“we’re running out of fuel” rantings of anti-mod-
ernists undermines their
case for taking action on
global warming. Environ-
mentalists of the pragmatic
school can only look on in
Pragmatic environmentalists
believe that public policy
interventions have made a big
bewilderment.
The fact that Lomborg’s
target is the pessimistic
difference. Lomborg does not
school drives the book’s omis-
sions as much as its irrelevant inclusions. There is an
effective demolition of exaggerated cancer scares, but
nothing on transport congestion or on how the noise
and visual impact of roads, or the expansion of housing
over countryside, destroy quality of life. The section
on biodiversity is focused on counting how many
species survive, not on landscape and wildlife as a
nourishment to man’s love of beauty. A few tigers sur-
viving in zoos, but none in the wild, would count as a
species survival on this basis, and therefore not a prob-
lem. And while Lomborg sees himself as the champion
of a rigorously rational homocentric approach, he fails
to recognise that rising demands for environmental
quality reflect the consumer preference of increasingly
wealthy people. As people get richer, they care more
about clean air, preserved countryside and natural
beauty, precisely because they are closer to satiation on
simpler material needs.
The most significant disagreement between prag-
matic environmentalists and Lomborg, however,
relates less to his description of trends than to his
point of view on causes. On several environmental
measures, in particular local pollution in developed
countries, the world has improved. And many of the
improvements depend, as Lomborg argues, on the
technological advances which prosperity has fos-
tered. But Lomborg goes further—implying that
34 PROSPECT May 2002
prosperity and the market economy are not just
enablers of environmental improvement but close to
sufficient in themselves. Pragmatic environmental-
ists believe that public policy interventions, respond-
ing to environmental concerns and lobbying have
been vital in achieving the improvements made so far.
Lomborg seeks to downplay such interventions. Yet
the example he cites is bizarrely unconvincing. Any-
one who lived in London, or in my case Glasgow,
before the Clean Air Acts will recognise the great
improvements in air quality to which Lomborg
refers, but most will be bemused by his belief (on the
basis of one referenced study) that the sudden, visible
and smellable improvements which followed those
Acts and which can be traced on Lomborg’s own
graph, were unrelated to them. Technology makes
environmental improvement possible, markets can
help achieve change cost effectively, but regulation
and environmental taxes are needed to give expres-
sion to people’s desires for environmental improve-
ment and to reflect externality effects in the prices
facing market participants.
BOVE ALL that is true
A in respect to global
warming, and it is on
global warming that prag-
matic environmentalists have
to part company completely
with Lomborg. For it is in the
penultimate chapter, “Global
Warming,” that Lomborg’s polemics most seriously
compromise and devalue his arguments.
Lomborg’s argument is simple. Global warming is
occurring and is caused at least partially by rising
man-made CO2 emissions, but renewable energy
technologies are likely to deliver an automatic mar-
ket-driven solution from about 2050 onwards, with
the maximum warming limited to an acceptable 2º to
3ºC. Policy interventions such as the Kyoto protocol
are therefore unnecessary as well as very costly.
That argument could be a legitimate contribution
to the climate change debate. The way Lomborg
makes it is not. The chapter is biased in its tone and
presentational devices. Inevitable uncertainties in
scenarios for CO2 emissions and temperature change
are played up to give the impression that no reason-
able judgements can be made. William Nordhaus’s
calculations of an optimal policy response, which rest
on hugely uncertain estimates of economic impacts
and costs from now to infinity, are paraded as provid-
ing us with certain knowledge—“a clear standard
with which to compare alternative policy
approaches.” More fundamentally, however, Lom-
borg’s key arguments on both climate change risks
and the costs of offsetting policies, are flawed and
logically inconsistent.
Lomborg’s starting point is the assessment pro-

duced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) in 2000. Rather than present a single
forecast, the IPCC set out a number of scenarios for
CO2 emission levels reflecting assumptions along
three key dimensions—world population growth,
income per capita growth, and technical and economic
progress towards energy efficiency and use of renew-
able energy. It then commissioned climate change
modelling for each of the chosen scenarios. One of the
resulting scenarios is labelled “A1FI.” To Lomborg
(and to me) this scenario, like all the A1 scenarios, has
the desirable feature of describing an increasingly
prosperous world, rather than one where growth has
been cut severely to avoid environmental damage.
However, A1FI also assumes only a limited move
away from fossil fuels: as a result it produces a temper-
ature rise of 4.5ºC by 2100, with further rises likely
thereafter—a worrying scenario since most models
suggest that the harmful consequences of global
warming increase rapidly as we move beyond a 2º to
3ºC rise. But Lomborg believes that A1FI ignores the
potential for renewable technologies (mainly wind
and solar energy) to become economic versus fossil
fuels by about 2040 and argues that the alternative
scenario “A1T” is more realistic. A1T suggests emis-
sions falling steadily after 2040, with the level in the
year 2100 75 per cent below a “business as usual” sce-
nario, and lower indeed than in 1990. As a result,
warming is limited to 2º to 3ºC.
All of which could be true—Lomborg’s technolog-
ical optimism is at least a possible result. But what
Lomborg fails to stress is that the A1T assumption on
population growth foresees world population peaking
at below 9 billion in 2050 and falling rapidly to reach 7
billion in 2100, heading back to the world’s present
population level in the early 22nd century. This, as
Lomborg knows but does not say, is an incredibly
optimistic scenario, and one for which his own chapter
on population growth gives no support, focusing
instead on the UN’s mid-range forecast of a world
population of 10.4 billion in 2100 (about 50 per cent
higher than the A1 scenario). Combining this more
reasonable population assumption with Lomborg’s
technological optimism would produce an end of cen-
tury temperature much higher than the 2.5ºC which
Lomborg believes acceptable. In other words, Lom-
borg’s “don’t worry” message depends on combining
an aggressively optimistic (but just possible) techno-
logical assumption with a population assumption
which most experts would consider unbelievably
benign. The polemical effectiveness of the chapter
depends on the reader not noticing that fact.
Whatever the population assumption, however,
the vital long-term issue remains, as Lomborg says,
whether and when renewable energy sources will
substitute for fossil fuels, and whether we should
leave the transition to market forces alone or seek to
speed it along with policy interventions. Apart from
ESSAY/ TURNER
a little nudge via increased R&D support, Lomborg
believes policy interventions unnecessary and con-
demns Kyoto as making only a minimal difference to
the likely temperature increase at an enormous eco-
nomic cost. His argument, however, is based on a bla-
tant logical inconsistency and on an obtuse refusal to
think through the likely economic and technological
consequences of a Kyoto style agreement.
Kyoto, Lomborg claims, will make only a minimal
difference to total emissions and temperatures, since it
doesn’t cover the developing countries. As a result, his
chart shows a Kyoto-influenced world relentlessly
increasing its emission levels to 18 billion tons in
2100, only slightly below a business-as-usual level of
21 billion. Since, however, his preferred no-interven-
tion scenario (A1T) has emissions falling quite natu-
rally to 5m tons, this is nonsense. He could still argue
that Kyoto implementation would improve the situa-
tion only slightly versus A1T, but he cannot argue
that a Kyoto-influenced world will produce emissions
far above his preferred scenario. Nor are his high esti-
mates of the costs of Kyoto consistent with his tech-
nological optimism. Kyoto, he claims, will cost 2 per
cent of OECD countries’ GDP by 2050, growing fur-
ther to 4 per cent by 2100. The increased burden
beyond 2050 cannot exist, however, if Lomborg is
right in his optimistic assumption that renewables
will be substituting for fossil fuels, even without pol-
icy intervention, from 2040 onwards. Kyoto-style
intervention could logically be unnecessary because
technological development and free market prices are
in any case going to drive rapid substitution. It could
alternatively entail a very large (though arguably
unavoidable) cost if technology does not come so
quickly to our aid. But Lomborg’s assertion that
Kyoto is both unnecessary and hugely expensive even
beyond 2050 is a logical nonsense.
In fact, Kyoto is neither unnecessary nor unaccept-
ably costly. Instead, it is an intelligent first step, and
one whose most important effect will be to accelerate
the technology developments on which Lomborg’s
optimistic scenario depends. Lomborg refuses to see
this, drawing a sharp distinction between Kyoto’s pol-
icy of “limiting” carbon emissions and his preferred
approach of substituting renewables for fossil fuels.
But he must know that this is a meaningless distinc-
tion. Replacing fossil fuel sources with renewables is
not an alternative to “limiting” emissions, it is one of
the ways by which limitation could be achieved. If
Kyoto had sought to limit energy consumption rather
than CO2 emissions, Lomborg’s distinction would be
a real one; but it seeks no such thing. It sets initially
modest targets for limiting greenhouse gas emissions
since that is the only way to offset climate change, but
leaves it to individual countries to design the mea-
sures used to achieve that objective. If countries are
sensible, they will implement it making maximum use
of price signals—increasing the tax-inclusive price of
PROSPECT May 2002 35
ESSAY/ TURNER
fossil fuels, modestly at first, but with clear commit-
ments to significantly higher prices later. All that we
know about the power of market mechanisms sug-
gests that this will result in a cost of adjustment well
below what simple econometric models suggest. The
new price signal will unleash a myriad of changes—in
consumer behaviour, product design, locational deci-
sions, medium-term product development and long-
term research—which no planning system could
imagine and which modelling cannot predict. The
stimulus of Kyoto will therefore bring forward and
make more certain the economic cross-over between
fossil fuels and renewables, both because of the direct
effect of higher fossil fuel prices and through the tech-
nological progress unleashed.
Seen in this light, the criticism that Kyoto does not
cover developing countries is largely irrelevant. A
later global agreement is desirable, but the only polit-
ically feasible first step is an agreement of the devel-
oped countries, which now emit four times as much
CO2 per capita as the developing world. Even with-
out subsequent global agreement, the technological
development stimulated by
Kyoto will accelerate
increases in energy efficiency Lomborg’s assertion that
and renewables substitution
in the developing world too.
Kyoto is both unnecessary and
Calculations of Kyoto’s hugely expensive is a logical
impact which make no
allowances for this acceler-
nonsense. It is neither
ated substitution are point-
less polemics of which a supposedly market-friendly
writer should be ashamed. Lomborg’s technological
optimism, combined with rising prosperity, is an
attractive outlook: Kyoto will make it more likely.
Indeed it is odd that Lomborg himself does not
argue a variant of that case. It would have been possi-
ble to combine a great deal of his book with a more
balanced discussion of global warming, avoiding the
glaring inconsistencies between, for instance, his rea-
sonable population scenario in chapter three and his
hyper-optimism in chapter 24, or between his bullish
fossil fuel reserve and cost forecasts in chapter 11 and
his global warming assumption that fossil fuels will
rapidly become uneconomic. A work of environmen-
tal pragmatism would have combined Lomborg’s
trenchant debunking of scare-stories with a recogni-
tion of real environmental problems. It is interesting
to wonder why Lomborg did not write that book, and
legitimate to do so since Lomborg himself questions
his opponents’ motives as well as their logic.
The answer must partly be the motivation of any
author to set out a strong and controversial line—a
full-scale assault is more newsworthy than a balanced
account and, partly as a result of the book, Lomborg
has become an academic star advising governments
and corporations. But the answer also appears to lie
in Lomborg’s fixation with the exaggerated claims of
36 PROSPECT May 2002
some ecologists. Any overstatement of the environ-
mentalist’s case seems to raise in him a righteous
anger, sometimes with close to laughable results. He
seems incapable of accepting that green lobby groups
operate in a market for public attention, in competi-
tion with companies selling their wares and business
lobby groups pursuing their self-interest, and that if
green lobbyists eschewed the techniques of emo-
tional appeal and, yes, sometimes slanted presenta-
tion, which companies and business lobbyists use,
they would be unfairly disadvantaged. He is worried
about the power of the “finely tuned PR depart-
ments” of environmental lobby groups, but uninter-
ested in the larger, slicker PR departments of big cor-
porations. His account of the political dynamics of the
global warming debate manages to mention the lob-
bying power of the windmill manufacturers, while
omitting any reference to oil companies. As someone
who has played a reasonably senior role in business
lobbying at British and European levels, including on
environmental issues, I have to admit that the sinister
clout of the windmill manufacturers passed me by.
More fundamentally, what
raises Lomborg’s ire is the
hidden agenda of the anti-
modernists, and here he
makes a legitimate and
important point. As his dis-
cussion of the IPCC’s con-
clusions reveals, some envi-
ronmentalists do not want to
make increased material prosperity compatible with
environmental improvement. They therefore use
global warming fears as a rhetorical ally in an anti-
growth and anti-free market argument. Kyoto to
them is the first blow against the idea of ever-
increasing material prosperity and because they pre-
sent it like that, Lomborg feels the need to oppose it.
His own figures reveal how little he needs to. Even
on his own pessimistic assumptions about Kyoto-
induced cost, what we face is the possibility that
between now and 2050 the developed world might
grow just 0.04 per cent per annum slower then it
otherwise would, attaining some time in November
2050 the prosperity level we would otherwise
achieve in January: a prosperity level roughly three
times today’s. And if his technological optimism is
right, no further sacrifice of growth would be
required beyond 2050. The dream of the anti-mod-
ernist pessimists that our response to global warm-
ing will require the end of growth will be disap-
pointed: the scare story of US business lobbyists that
Kyoto is unaffordable will prove to be as wildly exag-
gerated as arguments against previous environmen-
tal improvements. There is a very good case to be
made for a pragmatic, market-friendly and rational
environmentalism. It is a pity that Bjørn Lomborg
does not make it. ■

SPECIAL REPORT
ORGANIC FOOD
AND ANTI-SCIENCE
by Dick Taverne THE RISE AND rise of the public’s demand for
organic food seems inexorable. EU farm min-
The author is a
isters expect that within the foreseeable future
Liberal Democrat peer
20 per cent or more of EU farm produce will
be organic. It is widely predicted that the next
steps in reforming the Common Agricultural
Policy will be policies to encourage further
conversion from conventional to organic
farming. The British government subsidises
those who make the change. Supermarkets
love organic foods. Tesco and Sainsbury pro-
mote organic fruit, vegetables, yogurt, milk,
biscuits, chocolate, meat and even organic
wine. The media regard the merits of organic
food as self-evident. When the Today pro-
gramme interviews Patrick Holden, director
of the Soil Association and high priest of the
organic movement, he is treated as an objec-
tive authority on healthy food and good farm-
ing practice. We are constantly led to believe
that organic food is tastier, healthier, safer,
more environmentally friendly. Meanwhile,
health scares about the safety of conventional,
let alone genetically modified, food drive con-
sumers into the arms of organic producers.
These are also seen as the antidote to the per-
ceived excesses of “agri-business,” particularly
Monsanto, which has become public enemy
number one. No wonder the demand for
organic produce is so strong that domestic
supply cannot keep up and nearly 80 per cent
of organic food has to be imported.
Yet the evidence to justify the fashionable
enthusiasm for organic produce has proved
elusive. The Food Standards Agency stated
that “it considers that there is not enough
information available at present to be able to
say that organic foods are sufficiently differ-
ent in terms of their safety and nutritional
content to those produced by conventional
farming.” The Advertising Standards
Authority found no convincing evidence to
support claims made by the Soil Association
in their recruiting leaflets that organic food
tastes better, is healthier, better for the envi-
ronment or produces healthy and happy ani-
mals. The leaflets had to be withdrawn.
Indeed, in a devastating attack in Nature on
“Urban myths of organic farming,” Professor
Anthony Trewavas of the Edinburgh Centre
for Molecular Biology, not only refuted the
38 PROSPECT October 2001
Organic farming is the one bright
spot in the otherwise bleak land-
scape of European agriculture. But
most of the claims made for organic
food—that it is tastier, healthier,
and better for the environment—
turn out to be dubious or false
claims made for organic farming, but argued
that in many respects it is less beneficial for
the environment than some forms of conven-
tional farming and also presents health haz-
ards of its own.
If it is true that claims for the virtues of
organic farming cannot be justified and food
scares about health hazards from other foods
are ill founded, this has important implica-
tions that go beyond the food industry.
Democracy depends on a reasoned debate in
which policy is based on rational grounds, not
on myth or hysterical scare stories. If we
reject scientific evidence and instead promote
a cult of unreason, the consequences will not
only damage our economy, but will affect the
kind of society we live in. It is therefore
important that politicians should examine as
objectively as possible the merits of the case
for and against organic food.
WHAT IS ORGANIC FOOD?
The meaning of the term “organic” has under-
gone a transformation. All plants and animals
are organic. Therefore all farming is by its
nature organic. “Organic farming,” however,
has a particular meaning. A farm only quali-
fies officially as “organic” if it observes certain
rules and principles, which are based on a par-
ticular philosophy of life concerned with
man’s place in nature. Its inspiration was
Rudolf Steiner, the early 20th-century
philosopher, who followed the 19th-century
school of “nature” philosophers. He developed
the concept of “biodynamic cultivation,”
which, among other things, advocated planti-
ng according to the phases of the moon and
nourishing the soil with cow horns stuffed
with entrails. That is history, but it is where
the organic movement started.
The movement and its current philosophy
does not claim to be based on science,
although, as it is developing, it seeks to incor-
porate science-based knowledge and promotes
research to justify its claims of benefits to man
and nature. Its proponents emphasise its
“holistic” approach and exhibit a degree of
impatience with the “reductionist” tendencies
of scientists, who vary one factor at a time to
seek to establish cause and effect and look for
measurable standards. In his evidence to the

© AP
Organic apples—are they House of Lords select committee on organic
sweeter? farming (Organic Farming and the European
Union, 1999), Holden repeatedly stated that
he believed certain propositions to be true
although he could cite no evidence in support.
Belief is apparently more important to him
than evidence. The rules and practice of the
movement incorporate the same approach.
To qualify as organic, food must have been
produced according to rules approved by one
of a number of certifying bodies, of which
there is a plethora. In Britain the main ones
are the United Kingdom Register of Organic
Food Standards (UKROFS) and the Soil
Association itself. The rules are not always
consistent, nor do they seem to be based on a
coherent or comprehensive set of principles.
One of the basic principles is that you should
feed the soil, rather than the plant directly. As
one of the proponents of organic farming
acknowledged to the House of Lords select
committee, “there is very little science and
understanding of how to take those basic prin-
ciples into a centralised and highly complex
processing and production system… This
gives rise to a great deal of illogicality and
confusion and, particularly in some areas of
production, conflict and perhaps compromise.”
As another witness to the committee
observed: “when you are looking at organic
standards, if you look for logic, you will not
find it there.”
The rules are not only contradictory but
arbitrary. Some pesticides are allowed, for
example, spraying by Bacillus thuringiensis
(Bt). This is the same Bt whose gene has been
inserted into insect-resistant GM maize, soya,
cotton and other plants. The Soil Association
is one of the principal lobbyists against such
genetically modified crops. Yet the same prod-
uct that is produced inside the plants by the Bt
gene is applied to plants by the organic
farmer. Fertilisers which are inorganic and
highly toxic are allowed in organic farming,
SPECIAL REPORT/ TAVERNE
for example, copper sulphate; while at the
same time plant extracts are used which are
both less effective and less benign than the
best registered pesticides, (see the evidence
from the Institute of Crop Research, to the
House of Lords committee). In general, the
principles of the organic movement assume
that nature is benign and the idea that the syn-
thetic chemist can improve it is dismissed.
Given the numerous diseases from which we
suffered 150 years ago, when farming was
truly organic and before modern technology
interfered with nature and made food safer
and cheaper, the principles defy all reason.
Organic farming therefore has no founda-
tion in science or logic. It is based on mysti-
cism, a vague philosophy about nature and has
some of the characteristics of a cult. However,
this does not in itself prevent organic farming
from having beneficial effects. Certainly the
public’s enthusiasm for organic products
shows that they believe that it works, whatev-
er the theory. A survey by Health Which?
showed that 68 per cent of consumers bought
organic food because of the taste, 83 per cent
because they wanted to avoid pesticides and
75 per cent because they thought it was kinder
to the environment. They also expressed con-
cern about BSE and a desire to support local
farmers. Each of these reasons should be
examined in turn.
TASTIER, HEALTHIER AND ECO-FRIENDLIER?
First, taste. In blind tests, people have been
unable to distinguish between the taste of
organic and conventional products. But still
they are convinced that organic food tastes
better. There is one obvious explanation: most
homegrown organic products are fresher
(organic products have a short shelf life) and
fresher food tastes better, whether it has been
organically or conventionally farmed. It is
true that one study in the US state of
Washington did show that organically grown
apples tasted sweeter. On the other hand, in a
comparative study of different farming sys-
tems in Essex, a panel carrying out blind tests
found that organically produced bread had a
mustier taste than bread from conventionally
produced grain.
The next issue is health. The Soil
Association plays on the public’s concern
about pesticides. They are supported by a
number of other campaigning organisations
that have created a food scare industry. It is an
effective way of gaining publicity and promot-
ing membership. Which? magazine in
November 1998 under a heading “Pesticide
Concerns” carried the scare story that test
results from animal studies linked high doses
of pesticides with cancers, hormone distur-
bances and birth defects. It did not mention
PROSPECT October 2001 39
 that high doses of
almost anything at
all cause harm, or
that official reports
on the concentrations
©WWW.CARTOONSTOCK.COM
of pesticide residues
in food state they do
not make it unsafe.
It is common to
worry about the
effect of pesticides on
health. The irony is
that there is probably
more concern about
food safety today
than ever before, when food is generally much
safer than it has ever been. The pesticide con-
tent of food in Britain is strictly controlled by
what is sometimes claimed to be the most
effective regulatory regime in the world. The
amount permitted is a minute fraction of the
minimum safety level. In fact, during the 50
years since synthetic pesticides first came into
widespread use, life expectancy in Britain has
increased by five or six years. At least some of
the improvement in health and longevity can
indeed be attributed to healthier and safer
food. If we were really concerned about dan-
gers to health from eating, we would concen-
trate on today’s most urgent problem: obesity.
This is causing a huge increase in cases of dia-
betes, among other diseases.
Some pertinent questions have been raised
about contaminants other than pesticides in
organic food. In the US, organic foods were
implicated in a disproportionately high num-
ber of cases of fatal poisoning from pathogen-
ic strains of E coli. Animals which are infected
with such pathogenic strains carry the organ-
isms longer if they are fed on hay, as recom-
mended in organic regulations, than if they
are conventionally fed with grain. In his book
Pandora’s Picnic Basket (OUP), Alan
McHughen, Chair of the International
Biosafety Advisory Committee of the
Genetics Society of Canada, writes: “I know I
prefer to consume the small quantities of reg-
ulated and approved pesticides in convention-
al foods than unknown quantities of ‘natural’
toxins, manure, bacteria, fungi, and whatever
else… The fact is that organic foods carry
more ‘organic’ contaminants than convention-
al or GM foods.” The risks of eating organic
food are, however, still a matter of consider-
able debate and although, as McHughen
attests, some of the evidence of health hazards
is disturbing, it requires further scrutiny.
What is clear is that the safety of convention-
al (and GM) food is more assured, as it is
based on much more extensive tests.
Perhaps the main argument in favour of
organic food is that organic farming is friend-
40 PROSPECT October 2001
lier to the environment. Organic farms do
show environmental benefits. More birds, but-
terflies and other insects have been found
there than on most land which is convention-
ally farmed. Indeed, one should not dismiss
the idealism that makes many people take up
organic farming. They want to preserve and
encourage biodiversity and believe that organ-
ic farming is the answer. The rules of
UKROFS specifically require them to aim for
environmental benefits. They manage their
farms to achieve a particular effect and it is
not surprising that they achieve it.
But again, this is not a unique feature of
organic farming. Conventional farms can
achieve the same and better results at less
cost. The Institute of Arable Crop Research at
Rothamsted has found that a system of inte-
grated farming using conventional methods
can have the same effect as organic farming in
increasing the diversity and density of the soil
fauna. Its evidence to the House of Lords com-
mittee was that “where one tries to match the
farm type, the butterfly and bird numbers can
be as good on a conventional farm as on an
organic farm.” What matters is management,
not the system. The Game Conservancy
Trust argued that the ecological case for
organic farming systems had not been made.
“The benefit of organic farming for wildlife
could probably be obtained from mixed farm-
ing systems based on the traditional ley, at far
less inconvenience to the farmer and at far
lower cost to the community”
Professor Trewavas argues that conven-
tional farming can in fact be much more sus-
tainable and better for the environment,
because it is so much more efficient. For the
same yield it uses only 50 to 70 per cent of
farmland. Since Europe produces an excess of
food, this means that farmers can be encour-
aged, as many in Europe are, “to set aside half
their land for fast growing willow plantations
which are then frequently coppiced and the
wood used as fuel.” The plantation, with its
undercover of weeds, bird-nesting sites and
mammal and insect refuges, is far more effec-
tive at promoting biodiversity than any
organic farm, uses far less fossil fuel and pro-
duces much less carbon dioxide.
The effects on biodiversity of different
farming systems was tested in a meticulously
conducted study in Essex (referred to earlier)
comparing organic farming, conventional
farming and integrated crop management.
The study was sponsored by Aventis, but car-
ried out by a number of independent universi-
ties and institutes. The report listed as its
most important finding that the particular
farming system used had less direct impact on
key areas of biodiversity than was earlier sup-
posed. The best results overall came from

integrated crop management, which uses nat-
ural and man-made resources and whose aim
is to preserve and enhance the environment
and local ecology. Many of its techniques have
now become common practice in conventional
farming. On most environmental tests—effect
on bird life, soil quality, mammals and
insects—it scored at least as well as organic
farming and overall it was the friendliest to
biodiversity. It also used much less fuel and
was much more efficient in its use of labour
than organic farming. The latter was superior
in only one respect: the high premium prices
for organic food made it more profitable.
Finally, it is worth mentioning public con-
cern about BSE, which has profoundly under-
mined trust in scientists and experts. “They
told us eating beef was safe. Why should we
believe them when they tell us pesticides or
GM foods are safe?” It was unnatural to turn
cows into carnivores. Hence the widespread
belief that somehow food that is more “natur-
al” is safer. It is true that mistakes were made
in the handling of the crisis. But as the
Phillips inquiry found, BSE was an immense-
ly complex phenomenon. Its origins are still
obscure. The emergence of a rare infectious
agent that causes new variant CJD was quite
unforeseeable. Few understand the science of
this form of spongiform encephalopathy and,
contrary to popular belief, while scientists at
first underestimated the risk of transmission
to humans, they did not say there was no risk
and that the danger to people should be
ignored. It was politicians, worried about the
spread of panic, who told the public that eat-
ing beef was safe.
But even though mistakes were made, the
Rudolf Steiner rules OK history of the BSE outbreak
provides no grounds for
rejecting scientific evidence
in general and turning to
“nature” instead. Doctors
make mistakes, but do we
therefore reject medicine?
Should we turn to quacks
when we are seriously ill?
Pesticides have been studied
for many years and knowl-
edge of genetic modification
is not confined to just a few
specialists. The BSE analo-
gy is false.
Most of the claims made
by the organic lobby are
unfounded. But neverthe-
less, are there not practical
reasons for supporting the
move to organic food? Even
© CORBIS
if they do so for the wrong
reasons, people buy it and
are ready to pay a premium
SPECIAL REPORT/ TAVERNE
price. Supermarkets profit. Organic farmers
profit. At a time of depression in the industry
the prospects for organic farming is one
bright spot in a bleak landscape. Finally, if
organic farmers do in fact farm in a way
which is good for the environment, what does
it matter if the philosophy behind it is based
on gobbledegook?
BAD FOR CONSUMERS AND THE THIRD WORLD
It does matter that organic farming is ineffi-
cient. It matters even in a prosperous society
such as Britain that we should not turn our
backs on cheap ways of producing food.
Prosperous (and vocal) middle-class con-
sumers are very ready to dismiss the impor-
tance of cheap food. But the poorer you are,
the more the price of food matters. The more
pervasive the propaganda in favour of more
expensive organic food as being “safer and
healthier,” the greater the pressures on poorer
families to buy food they can ill afford. It is
only too likely that they will eat less fruit and
vegetables, the key to a healthy diet and an
important protection against cancer.
Providing cheap food for the less well-off is
one of society’s most effective social services
and has been one of the most beneficial
achievements of modern agriculture.
Further, it scarcely makes economic sense
to seek to solve the present problems of farm-
ers by promoting a system that is inefficient
and depends on premium prices paid for food
of no superior quality. It is not a sound basis
for sustainable agriculture. The premium
depends on the organic market being a niche
market. As organic producers multiply,
encouraged by government subsidy, the pre-
mium will fade away. This spring, 18 new
organic dairy farms came on stream and the
produce from this small new group over-
whelmed the market for organic milk, forcing
the price down from 30p a litre to 24p a litre;
only a penny more than the conventional
price. The new farms are producing much
smaller yields at considerably increased cost
at a sale value similar to conventional milk.
At the moment, high prices for organic pro-
duce benefit supermarkets. But if companies
boost their profits by promoting the sales of
more expensive products, whose higher prices
do not benefit the consumer, is this ethical?
Supermarkets claim they are providing what
customers want. But far from educating their
customers to get value for money, they
encourage them to buy organic food by every
possible means. It is a form of consumer
exploitation that would raise howls of protest
if it was practised by global agri-businesses.
However, it is the developing world which
stands to lose most from inefficient farming
systems. An expanding world population faces
PROSPECT October 2001 41
© CORBIS SPECIAL REPORT/ TAVERNE
a fixed or diminishing amount of agricultural
land. According to Bridget Ogilvie, former
head of the Wellcome Foundation, “in 1950,
there was one person per 0.58 hectares of use-
ful agricultural land. In 1998, one per 0.25
hectares. By 2050, if the UN’s forecast of a
population growth of 50 per cent is realised,
there will be one person per 0.12 hectares… A
step change in food production is once again
urgently required.” The green revolution is
running out of steam.
The poorest of Africa and Asia’s farmers
are already, in the true sense, organic. They
use no pesticides, because they cannot afford
to. They have not even reached the green rev-
olution stage. What can the organic move-
ment contribute to the vital next step? It can-
not help the development of drought-resistant
crops that can grow in arid or semi-arid land.
Its productivity cannot compare with the
immense possibilities presented by GM tech-
nology. Yields from organic crops do not even
approximate to those from conventional farm-
ing. The simple fact is that organic farming
requires more land. The world need is for
farming that uses less land. The promotion of
organic farming is at best irrelevant to world
needs and at worst a major obstacle.
Last, but not least, the fashion for organic
42 PROSPECT October 2001
farming is one of many manifestations of the
spread of a mood of anti-science. The aims of
organic farming may be idealistic and some of
its practices may have beneficial effects. But
the movement invites us to abandon respect
for evidence. Abandoning the guiding light of
reason leads to bad economic decisions that
will affect our prosperity; it also opens the
door for the quack and the charlatan.
THE CULT OF ANTI-SCIENCE
Britain is becoming an unattractive place in
which to do pharmaceutical research because
of the activities of animal rights activists (who
are more extreme in this country than any-
where else). They argue that animals are not
needed for testing new drugs. Their philoso-
phy rejects the need to consider evidence.
Their appeal is to prejudice and emotion. The
future of field trials of GM crops in Britain is
in doubt because of the activities of
Greenpeace and other environmental groups
who destroy trial crops. The future of biotech-
nology in Britain, one of our most important
and promising industries, is imperilled as a
result. Yet there is no evidence of danger to
health from GM crops and the very purpose of
the trials is to establish whether they could
harm biodiversity. (Again, there is so far no
reason to suppose, from tens of thousands of
trials elsewhere in the world, that they will do
so). The crop destroyers oppose GM crops
because fundamentally they do not regard evi-
dence as important. Opposition has become a
matter of faith not of reason.
How would justice survive if juries ignored
evidence and gave their verdict on prejudice?
What is racism and xenophobia, but the tri-
umph of prejudice over facts, of ignorance
over evidence? The connection between these
things and organic farming may seem far
fetched. Idealistic environmentalists who sup-
port organic farming are in many respects on
the side of the angels. They live in a different
moral world from that of racists, animal
extremists or other bigots. But rejecting the
importance of evidence is the first step on a
dangerous journey. ■
witness
by Karl Sabbagh
BEAUTIFUL
MATHS
Could one of the greatest problems of
maths be on the verge of a solution?
Mathematicians dream of proving
Riemann’s Hypothesis. Not for the
prize money, but just to glimpse the
deep beauty of prime numbers
VER THE LAST century or so, maths
O became “modern.” It has reached new
heights of abstraction and provided
tools for the revolution in physics and
cosmology that came to the public’s
attention with Einstein. Modern mathematics now
routinely handles concepts such as infinities of differ-
ent magnitudes and has invented new numbers
which lie nowhere on the line from minus infinity to
plus infinity. It has devised closed shapes with finite
areas but infinite perimeters. Techniques which at
first seem to have no useful function turn out decades
later to provide tools for use in the real world. But the
essential joy of maths has remained unchanged.
When a mathematician proves a hypothesis, he or she
has discovered something which is true forever.
Living on a planet that is running out of unex-
plored territory, the mathematical explorer can never
run out of discoveries to savour. And the mathemati-
cal world is now at a significant moment: one of its
most important unsolved problems may be on the
brink of solution.The problem has been around since
1859 and every pure mathematician has longed for it
to be resolved. In fact, it may be insoluble, but even
knowing that for certain would be a major advance.
This is not a problem that is important in the way
that splitting the atom was, or unravelling the
genetic code. But last year a US foundation thought
the problem merited a prize of $1m to the first person
to provide a proof. In fact, the Clay Foundation
Karl Sabbagh’s book, “A Line of Zeros,” will be published
in the US by Farrar Straus Giroux in 2002
44 PROSPECT January 2002
offered seven prizes of $1m each for proofs of what it
considered to be the most significant maths prob-
lems. (Some of them sound deceptively easy—“prove
that P = NP” for example.) But the most important of
these problems, and the most difficult judging by the
effort being put into it, is the Riemann Hypothesis.
In 1859, a German mathematician called Bernhard
Riemann, a “timid diffident soul with a horror of
attracting attention to himself,” published a paper
that drew more attention to him than to almost any
other mathematician in the 19th century. In it he
made an important statement: the non-trivial zeros of
the Riemann zeta function all have real part equal to ½.
That is the Riemann Hypothesis: 15 words encap-
sulating a mystery at the heart of our number sys-
tem. If you read the statement with no mathematical
knowledge, you could still ask a meaningful question
about it. You could work out that there are things
called “non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta func-
tion” and that something is said to be true about all of
them. They all have “real part equal to a half.” The
statement is therefore testable. If we call “non-trivial
zeros of the Riemann zeta function” snarks and any-
thing with “real part equal to a half ” a boojum, those
people who know what the Riemann zeta function is
need only take the snarks and do something with
them that will prove that they all have boojums. They
will also win the prize if they disprove the hypothesis,
by finding one snark that does not have a boojum.
For many mathematicians working on it, $1m is
less important than the satisfaction that would come
from finding a proof. Throughout my researches
among the mathematicians’ tribe (I have interviewed
30 in the past year), Riemann’s Hypothesis was often
described to me in awed terms. Hugh Montgomery
of the University of Michigan said this was the proof
for which a mathematician might sell his soul. Hen-
ryk Iwaniec, a Polish-American mathematician,
sounded as if he were already discussing terms with
Lucifer. “I would trade everything I know in mathe-
matics for the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis,” he
said. “It’s gorgeous stuff. I’m only worried that I’ll be
unable to understand it. That would be the worst...”
What lies behind this 15-word statement is a ques-
tion about prime numbers, the building blocks of our
number system. Despite the self-contained abstrac-
tion of pure maths, prime numbers appear to possess a
concrete “existence.” “Primes are like things you can
touch,” Yoichi Motohashi, a Japanese mathematician
at Nihon University, told me. “In mathematics most
things are abstract but I have some feeling that I can
touch the primes, as if they are physical particles.”
Below is an incomplete list of integers (whole
numbers). Among them, in bold, are the primes:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,
18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32,
33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45…
A prime number cannot be divided by any other

whole number (except 1) without leaving a remain-
der. In their indivisibility, they are like atoms and the
other numbers, known as composites, are like mole-
cules. You cannot “split” 19 into the product of
smaller numbers, like you cannot split an atom into
smaller atoms. Another fact about the primes was
proved by Euclid—they go on forever. However far
you count, you will always come across primes.
Ever since people started counting, the nature of
the primes has aroused interest. Out of one simple
property of these numbers has emerged an edifice of
theory, leading to fields of maths which require years
of training to grasp.
There’s also a lot we do not
know about primes. We do not
know what determines their
distribution among the inte-
gers. Sometimes, as you count
up from one, two of them
come along together, sepa-
rated by one integer; at other
times you could go through
hundreds or thousands of
numbers without finding a
single prime. As mathemati-
cians started to analyse the
statistics of the distribution of
the primes in more detail, they
uncovered a hidden structure
that they could describe but
not explain. The Riemann
Hypothesis would provide an
explanation for that structure.
But a proof of the Riemann
Hypothesis would be far more
significant than providing one
piece in a jigsaw puzzle. It
would form the final piece for
hundreds of puzzles, all
incomplete. Number theory,
the field that investigates inte-
gers, is full of conjectures that
start, “if the Riemann Hypoth-
esis is true, then…” So strong is the feeling among
mathematicians that the Riemann Hypothesis is true,
but too hard to solve, that they have rushed ahead
with other theorems that depend on the hypothesis.
The central element in the Riemann Hypothesis is
a mathematical expression called the Riemann zeta
function. A “function” in mathematics is like a black
box into which you put a number at one end and a dif-
ferent number comes out the other. What is impor-
tant for the Riemann zeta function is that, with certain
inputs, you get zero out at the other end. This can be
illustrated with a simple function, such as x2-4. If you
express this as an equation and put 2 “in one end”—
substitute it for x—you get zero out of the other (22-
4=0). But where the function x2-4 has only two
WITNESS/ SABBAGH
“zeros” (x=2 and x=-2) the hugely more complex Rie-
mann zeta function has an infinite number. All these
zeros, if plotted on a special kind of graph, are
believed to lie in a straight line.
Riemann calculated the positions of the first few
zeros—with difficulty because it was a laborious
task—and they did lie on the expected line. But cal-
culate as many points as you like, you will never be
able to demonstrate that all the points lie in a straight
line, since there is an infinity of them. This has not
stopped mathematicians calculating zeros into the
billions using computers, and no one has yet found a
zero that is off the line. But demonstration is not
proof. One famous conjecture,
called Mertens’ Conjecture,
was true for all numbers up to
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,00
0,000,000,000 but false after
that. Mathematicians can only
move ahead cautiously, know-
ing that their efforts are built
on sand if they rely only on
confirming examples. That is
why a proof of the Riemann
Hypothesis is so desirable.
NYONE WHO thinks
A that mathematicians
are good at mental
arithmetic should meet the
French-American mathemati-
cian, Louis de Branges. We
were discussing the idea that
mathematicians did their best
work while young, and I asked
him when he had made a par-
ticular insight. “Let’s see,” he
said, “I was born in 1932 and I
made the discovery in 1984.
So was I over 50? How old
was I…?” He wrestled with
the problem and then gave up.
I met de Branges because
he said he was putting the final touches to a proof of
the Riemann Hypothesis. It took only two or three
phone calls to other mathematicians to realise that no
one took that seriously. This wasn’t the first time de
Branges had claimed to be near a proof of Riemann.
In their view, there was “no chance” that de Branges
had a proof; he was “always telling people he had a
proof and it was always riddled with errors”; he was
“working in the wrong area,” and so on.
De Branges has a personality that many people
find brusque, obsessive and stubborn. You can see
how colleagues might be deterred from giving his
work on the Riemann Hypothesis the attention he
believes it deserves. But their scepticism made me
want to find out more about de Branges, as a way of
PROSPECT January 2002 45
understanding what the Riemann Hypothesis was
and what mathematicians do when they are trying to
prove it. Here was a man who had been thinking
about the hypothesis for 20 years. Surely he would
know it as well as any mathematician, even if he was
barking up the wrong tree. The history of mathemat-
ics is littered with false proofs. Every major unsolved
problem leads to swathes of amateur attempts land-
ing on the desks of professional mathematicians. But
de Branges had one factor which suggested that he
was not a crank. He had proved the Bieberbach Con-
jecture in 1984, 68 years after it was formulated.
The Bieberbach Conjecture is even more difficult
to explain than the Riemann Hypothesis (it deals
with “normalised injective holomorphic functions”).
But it is enough to know that de Branges’ achieve-
ment earned him the right to be taken seriously as a
mathematician. “When I understood it,” says Xian
Jin Li, who studied under de Branges, “I appreciated
how beautiful his original proof really is.”
Beauty is a concept used by mathematicians (and
other scientists) when they find something that com-
bines truth and simplicity. Like the use of the word in
everyday life, you know it when you see it. It is possi-
ble to distinguish superficial from less superficial
beauties in maths, just as you can between trite and
subtle harmonies in music. But in Wittgensteinian
terms: one cannot explain, one can only show.
Yet something went wrong when de Branges pro-
duced his “beautiful solution.” It is difficult to follow
the events that followed his announcement of his
proof of the Bieberbach Conjecture. In de Branges’
moment of triumph, he believed that credit was
snatched away by jealous colleagues. Nursing his
wounds, he turned to the Riemann Hypothesis and
over the last 15 years has let it be known that he is
near to a proof. He has too much self-belief to con-
sider that he might be wrong and has told me that
2002 will be the year he really offers a watertight
proof of the Riemann Hypothesis.
HE LAST great mathematical problem to be
T solved was Fermat’s Last Theorem. This
problem was much easier to state than the
Riemann Hypothesis, but not much easier to prove.
The theorem states that there is only one value of n
for which whole numbers x, y, and z, can be found to
satisfy the expression xn+yn=zn, and that value is 2.
Like the Riemann Hypothesis, the problem conceals
more than it reveals. As the successful proof showed,
Fermat’s Last Theorem identified a route into fields of
mathematics that were not obviously connected with
the sums of powers of whole numbers. Attempts to
prove it led to most of modern algebra. It is often the
difficulty of proving an apparently simple theorem
that demonstrates its importance to the wider field.
After decades of solitary calculation, the English
mathematician Andrew Wiles published a correct
46 PROSPECT January 2002
proof, which runs to more than 100 pages. But there
were some mathematicians who resented the fact that
Wiles carried out his work in secrecy. More than one
of them wasted years going down blind alleys which
Wiles had already explored and dismissed. Now, with
the stakes even higher, current work on the Riemann
Hypothesis raises the same fears. Whatever mathe-
maticians say about the pure joys of doing mathemat-
ics, there is no denying the human pleasure that
comes from achieving a goal before your colleagues.
Atle Selberg, a distinguished Norwegian number
theorist in his 80s, is believed by many to be pursuing
the Riemann Hypothesis, after working on it for the
last 60 years and making important contributions to
the theory of primes. He has demonstrated that a
positive proportion of the zeros of the Riemann zeta
function do lie on the required straight line. But he
has never in public said that he was near a proof.
When I asked him whether he was looking, he
replied: “my mind is still reasonably alert.”
Henryk Iwaniec is also thought capable of proving
the Riemann Hypothesis. He is an example of a
“younger mind” that has made several minor break-
throughs already. (Mathematics’ “Nobel Prize,” the
Fields medal, goes only to mathematicians under 40.)
Iwaniec sees nothing wrong in keeping promising
results to himself: “collaboration is a nice thing, but
when it comes to the best work, this is too good to
share.” Such are the delights of the field.
André Weil, sister of Simone Weil, compared the
mathematical enterprise to sex: “Every mathemati-
cian worthy of the name has experienced, if only
rarely, the state of lucid exaltation in which one
thought succeeds another as if miraculously. Unlike
sexual pleasure, this feeling may last for hours at a
time, even for days. Once you have experienced it, you
are eager to repeat it but unable to do so at will,
unless perhaps by dogged work.” For many mathe-
maticians the pleasure of practising mathematics out-
weighs almost any other mental or physical pleasure.
Andrew Granville, an English mathematician work-
ing at the university of Georgia, told me: “It’s the
beauty that justifies things… you just have to do it.”
Most mathematicians believe they are making real
discoveries about real objects in a real world. Not our
real world, nor a world whose existence can be con-
clusively demonstrated. But a world of ideas that
appear more real than the ideas of ethics, politics or
aesthetics. There is no ambiguity in a mathematical
discovery. You cannot argue with a mathematical
proof in the way that people argue about other ideas.
It is possible to go further and, as Pythagoras did,
regard mathematics as no less than the secret of the
universe. Scientists from Galileo’s time onward dis-
covered not only that physical phenomena appear to
be perfectly captured by mathematics, but that the
world seems to be mathematical in character. Galileo
called maths, “the language of nature” and Sir Arthur

Eddington said that a study of physics gives us a
“knowledge of mathematical structures.” The physi-
cal universe, for all its diversity, can be described with
precision in terms of a relatively small group of equa-
tions. And where the physicists led the biologists fol-
lowed with their equations for evolution. The mathe-
matical picture of nature makes possible such things
as electric light, space exploration and the destruc-
tion of Hiroshima. (Many people working on the
Manhattan project used sophisticated mathematics to
help work out the behaviour of sub-atomic particles.)
And yet, mathematicians are not, for the most part,
people who do maths to learn about the outside
world. They do maths to learn about maths. When
Riemann first formed his hypothesis he gave no
thought to whether it would improve a future gener-
ations of mobile phones. The surprising thing is, it
might, through a new method of encrypting commu-
nications. But few mathematicians have that as their
aim, although some are paid by companies that will
benefit from such encryption. What drives them is
the pleasure of discovering something new about the
number system, in the same way that a scientist dis-
covers new facts about the
physical universe.
The ideas of theoretical
Mathematicians try to solve
physics start with real objects, Riemann for mathematical
from atoms to galaxies; the
ideas of mathematics start reasons. But it may also help
with concepts and can lead to
descriptions of reality. But are
encryption technology
mathematical objects “out
there” like astronomical objects are? Some philoso-
phers argue that mathematics is the creation of mind.
We define certain concepts—number, or set—and
then define certain operations that can be performed
with them according to certain rules. All the truths
that follow are the logical consequences of these defin-
itions. A change of definitions produces a change in the
resulting truths: witness Alice’s version of multiplica-
tion as she falls down the rabbit-hole. If mathematics is
the product of thought, and reality mathematical in
character, is mind the ultimate reality?
To some mathematicians that philosophical dis-
tinction is unimportant. How the entities referred to
in mathematics—numbers, sets, operations, func-
tions—constitute the solid objects of the world ceases
to matter once you have experienced them first hand.
Matti Jutila from Finland said, “I sometimes have the
feeling that the number system is comparable with the
universe that the astronomer is studying…The num-
ber system is something like a cosmos.”
If you work with integers, discovering properties
that can be demonstrated to other mathematicians,
exploring the relationships between prime numbers,
or squares and higher powers, they acquire a reality
which is hard to deny. You make observations, form
hypotheses, and can test them by gathering data, as
WITNESS/ SABBAGH
observations of the galaxies allows cosmologists to
test theories about the age of the universe.
Leopold Kronecker, a 19th-century German math-
ematician, said, “God gave us the positive integers;
man did all the rest.” This is a compromise that some
mathematicians would accept. There is something so
indisputable about the numbers that a suggested way
of communicating with alien intelligences is by send-
ing them sequences of prime numbers in the belief that
they would recognise them. The rest, the theorems,
hypotheses and conjectures of number theory, includ-
ing the Riemann Hypothesis, may be the work of man.
For other mathematicians, theory is pointless. “I
never think about such a thing, never,” Peter Sarnak
said. “We know what we’re after, we’re working peo-
ple. The philosophy comes when you’re looking back,
taking stock. When you’re out there in the front line,
you can’t start worrying about whether numbers are
real.” When I asked Alexander Ivic, a gravel-voiced
Croatian with several discoveries under his belt,
whether mathematics is discovered or invented, he
said: “I don’t deal with philosophical questions. They
are too unnerving, so to speak.”
I believe that there is
something “out there”; that
mathematics is a description
of something external. It is
hard to think of an endeavour
that has the consistency and
universal acceptability of
mathematics—what has been
called “the unreasonable
effectiveness” of mathematics is difficult to deny.
Since first meeting de Branges, I have been in
touch with him several times and on each occasion
his proof has been imminent. In fact, he once thought
up a crucial ingredient while waiting for my train to
arrive at the station near his French summer home.
But even if he does publish a correct proof, there may
be no mathematician willing to read it. An important
mathematical proof cannot be understood by glanc-
ing at a few pages of symbols. It can run to hundreds
of pages of dense, specialised mathematics. You must
believe that it has a chance of being correct to commit
the time to read it. De Branges may end up in the
strange position of believing that he is the only per-
son who knows the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis.
But for mathematicians like Charles Ryavec, that
solitary satisfaction would not be enough. “I was
talking to a guy once and I said, ‘suppose you’re the
last person on earth: are you going to work on the
Riemann Hypothesis?’ We kind of agreed no. If
you’re the only one left, what are you supposed to do?
Turn off the lights? Shut the door? Do the Riemann
Hypothesis?—it’s not going to be that important.”
“But what if you were among the last five people on
earth, all of them mathematicians?” I asked.
“With five or ten, I probably would,” he said. ■
PROSPECT January 2002 47

SPECIAL REPORT
THE SCIENCE OF
ETERNITY
by Martin Rees OVER THE PAST few centuries, the earth has
aged spectacularly. Its creation has been
The author is the
moved back from 6pm on Saturday, 22nd
astronomer royal and
October, 4004 BC, as calculated by the 17th-
fellow of King’s
century scholar and Archbishop of Armagh,
College, Cambridge
James Ussher, to a time and date some 4.5 bil-
lion years earlier. The story of life has been
stretched back almost as far, and the story of
complex, multicellular life-forms—relative
newcomers—has itself been almost a billion
years in the making. As a result, the way we
see the world has changed profoundly. Not
only can we now have some sense of the mil-
lions of years it takes to raise and then level
mountains, or to open and then close oceans,
we also have the clearest evidence of humani-
ty’s absence throughout those ages. To
Ussher’s mind, the creation of the world and
the creation of humanity were within a week
of one another; to our modern minds, the two
events are unimaginably far apart. There was
a vast absence before us, a physical and bio-
logical world untouched by introspection, and
its record stares out at us from every rock.
If the earth’s past has been stretched, what
of its future? To those of Ussher’s faith, the
end of the world was a certainty and to some
of his contemporaries history was already
nearing its close. Sir Thomas Browne wrote,
“the world itself seems in the wane. A greater
part of Time is spun than is to come.”
To look forward, we must turn from geolo-
gy to cosmology. Current cosmology sug-
gests a future that, if not infinite, dwarfs the
past as much as the depths of time we now
accept dwarf Ussher’s exquisite estimates.
What it cannot tell us, though, is whether
these vast expanses of time will be filled with
life, or as empty as the earth’s first sterile seas.
In the aeons that lie ahead, life could spread
through the entire galaxy, even beyond it—
and outlast it too. But life could also snuff
itself out, leaving an eternity as empty as the
space between the stars.
GETTING VERY HOT
To begin at the beginning, we can, with some
confidence, trace cosmic history back to its
first few seconds, some 12 billion years ago.
But in response to the fundamental question,
“what happened before the beginning?” we
48 PROSPECT January 2002
This century may be a defining
moment for the cosmos. If humans
do not destroy themselves they may
spread beyond the earth into a uni-
verse that could last almost forever.
Life would have tunnelled through
its moment of maximum jeopardy
cannot do much better than St Augustine in
the 5th century, who sidestepped the issue by
arguing that time itself was created with the
universe. The origin of the “big bang” is, in
some ways, as mysterious to us as it was to St
Augustine. Cosmologists who study it are
forced to jettison commonsense ideas, invok-
ing extra spatial dimensions and postulating
that space and time may have an inherently
“grainy” structure on very tiny scales.
The sun—and the earth with it—came into
being when the universe was approximately
two thirds its current age. Minuscule though
they may be in terms of their size, on a cosmic
scale, they are thus of a respectable age. The
sun will continue to shine for five billion
years—longer than it has taken for our earth
to evolve from a lump of molten rock to its
present state. It will then swell up into a red
giant, engulfing the inner planets and vapor-
ising any life that remains on earth.
It is hard to say what life might remain on
the earth at that point. The sun has been get-
ting hotter since its birth and will continue to
do so. This heating has been balanced on
earth, to some extent, by trends that have
tended to cool the planet; the most clear cut of
which, over geological timescales, has been a
long-term drop in carbon dioxide and a resul-
tant weakening of the earth’s natural green-
house effect. This trend, however, cannot con-
tinue for long; carbon dioxide, once more
plentiful in the atmosphere than oxygen, is
now present at a mere 300 parts per million.
Even a drop to zero would not cool the planet
a great deal in the face of increased solar lumi-
nosity—but it would kill off the plants which
rely on carbon dioxide as the raw material for
their photosynthetic growth, and thus remove
oxygen from the atmosphere.
Without the cushion provided by ever-
lower carbon dioxide levels, over the next bil-
lion years the earth will start to feel the
warming of the sun much more than it has in
the past, and when the surface reaches about
50ºC, the increased levels of water vapour will
permit a new form of “runaway” greenhouse
effect that will quickly raise the temperature
high enough to boil the remaining oceans.
Current estimates suggest that the biosphere
cannot survive much beyond a billion years.

© SPL
The Hubble Space
Telescope—gazing
into the long range
cosmic future
So by the time the sun finally licks the
earth’s face clean, life on earth will either be
extinct, spread beyond its original planet or in
a form impervious to extremes of tempera-
ture. Just as the universe is still young, so it
seems that the emergence of intelligence and
complexity is near its cosmic beginnings; we
are far from the culmination of evolution.
Intelligently-controlled modifications could
lead to faster and more dramatic changes than
Darwinian natural selection allows. The
future may lie in artefacts created by us and in
some way descended from us, that develop via
their own directed intelligence. Such entities
might see the death of the sun as a minor or
sentimental matter.
In the 1960s, Arthur C Clarke imagined the
“Long Twilight” after the death of the sun and
today’s other hot stars as a realm at once
majestic and slightly wistful. “It will be a his-
tory illuminated only by the reds and
infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be
almost invisible to our eyes; yet the sombre
hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be
full of colour and beauty to whatever strange
beings have adapted to it. They will know that
before them lie, not the… billions of years that
span the past lives of the stars, but years to be
counted literally in trillions. They will have
time enough, in those endless aeons, to
attempt all things and to gather all knowl-
edge. But for all that, they may envy us, bask-
ing in the bright afterglow of creation; for we
knew the universe when it was young.”
FROM BIG CRUNCH TO ETERNAL EXPANSION
But even after the longest twilight, night will
fall. There will come a time when the
dimmest, slowest-burning stars are done.
While academic cosmologists publish, month
after month, hundreds of scientific papers dis-
cussing the ultra-early universe, they have
SPECIAL REPORT/ REES
written little about this long-range future. But
it is an area ripe for speculation. I can claim to
have made one of the first scientific contribu-
tions to “cosmic futurology” in a short 1968
paper entitled “The Collapse of the Universe:
an Eschatological Study.” Many cosmologists
suspected then that the expansion that cur-
rently characterises our universe would cease
and reverse itself. Galaxies would then fall
towards each other, eventually crashing
together into a “Big Crunch.” I described how,
as galaxies merged together in the countdown
to the crunch, individual stars would acceler-
ate to almost the speed of light (rather as the
atoms speed up in a gas that is compressed).
Eventually these stars would be destroyed as
the blue-shifted radiation from other stars
rushing towards them made the sky above
them hotter than the fires within.
Currently, though, the big crunch is out of
favour; more recent long-range cosmic fore-
casts have predicted that the expansion of the
universe will continue for ever, with its con-
tents becoming ever colder and more diffuse.
Ten years after my paper, the Princeton theo-
rist Freeman Dyson—who would not counte-
nance the Big Crunch because it “gave him a
feeling of claustrophobia”—made scientific
eschatology more respectable in an influential
article called “Time without End: Physics and
Biology in an Open Universe,” published in
the austere scholarly journal Reviews of
Modern Physics. “The study of the remote
future,” Dyson wrote, having noted that the
handful of papers on the subject were written
in an apologetic or jocular style, “still seems to
be as disreputable today as the study of the
remote past was 30 years ago.” He set out to
change the state of affairs with a rigorous
study of the physics of the far future and the
prospects for some sort of life persisting there.
Dyson charted the processes that would
take place after the suns had burned out, and
their timescales; the loss of planets from dead
stars, the slow evaporation of galaxies, the
decay of black holes (a process that takes 1060
years—that is one with 66 zeros behind it for
a stellar-mass hole, and longer for a giant one)
and the eventual transmutation of all remain-
ing matter into iron. That last alchemical
endgame is spun out for such a large number
of years that to write it down would need as
many zeros as there are atoms in all the galax-
ies we can see. That is how long you would
have to wait before a giant quantum fluctua-
tion caused an entire star to “tunnel” into a
black hole. Throughout it all, Dyson imag-
ined, life might persist in some form.
The universe’s usable energy reserves are
finite, and at first sight this might seem to be
a basic restriction on everlasting life. But
Dyson showed that this constraint was not
PROSPECT January 2002 49
 fatal. Just as an infinite series can have a finite
sum (for instance 1 + H + G + … = 2) so there
is no limit to the amount of information pro-
cessing that could be achieved with a finite
expenditure of energy. And the nature of
mathematics ensures that there could be infi-
nite novelty generated in that infinite infor-
mation processing. It might be an odd,
stripped down sort of “life,” a life abstracted to
such an extent that only the most mathemat-
ical of minds could conceive it as life—but it
would not have to be repetitive, and thus
might not have to be dull. The rate at which
the calculations were made would get slower
and slower and enforced periods of hiberna-
tion longer and longer—as Woody Allen said,
“eternity is very long, especially toward the
end”—but life in some form could persist.
WHAT FREEMAN DYSON DIDN’T KNOW
Recent developments in physics have modified
Dyson’s picture in two ways. First, we now
suspect that atoms themselves live for “only”
1036 years—not for ever. In consequence, the
cold remnants of stars and planets (and any
complex entities made of atoms) will erode
away as the atoms within them decay.
Thoughts and memories would only survive
beyond this stage if downloaded into circuits
and magnetic fields in clouds of electrons and
positrons—maybe something that would
resemble the alien intelligence in The Black
Cloud, the most imaginative of Fred Hoyle’s
science fiction novels of the 1950s.
Second, Dyson saw no limit to the scale of
artefacts that could some day be constructed.
He envisioned the observable universe getting
ever vaster, as the expansion of space slowed
down and galaxies whose light has not yet had
time to reach us (galaxies further away in
space than the big bang is in time) slowly
came within range of possible communication
and “networking,” offering scope for ever
larger cosmic construction projects. But with-
in the past few years, cosmologists have dis-
covered to their surprise that the expansion of
the universe is not slowing down at all: some
repulsive force or antigravity seems to be
pushing galaxies apart at an accelerating rate.
This means that, rather than more and more
galaxies coming into contact with us, we will
lose contact with most of the galaxies we can
now see: these galaxies will accelerate towards
the speed of light, eventually receding “over
the horizon” into the unobservable. In the
very distant future, our descendants (if any)
would have lost contact with everything
except the small group of galaxies that con-
tains our own milky way (by then bereft of the
starlight that makes it milky). There would
therefore be a permanent limit on how large
and complex anything can get. Some theorists
50 PROSPECT January 2002
suggest that this limit on the energy and com-
plexity available would preclude infinite nov-
elty and that eternity would become very dull.
The implications of accelerating expansion,
though, need to be put in the context of the
other uncertainties. First, we cannot be sure
that the regions beyond our present horizon
are like the parts of the universe we see, and
this might influence future expansion. For
another thing, there is a theoretical possibility
that the nature of the universe, and the laws
that hold sway in it, might be subject to radi-
cal and unexpected change. Very pure water
can stay liquid below 0ºC—a state known as
supercooling—only to freeze in a flash when a
snowflake falls on it. It has been suggested
that our present “vacuum”—the fundamental
stuff of space time—may also be “super-
cooled,” and thus that some comparatively
minor event could trigger a change to a new
state of being, governed by quite different
laws. There are occasional scares that this sort
of catastrophe could be induced artificially by
experiments that crash particles together with
high energy. Those in charge of the
Brookhaven national laboratory in the US
were cautious enough to commission an
expert assessment on whether any of their
planned experiments could end the universe
this way or trigger some other global cata-
strophe. (Another scare was that a new kind of
atom called “strange matter” could be created
in accelerators, which would by contagion
gradually transform the entire earth into this
new form—a scenario reminiscent of Kurt
Vonnegut’s Ice Nine, where the oceans are
transformed into a new kind of ice with a high
freezing point.) It is reassuring to note that
“cosmic ray” particles, hurtling through space
with far more energy than any terrestrial
experiment can generate, have been hitting
each other, on and off, for billions of years,
without tearing the fabric of space or destroy-
ing the possibility of matter.
THE FUTURE OF TIME TRAVEL
To see any of these wonders far ahead in time
would require a time machine—something
like that contraption of “black and brass”
imagined by HG Wells, just over a century
ago. As Wells’s chrononaut gently eased the
throttle forward, “night came like the turning
out of a light, and in another moment came
tomorrow.” As he sped up “the palpitations of
night and day merged into one continuous
greyness.” Eventually, after some unpleasant-
ness with the Eloi and the Morlocks, he ends
up 30m years hence, in a world where all
familiar forms of life have become extinct. He
then returns to the present, bringing strange
plants as evidence of his trip.
Time travel clashes less with current scien-

tific concepts than it did with those of Wells’
readers at the end of the 19th century.
Einstein has taught us that time is not
“absolute.” If you move almost as fast as light,
or if you are exposed to strong gravity near a
black hole, time is stretched. This may seem
counter-intuitive. But our intuitions are based
on a constricted range of experience. Few of
us have travelled faster than a millionth of the
speed of light (the speed of a jet airliner) and
we live on a planet where gravity is far weak-
er than it is near black holes. But time travel
still takes place, if only on a small scale.
Richard Gott, another Princeton theorist, cal-
culates that the American astronaut Story
Musgrave is a millisecond younger than he
would be if he had not travelled repeatedly
into space. The designers of the extremely
accurate clocks at the heart of the GPS satel-
lite navigation system have
had to take into account the
fact that the clocks on their
satellites measure time at a
slightly different rate to
clocks on the earth.
Time travel into the far
future violates no funda-
mental physical laws. A
spaceship that could travel
at 99.99 per cent of the
speed of light would allow
its crew to “fast forward”
into the future. An astro-
naut who managed to navi-
gate into the closest possi-
ble orbit around a rapidly-
© SPL
spinning black hole without
falling in could, in a subjec-
A home from home? tively short period, view an immensely long
Nebula in galaxy M33, future time span in the external universe.
2.7 million light years Such adventures may be technically challeng-
away ing, but they are not impossible. Nor, rather
more surprisingly, is travel into the past—as
far as we know.
Time, as Wells and his chrononaut knew, is
a fourth dimension, but it is different from the
three dimensions that define space. In three-
dimensional space we can move to the left as
easily as to the right, backward as well as for-
ward, up as well as down. But we seem to be
dragged forward in time willy-nilly. In some
ways this seems like a good thing, since
returning to the past involves the risk of
changing it in such a way that makes history,
or the universe itself, internally inconsistent.
Science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov and
Poul Anderson have imagined busy time-
police trying to keep reality straight, stopping
people from murdering their grandmother, or
engineering the defeat of Charles Martel at
the battle of Tours, or whatever. Physicists,
less in need of plot lines, have preferred to
SPECIAL REPORT/ REES
have such things banned by the laws of nature
rather than the laws of man. But insisting that
time travel cannot change the past is not the
same as saying that time travel cannot happen.
More than 50 years ago, the great logician
Kurt Gödel (Princeton again) invented a
bizarre hypothetical universe, consistent with
Einstein’s theory, that allowed “time loops,” in
which events in the future “cause” events in
the past that then “cause” their own causes,
introducing a lot of weirdness to the world
but no contradictions. (The film, The
Terminator, in which a son sends his father
back in time to save—and inseminate—his
mother, wonderfully combines the insights of
the greatest Austrian-American mind, Gödel,
with the talents of the greatest Austrian-
American body, Arnold Schwarzenegger.)
Several later theorists have used Einstein’s
general theory of relativity (which tells you
how to change the shape of spacetime) to
design “time machines” that might create tem-
poral loops. But these machines are not things
you can build in a Victorian basement. Some of
them need to be of effectively infinite length;
others need vast amounts of energy.
Despite the remoteness of these concepts
from realistic technology, Gödel’s discovery
raised a fundamental question: is time-travel
into the past precluded by a “chronology pro-
tection law?” The science-fiction writer Larry
Niven believes that time travel would create a
chronology protection law; if time travel is
allowed, time travellers will endlessly change
the universe until one of them changes some-
thing so basic that time travel becomes impos-
sible, at which point the universe stabilises
with a new set of laws that rule out time trav-
el. One piece of evidence for the protection of
chronology sometimes put forward is that
time travel is not, in fact, observed: “tourists
from the future” don’t swell the crowds at his-
torical events, as far as we can tell. But this
may tell us only that no time machine has yet
been made, not that it is impossible. Even the-
ories that allow time machines suggest that
they have limitations: a time machine could
not enable its users to travel back prior to the
date of its construction.
If there is no absolute chronological protec-
tion, perhaps there is some subtler means
whereby, while time travel is possible, it never
changes what has already happened. This
would restrict the time traveller’s free will,
but that is nothing new. Physics already con-
strains us: we cannot exercise our free will by
walking on the ceiling. Another option is that
time-travellers would shift into a parallel uni-
verse, where events played out differently
rather than repeating themselves exactly, as in
the film Groundhog Day. Perhaps in the sunless
future, as galaxies fade over the cosmic
PROSPECT January 2002 51
SPECIAL REPORT/ REES
horizon like astronauts sinking
into black holes, it will be
through time travel to parallel
universes that our descendants
stave off the ennui of eternity. As
the long day wanes and the slow
moons climb, they will make off
for newer worlds, endlessly seek-
ing a perfect past.
A DANGEROUS MOMENT FOR LIFE
A hackneyed anecdote among
astronomy lecturers describes a
“This is my husband Michael. He worried questioner asking: “how
knows enough about the eventual long did you say it would be
collapse of the universe to fill the before the sun burnt the earth to
gaps in any conversation”
a crisp?” On receiving the
answer, “five billion years,” the
questioner responds with relief: “thank God
for that, I thought you said five million.” What
happens in far-future aeons may seem blazing-
ly irrelevant to the practicalities of our lives.
But I don’t think it is. It is widely acknowl-
edged that the Apollo programme’s pictures
of the island earth, its fragile beauty contrast-
ed with the stark moonscape, changed the way
we see ourselves in space—strengthening the
collective ties that bind us to our environ-
ment. No new facts were added to the debate;
just a new perspective. A new perspective on
how we see ourselves in time might do some-
thing similar. (That is the hope of the Long
Now Foundation, an organisation devoted to
the construction of clocks and other instru-
ments that can last thousands of years.)
Taking the truly cosmic long view, the view
in which billions of years pass as hours, would
require pictures of the earth, not from the
neighbouring moon, but from light years
away, from some far-off star. Within a few
decades, new generations of space telescopes
should provide the technology to take just
such pictures—to produce images of the plan-
ets around other stars. Will they have bios-
pheres? Will they harbour intelligent life? We
know too little about how life began, and how
it evolves, to be able to say whether alien intel-
ligence is likely or not. The cosmos could
already be teeming with life: if so, nothing
that happens on earth would make much dif-
ference to life’s long-range cosmic future. On
the other hand, advanced life may be rare—so
rare, perhaps, that it is unique to our earth.
The emergence of intelligence may require
such an improbable chain of events that it has
not occurred anywhere else—not around even
one of the trillion billion other stars within
range of our telescopes. Claims that advanced
life is widespread must confront the famous
question first posed by the physicist, Enrico
Fermi: “why aren’t the aliens here?” Why
haven’t they visited earth already, or at least
52 PROSPECT January 2002
manifested their existence in some way? This
argument gains extra weight when we realise
that some stars similar in many ways to our
sun are billions of years older: if life were com-
mon, its emergence should have had a head
start on planets around these ancient stars.
But if earth is the unique abode of intelli-
gence, the fate of our planet could have an
importance that is truly cosmic: it might con-
ceivably be the difference between a near eter-
nity filled with ever more complex and subtle
forms of life and one filled with nothing but
base matter. Yet this fate is finely balanced.
One does not need to believe that the
Brookhaven national laboratory is a threat to
believe that technological civilisation carries
risks that get greater with every century. The
20th century brought us the bomb; the 21st
offers the more far-reaching threats of cata-
strophically replicating rogue nano-machines
and engineered diseases. The latter are the
biggest worry. Within a few years, thou-
sands—even millions—of individuals may
acquire the capability to make and dissemi-
nate weapons that could cause widespread epi-
demics. An organised network of al Qaida
type terrorists would not be required: just one
fanatic or weirdo with the mindset of those
who now design computer viruses. In a few
decades, such individuals may be able to trig-
ger truly global catastrophes. Even if all
nations applied a strict precautionary princi-
ple to dangerous procedures, the chances of
effective worldwide enforcement are small.
There is also, of course, the possibility of acci-
dents in the most respectable of institutions.
Pessimism on these matters seems the
rational stance. But technology also offers
hope. Perhaps, by the end of the century, self-
sustaining communities will have been estab-
lished away from the earth—on the moon, on
Mars, or freely floating in space. Although it
will be little consolation to those on earth,
life’s long-term cosmic potential could there-
after not be quenched by any terrestrial cata-
strophe: life would have “tunnelled through”
its era of maximum jeopardy. This is the best
reason for prioritising programmes of
manned, rather than unmanned, spaceflight.
(New technologies may offer another option
too: downloading our blueprint into inorganic
memories that could be launched into space.)
The most crucial location in space and time
(apart from the big bang itself) could be here
and now. This new century, on this planet,
may be a defining moment for the cosmos.
Our actions could initiate the irreversible
spread of life beyond the solar system. Or, in
contrast, through malign intent, or through
misadventure, 21st-century technology could
jeopardise life’s cosmic potential when its
evolution has still barely begun. ■
 prospectdebate
Biotechnology:
our slippery slope?
GREGORY STOCK
is director of Medicine,
Technology and Society
at UCLA and author of
“Redesigning Humans”
(Profile)
Dear Francis
18th March 2002
The current dispute about cloning is
a proxy for broader fears about the
new technologies emerging from our
unravelling of human biology. Critics
like yourself imagine that if we can
stop cloning, we can head off possi-
bilities like human “enhancement.”
But as we decipher our biology we
learn to modify ourselves—and we
will do so. No laws will stop this.
Embryo selection, for example, is
feasible in thousands of labs around
the world. Any attempt to block it
will increase the potential dangers of
the technology by driving it out of
sight and depriving us of early indi-
cations of medical or social problems.
The best reason not to curb inter-
ventions that many people see as safe
and beneficial is not that such a ban
would be dangerous, but that it would
be wrong. A ban would prevent people
from making choices that are intend-
ed to improve their lives and would
hurt no one. Such choices should be
allowed. It is hard to see how a soci-
ety that encourages us to stay healthy
and vital could justify, for instance,
54 PROSPECT June 2002
trying to stop people from undergo-
ing genetic therapy or consuming
drugs aimed at retarding ageing.
Imposing such a ban requires more
compelling logic than the assertion
that we should not play God or that,
as you have said, it is wrong to tran-
scend a “natural” life span.
Also, a serious effort to block ben-
eficial technologies that might
change our natures would require
policies so harsh and intrusive that
their harm would be far greater than
that feared from the technologies
themselves. If the war on drugs—
with all its resources—has failed, the
government has no hope of with-
holding access to technologies that
people see as beneficial. Even without
aggressive enforcement, such bans
would reserve the technologies for
the privileged. When abortion was
illegal in some US states, the rich just
travelled to more permissive places.
Laboratories can now screen a six-
cell human embryo by teasing out a
single cell, reading its genes and let-
ting parents decide whether to
implant or discard the embryo. In
Germany, such screening is criminal.
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
is a professor at Johns
Hopkins University
and author of
“Our Posthuman
Future” (Profile)
But this does not deny the technolo-
gy to affluent Germans. They can
take a trip to Brussels or London,
where it is legal. As such screenings
become easier and more informative,
genetic disease could gradually be
relegated to society’s disadvantaged.
We need to think about how to make
the tests more, not less accessible.
If parents can easily and safely
choose embryos, wouldn’t they pick
ones with predispositions toward
various talents and temperaments?
They might. But policies in Britain to
block innocuous choices like the sex
of a child are a good example of
undesirable state intrusion. Letting
parents who strongly desire a girl (or
boy) be sure to have one neither
injures the resulting child nor causes
gender imbalances in western coun-
tries. A few interventions will arise
that virtually everyone would find
troubling, but we can wait until actu-
al problems occur before moving to
control them. These coming repro-
ductive technologies are not like
nuclear weapons, where large num-
bers of innocent bystanders can sud-
denly be vaporised. We have the lux-

ury of feeling our way forward, see-
ing what problems develop, and care-
fully responding to them.
The real danger is that vague
threats to our values will be used to
justify unwarranted political incur-
sions that delay medical advances. If,
out of concern over cloning, the US
Congress criminalises embryonic
stem-cell research that might bring
treatments for Alzheimer’s or dia-
betes—and you lent your name to a
petition that supported such laws—
there would be real victims: present
and future sufferers of those diseases.
We are not devoting massive
resources to the life sciences out of
idle curiosity, but in an effort to bet-
ter our lives. Of course, the resultant
technologies pose challenges: they
will alter the way we conceive chil-
dren, the way we manage our moods
and even life spans. We will be forced
to confront the question of what it
means to be human. Do we have the
courage to embrace the possibilities
ahead, or will we succumb to our
fears and draw back, leaving this
exploration to braver souls in other
regions of the world?
Yours
Gregory
Dear Gregory
19th March 2002
You offer two arguments against
restricting future biotechnologies:
first, that such rules are unnecessary
as long as reproductive choices are
being made by individual parents
rather than states, and second, that
they cannot be enforced and would
be ineffective even if they were to be
enacted. Let me respond to both.
While genetic choices made by
parents are on the whole likely to be
better than those made by coercive
states, there are several grounds for
We are not devoting
resources to the life
sciences out of curiosity,
but to better our lives
GREGORY STOCK
GREGORY STOCK versus
not letting individuals have complete
freedom of choice in this regard.
The first two are utilitarian. When
we get into human germline engi-
neering, safety problems will multi-
ply exponentially. Genetic causation
is complex, with multiple genes
interacting to create one outcome or
behaviour, and single genes having
multiple effects. When a long-term
genetic effect may not show up for
decades after the procedure was
administered, parents will risk a mul-
titude of unintended and irreversible
consequences for their children. This
calls for strict regulation.
A second utilitarian concern has to
do with possible negative externali-
ties, the classic ground for state reg-
ulation, accepted by even orthodox
free-market economists. An example
is sex selection. Today in Asia, as a
result of cheap sonograms and abor-
tion, cohorts are being born with
extremely lopsided sex ratios—117
boys for every 100 girls in China, and
at one point 122 boys for every 100
girls in Korea. Sex selection is ratio-
nal from the standpoint of individual
parents, but imposes costs on society
in terms of the social disruption that
a large number of unattached young
males can produce. Similar negative
externalities can arise from individ-
ual choices, for example, to prolong
life at the cost of a lower level of cog-
nitive and physical functioning.
A further set of concerns about the
ability to “design” children has to do
with the ambiguity of what consti-
tutes improvement of a human, par-
ticularly when we get into aspects of
personality. We are the product of a
complex evolutionary adaptation to
our physical and social environment.
Genetic interventions made out of
faddishness or political correctness
might upset that balance in ways that
we don’t understand—in the interests
of, say, making boys less aggressive,
girls more assertive, people more or
less competitive. Would an African-
American child be “improved” if we
could genetically eliminate his or her
skin pigmentation?
The final issue concerns human
nature itself. Human rights are ulti-
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
Our liberal democratic
order will not survive if
we genetically engineer
different types of humans
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
mately derived from human nature.
That is, we assign political rights to
ourselves based on our understand-
ing of the ways members of our
species are similar to one another,
and different from other species. We
are fortunate to be a relatively homo-
geneous species. Earlier views that
blacks were not intelligent enough to
vote, or that women were too emo-
tional to be granted equal political
rights, proved to be empirically false.
The final chapter of your book opens
up the prospect of a future in which
this homogeneity splinters, under the
impact of genetic engineering, into
competing human biological kinds.
What kind of politics do we imagine
such a splintering would produce?
The idea that our present-day toler-
ant, liberal, democratic order would
survive these kinds of changes is far-
fetched: Nietzsche, not JS Mill or
Rawls, should be your guide to the
politics of such a future.
Your second set of arguments
asserts that no one can stop this tech-
nology. You are certainly right that if
a future biotechnological technique
proves safe, cheap, effective and high-
ly desirable, governments would not
be able to stop it and probably should
not try. What I want, however, is not
a ban on wide swathes of future tech-
nology, but strict regulation in light
of the dangers outlined above.
Today we regulate biomedical
technology all the time. People argue
about where to draw various lines.
But the argument that procedures as
potentially unsafe as, say, germline
engineering for enhancement pur-
poses, cannot in principle be regulat-
ed has no basis in past experience.
We slow the progress of science
today for all sorts of ethical reasons.
Biomedicine could advance faster if
we abolished our rules on human
experimentation, as Nazi researchers
PROSPECT June 2002 55

If the war on drugs has
failed, the state will not be
able to ban technologies
that people find beneficial
GREGORY STOCK
did, and allowed doctors to inject
infectious substances into their sub-
jects. We enforce rules permitting
the therapeutic use of drugs like
Ritalin, while prohibiting their use
for enhancement or entertainment.
The argument that these technolo-
gies will move to more favourable
places if they are banned in the US
may or may not carry weight; it all
depends on what they are and what
the purpose of the regulation is. I
regard a ban on reproductive cloning
to be analogous to legislation ban-
ning incest. The purpose of such a
ban would not be undermined if a few
rich people could get themselves
cloned outside the country and, in
any event, much of the world seems
to be moving to a global reproductive
cloning ban. The fact that the
Chinese may not be on board should
not carry much weight; the Chinese
harvest organs from executed prison-
ers without permission and are hard-
ly an example we want to emulate.
I don’t think that a set of regula-
tions designed to focus future bio-
medicine on therapeutic rather than
enhancement purposes constitutes
oppressive state intervention or goes
far beyond the realm of what is done
today. You are in effect saying that
since rules against doping in athletics
don’t work 100 per cent of the time,
we should throw them out all togeth-
er and have our athletes compete in
56 PROSPECT June 2002
the future on the basis of who has the
best pharmacologist.
Yours
Francis
Dear Francis
20th March 2002
You are so suspicious of change in
general and new technology in par-
ticular that you won’t even acknowl-
edge the desirability of allowing peo-
ple to use safe and beneficial inter-
ventions that would almost certainly
improve their lives. You will only
admit that if a technology is “safe,
cheap, effective, and highly desirable,
government probably should not try
to stop it.” If you won’t even embrace
technologies that meet this high
threshold, you would never allow the
more problematic possibilities of the
real world. But facing such possibili-
ties is what has improved health so
greatly during the past century.
For the most part, you are vague
when it comes to precisely what we
should prevent. You are specific
about banning human cloning, but
that is about as risky as coming out
for motherhood. A more interesting
situation is sex selection. I argued
that in the US, such selection—
which can be done by sorting sperm
so that no embryos are destroyed—is
innocuous. Sex selection does not
harm children; indeed, it benefits
them when a child of the “wrong” sex
would seriously disappoint his or her
parents. You bring up the imbalance
in sex ratios in China, but this does
not justify regulating the practice in
the US, where such imbalances do
not arise. You oppose sex selection in
the US and have proposed the forma-
tion of a review board, like the one in
Britain that has barred this proce-
dure, but do you have anything better
to offer than a fear that the practice
would be a step down a slippery
slope? If you see a serious externali-
ty arising from sex selection in the
US, I would like to hear it.
In response to my comments about
the obvious benefit of future anti-
ageing medications, you point out
that “negative externalities can arise
from individual choices to prolong
life at the cost of a lower level of cog-
©TERESA HANSEN
nitive and physical functioning.” This
is true, but it is a frightening basis for
legislation. I shudder to think about
regulatory boards tasked with bal-
ancing the additional years that an
individual seeks against the social
cost of those years. If you do not
want to allow interventions to slow
the onset of ageing and bring longer
lives of relative health, then why not
block all treatments for the aged and
debilitated? Their extra years are a
net cost, and withholding medical
treatment for those over 65 would
work wonders on America’s ailing
social security system. It isn’t much
of a step to go even further and block
medical interventions that save acci-
dent victims with crippling injuries.
You no doubt feel that a sharp line
between therapy and enhancement
will avoid such perversions, but this
line will increasingly blur in the
years ahead. Anti-ageing interven-
tions, for example, fall in a large
realm that is best labelled “therapeu-
tic enhancement.” If we could gain an
extra decade by strengthening our
immune system or our anti-oxidation
and cellular repair mechanisms, this
would be a human “enhancement.”
But it would also be a “preventive
therapy,” because it would delay car-
diovascular disease, dementia, cancer,
and other illnesses of ageing.
Banning enhancement from sport
can obviously be justified as a viola-
tion of the agreed rules of the game.
But neither you nor our political
institutions have a recognised right
to set the rules of life. Outlawing a
whole realm of benefits that are not
injuring others is not only impracti-
cal, it is tyranny. You are right about
the ambiguities of “improvement,”
but I have not suggested some grand
government project that seeks
human perfection. I have spoken only
of free parental choices that are like-
ly to lead towards greater diversity.
I do not argue that parents need no
oversight in the use of advanced
technology for the conception of
children, merely that it should be
minimal, should address real rather
than imagined problems, and should

be concerned with the child’s safety
rather than social order or the per-
sonhood of embryos. When it comes
to children, I trust the judgement of
individual parents more than that of
political or judicial panels.
Yours
Gregory
Dear Gregory
21st March 2002
You have misunderstood a couple of
the points in my initial response. The
issue with regard to sex selection is
not that it would be a problem in the
US; it is possible now, after all, but
not widely practised. The point is
that individual choice coupled with
the spread of cheap biomedical tech-
nologies can quickly produce popula-
tion-level effects with serious conse-
quences. The problem with eugenics
is not simply that it is state-spon-
sored and coercive; if practised by
enough individuals, it could also have
negative social consequences.
I suspect that if the US ever gets
into something like this in the future,
it will have to do with potential
“enhancement” targets other than
sex. One I speculate about in my
book is sexual preference. It seems
clear to me that if parents, including
ones who are perfectly accepting of
gays, had the choice they would
select against their children being
gay, if for no other reason than their
desire to have grandchildren. The
proportion of gays in the population
could drop dramatically and I’m not
sure that society as a whole (let alone
gays) would be enhanced as a result.
Governments can intervene suc-
cessfully to correct individual choices
like these. The sex ratio imbalance in
Korea that emerged in the early
1990s was noticed, and the govern-
ment took measures to enforce exist-
ing laws against sex selection so that
today the ratio is much closer to 50-
50. If the government of a young
democracy like Korea can do this, I
don’t see why we couldn’t.
The reason I noted that life exten-
sion coupled with diminished capa-
bility can create negative externali-
ties was not to suggest that we
GREGORY STOCK versus
should ban or regulate such proce-
dures. You are perfectly right that we
already have adopted a lot of medical
innovations that produce this trade-
off. But the reason this is an impor-
tant issue is that in debates over stem
cells and cloning there is an unques-
tioned assumption that anything that
will prolong life or cure disease obvi-
ously trumps other concerns.
This is not obvious to me. Anyone
who has walked around a nursing
home recently can see that past
advances in biomedicine have created
a horrible situation for many elderly
people who can’t function at the lev-
els they would like, but who also can-
not die. New advances in biotechnol-
ogy may provide cures for degenera-
tive, age-related diseases such as
Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, but the
research community is in effect just
cleaning up the mess it created. So
when we balance near-term rights
and wrongs, the argument that more
medical advance is necessarily good
needs to be treated with scepticism.
You are right in saying that much
of my interest in having new regula-
tory institutions in place has to do
with ethical and social consequences
of new technology, and not simply
safety. States intervene all the time to
shape norms and produce social out-
comes. The possible benefits of
cloning need to be balanced against
social harms. Consider the following
scenario: a wife decides to clone her-
self because a couple cannot other-
wise have children. As their daughter
grows up, the husband will find his
wife growing older and less sexually
attractive. In the meantime, his
daughter, who will be a duplicate of
her mother, will blossom into sexual
maturity and increasingly come to
resemble the younger woman the
husband fell in love with. It is hard to
see how this situation would not pro-
duce a very unhealthy situation with-
in the family; in a certain number of
cases, it would lead to incest.
I do not want tyrannical intrusion
into private lives. Rather, I am rec-
ommending an extension of existing
institutions to take account of the
new possibilities that will be put
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
before us as a result of technological
advance. This may result in regula-
tion irksome to industry and to cer-
tain individuals but it will be no more
tyrannical than existing rules ban-
ning incest or, in the case of the
Koreans, banning sex selection. All
societies control social behaviour
through a web of norms, economic
incentives and laws. All I am sug-
gesting is that the law part of the mix
will need to be updated and strength-
ened in light of what is to come.
Yours
Francis
Dear Francis
22nd March 2002
I’m glad you agree that sex selection
in the US poses no serious threat. To
me, this means it should not be regu-
lated. Moreover, we should also hold
off on legislating against other such
technologies until problems show up.
You may worry about rapid “popula-
tion-level effects with serious conse-
quences,” but your example of
Korea’s success at handling its sex-
ratio imbalances is surely evidence
that we can afford to wait.
Consider your argument about
cloning. It is one thing to worry
When a genetic effect
may not show up for
decades, there is a big risk
of unintended effects
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
PROSPECT June 2002 57
GREGORY STOCK versus
about the medical dangers of an
unproven technology, another to jus-
tify a complete ban with stories about
a future father’s possible sexual
attraction for his wife’s budding
clone-daughter. Children hardly need
to resemble a parent to inspire incest.
We cannot start regulating families
on the basis of hypothetical sexual
perversions. We have laws governing
child abuse; let’s just enforce them.
As to gays, if there are fewer in the
future because of people’s choices
about the genetics or rearing of their
children, so be it. But I am not con-
vinced it would play out that way.
Contrary to what you imply, gays do
reproduce, using donor eggs or
sperm, surrogate mothers, and part-
ners of the opposite sex. Moreover,
such reproduction will get easier.
I’m glad to hear that you don’t
oppose anti-ageing interventions;
I’ve previously heard you say only
that government would be unable to
block such enhancements. You are
right that advances in health care
bring many challenges, and that the
needless prolongation of a dying per-
son’s pain and decrepitude is nothing
to boast about. That is no reason to
deny the value of the good added
years that modern medicine has
brought so many, but to recognise
that we must find better ways for
individuals to reach death with digni-
ty when it draws near.
You say you are urging only a
harmless extension of existing insti-
tutions. I disagree. The handing over
of decisions about human reproduc-
tion to a political process typically
driven by zealots on either side
would invite disaster. New agencies
with the power to project social the-
ory, and even religious dogma into
family life would be a frightening
development. (Judging from the com-
position of President Bush’s bioethics
advisory commission, many regula-
tors would be less moderate than
you.) And when lawmakers start
telling researchers not to do certain
types of embryonic stem cell research
because adult stem cells will work
just as well, something is wrong.
These legislators are micromanaging
58 PROSPECT June 2002
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
a realm they do not understand,
assaulting freedom of inquiry and
ignoring the entreaties of those
afflicted with serious diseases.
Yours
Gregory
Dear Gregory
23rd March 2002
One of the virtues of your book is
that you are willing to take risks in
predicting what changes might be in
store in the long-run future in terms
of enhancement technology. In your
final chapter, you suggest a number
of things that might happen in a
future world in which various forms
of enhancement become safe, effec-
tive and inexpensive. You suggest
that reproduction via sex may disap-
pear altogether as a result of the dif-
ficulties of handling artificial chro-
mosomes in vivo. Reproduction could
not happen outside a lab. We could
freely alter our personalities and
moods through drugs and genetics.
But most importantly the human
race disappears. You suggest that
there will be differentiation within
our species and, in effect, new specia-
tion. Some people may decide to
enhance their children for musical
ability, athletic prowess, or mathe-
matical talent. There will be a social
divide between the enhanced and the
unenhanced, and in the situation that
will emerge, it will be difficult for
people not to join in this genetic
arms race. Moreover, genetic differ-
entiation will become a cornerstone
of international politics. If we and the
Germans decide not to take part, the
Chinese will charge ahead with self-
enhancement and then we as a nation
will be challenged to follow suit.
What I don’t understand is why
anyone thinks that in this kind of
world—one in which the existing
genetic homogeneity of humans is
being undermined—we will be able
to continue to live within the nice,
liberal democratic framework that we
currently enjoy. You argue as if we
could presume the continuity of that
political world, and that the biggest
arguments we will have will concern
whether we have a little more regula-
tion and less progress, or the reverse.
But what will happen to equality of
opportunity when a non-musically
enhanced child aspires to be a musi-
cian, which has become not just the
territory of a guild of musicians, but
of a subspecies of musicians whose
genetic identity is tied up in that way
of life? Why shouldn’t the enhanced
start demanding superior rights for
themselves and seek to dominate the
unenhanced, since they will be supe-
rior not just as a result of social sta-
tus and education, but because of
genetic enhancements as well? What
is going to happen to international
conflict, when other, hostile societies
are not only culturally different but
not fully human, either?
The fact is that there will be no
theoretical or practical reason at that
point not to abandon the principle of
universal human equality. It is
strongly believed today, in part as a
matter of faith but also in part
because it is empirically supported.
When the principle was enunciated
in 1776, blacks and women were not
granted political rights in North
America because it was believed that
they were too stupid, or too emotion-
al, or otherwise lacking in some
essential human characteristic, to be
granted equal rights. This view
resurfaced as scientific racism in the
20th century, and one of the great
achievements of our time is that both
the empirical doctrine and the poli-
tics built on it have been discredited.
So if we are going to embrace this
technology and the prospect of
human self-enhancement, we ought
to do it with our eyes open. We
should say, with Nietzsche, that this
is a wonderful opportunity because
we can finally transcend liberal
democracy and re-establish the possi-
bility of natural aristocracy, of social
hierarchy, of the pathos of distance
and otherwise usher in an era of
“immense wars of the spirit.”
Yours
Francis
Reprinted in edited form from Reason
Online. ©Reason Foundation, 3415 S
Sepulveda Blvd, Suite 400, Los Angeles,
CA 90034 www.reason.com
portrait
by Andrew Brown
BILL HAMILTON
He was the greatest biologist of
the 20th century yet, to the dismay
of his many friends and admirers,
he believed that only a radical
programme of infanticide and
eugenics could save the human race
quite sure what killed Bill
N
O ONE WAS
Hamilton in March 2000, but it was
widely supposed that he had died of
malaria, contracted on an expedition to
sample chimpanzee faeces in the
Congo. What everyone knew for certain was that
with his passing had gone the greatest evolutionary
thinker of the late 20th century. Richard Dawkins
certainly thought so. In a moving and delicate eulogy,
he said that meeting Hamilton was the closest a mod-
ern biologist could come to meeting Darwin.
In his famous book The Selfish Gene, first published
in 1976, Dawkins had produced a thrilling synthesis
of the three key 20th century developments in Dar-
winian thought: genetics, ethology (the study of ani-
mal behaviour) and game theory. But the most origi-
nal aspect of the book derived from the work of
Hamilton. It explained how ruthless competition
between genes could produce selfless co-operation in
the organisms that carry them. “Biological altruism”
is the quality which explains why bees sting in
defence of their hives, even though it kills them to do
so. This puzzled the young Hamilton, as it had puz-
zled Darwin. Bees that kill themselves must leave
fewer descendants than those which hang back, so if
a tendency to self-sacrifice is inherited, it would
surely vanish in competition with tendencies to more
selfish behaviour. But this kind of co-operation has
not vanished. On the contrary, in some species, it has
increased. So, over countless generations, the more
altruistic bees must have outcompeted the selfish
Andrew Brown’s book about a very small, transparent
hermaphrodite, “In the Beginning Was the Worm,” will be
published in February by Simon and Schuster
60 PROSPECT January 2003
ones, something that seems to entail a contradiction
in Darwinian logic. The central insight of selfish
gene theory dissolves this apparent contradiction: it
holds that altruistic behaviour of this sort will spread
and increase if it benefits relatives of the altruist, who
are also likely to carry the altruistic gene and thus to
leave descendants who will in turn sacrifice them-
selves for their relatives, and so on. The gene for
altruistic behaviour in bees competes for survival
with a gene for more selfish behaviour. The result of
this “strategic” competition between bee genes can be
co-operation among bees. As a graduate student,
working in obscurity, Hamilton had formulated and
made mathematically rigorous this idea of “inclusive
fitness.” In some ways, it resembled Adam Smith’s
invisible hand, but Hamilton’s formula was more pre-
cisely defined than the economic version.
The central insight was older than Hamilton, but
he came upon it independently and was the first per-
son to do the maths which showed exactly when and
how genes spread in this way. When his first papers
on the subject were published, in 1963 and 1964, they
were barely noticed. Even today, few people have read
the originals or fought through the dense thickets of
equations they contain; but their central ideas are
now commonplace. Having worked out the mathe-
matics of selfish genery, he was also the first person
to suggest that in order to understand the world bet-
ter, we look at it from a gene’s perspective. This was a
thought experiment as audacious and almost as
important as Einstein’s wondering what light would
look like if you were moving at the speed of light.
These feats alone would have secured his immor-
tality, but he went on to work on almost every other
interesting problem of recent biology. He was inter-
ested in the origins of ageing: why do we grow old
when it would surely be to the advantage of our
genes for us to live as long as possible? He found rea-
sons to suggest that genes for senescence may be
selected for, if they lead to advantages earlier in life,
when we are reproducing. He was also one of the first
people to bring game theory and evolution together.
And his later work pioneered the use of computer
simulations in mathematical biology. He helped to
solve the puzzle of why animals cluster together into
flocks or shoals, although this makes them easier for
the hunters to find. (It is to do with the fact that the
benefit of being on the inside accrues to more animals
than are endangered on the outside.)
The last 20 years of his life were spent trying to
solve a single problem. Why do genes get involved in
sex? It was self-evident to Hamilton why we (and
other animals) get involved in sex: because it must be
good for our genes. But why? What’s in it for the
genes, when they could be making clones instead? An
animal that makes clones of itself passes on all its
genes to the next generation. But in sexual organ-
isms, half of our genes come from one parent and half

from the other. So half of the parental genes do not
make it to the next generation at all. This is a puzzle.
Why have sexual species not been replaced by clonal
ones? Hamilton spent the latter half of his life on this
problem—we’ll come to his solution later—but in
1996 he displayed an unsuspected side to his talent by
republishing all his early papers along with prefaces
describing how they were written. It formed the first
volume of Narrow Roads of Gene Land—one of the
oddest scientific autobiographies ever written.
The writing was passionate, vivid, and informed
by very wide reading: he quoted authors from
Sophocles to AE Housman without
strain or affectation. Reading it, you
feel that you know him, and that he
is a profoundly loveable man. He
certainly was profoundly loved, as
became apparent when he died, in
the tributes from Englishmen
generally given to emotional
reserve: “He was kind, and humble,
and gentle, and I loved him,”
said Richard Dawkins.
Yet there were signs, even
in this first volume, that
Hamilton did not much
care for the human race.
He described his loneli-
ness as a poor graduate
student in London, bat-
tling against the discour-
agement of his supervi-
sor, who believed it was
a waste of time to look
for genetic roots to
altruism. He walked
around London, not
only to save money: “I
STEPHEN LEE
wanted to conjure up
and recreate somehow,
below the bricks and
mortar around me, the
marshy fields that had once
been there, the streams dividing them, and the heaths
beyond—to seek elemental forces underlying the city.
Even a lonely child crying on the street did not tug
my heart as hard as a bracken fern when I saw it, for
example, in the valley of the stream once called the
Fleet—a plant etiolated and pale, standing up from
the deep wells of basement windows, its fronds
reaching to the level of the street.”
At times he would work on benches in train sta-
tions, or in Kew Gardens, just to escape the solitude
of his bedsit. Yet it is difficult to avoid the conclusion
that the force that drove him to the outskirts of soci-
ety was not humility, but something more like the
pride of Lucifer: he would rather have reigned in a
bedsit than serve, unnoticed, at the LSE. (His unfash-
PORTRAIT/ BROWN
ionable interest in the role of genes in the behaviour
of animal populations took him to the LSE demogra-
phy department after graduating from Cambridge
with only a moderate upper second in genetics.)
Most of his friends thought him a humble man
because he ignored the small change of everyday life.
He cycled everywhere, at high speed; that’s how the
first grant cheque intended to establish his work in
Oxford flew out of the carrier basket of his bicycle.
He was a quiet man in company; quiet even when he
was lecturing—he tended to face the blackboard
and mutter at his equations. He himself described
his attitude to society as “approaching autism.”
At the end of the first volume of his mem-
oirs, he recounts his changing attitude to the
world in the 1970s, as his ideas became
accepted: “For some time this solitary
bear-like animal [himself] had been
feeling a wind of change, a degree
of acceptance, less need to
shrink from the shadows either
of himself or of future compan-
ions… I drew in a little my
savage muzzle, sloughed
some winter fur; shortly
as I took another path
I began to imagine my-
self human.”
This is entirely of a
piece with Hamilton’s
ideas of what males are for:
they are doomed to compete,
and whatever the cause of
sex may turn out to be, its
rationale is that it cleans the
gene pool by filtering out
useless babies early, and a
little later removing the sub-
standard males who do
not reproduce. Since suc-
cess in reproduction is
closely tied to status, and
status is the product of
competition between males,
the low-status male really would be better off dead,
with his genes trying their luck in the company
of relatives’ bodies.
Like most men driven enough to achieve some-
thing great, he believed that death was preferable to
failure: “I strongly reject the idea that parents should
welcome ill-health in their offspring because the
handicapped child’s achievements, great or small,
should somehow elevate the spirits, the humanity,
and what not, in all concerned. In fact this view illus-
trates quite well what I meant about natural selection
being less cruel than many moralists are.”
He married in 1967 and had three daughters. Dur-
ing the 1970s he became, by his standards, solvent.
PROSPECT January 2003 61
By the mid-1980s, his early ideas had become the
orthodoxy of a new Darwinian faith that was sweep-
ing all before it. They were recognised as putting
biology onto a sounder theoretical footing. When he
returned to Oxford from the University of Michigan
in Ann Arbor in 1984, it was to a professorship set up
on the recommendation of the scientist, Lionel Pen-
rose, who had spurned him in his youth.
not mellow him much. His ideas
S
UCCESS DID
maintained their spiky and disturbing quality.
In part this was because of his remorseless con-
centration on the theme of natural selection. Every-
thing in nature, he believed, could be explained as the
outcome of competition between genes, down to such
details as the colour of leaves in autumn. To read his
writing about life on earth is to wander in a Martian
landscape, where the rocks have been carved by
strange winds. But by the end of his life, this strange-
ness was taken to certify his genius. Biologists cannot
win Nobel prizes unless the rules are bent, but
Hamilton had won all the most glittering prizes that
a biologist can. His profes-
sorship at Oxford was
arranged so that he only had Most scientists grow more
to give one undergraduate
lecture a year. Often he for- respectable with age, Hamilton
got even that.
But where most scientists,
never lost interest in theories
as they grow older, grow on the edge of respectability
more conventional, Hamil-
ton never lost his interest in
theories on the edge of respectability. He put a value
on oddness and intellectual solitude for its own sake.
He had a fondness for the Aquatic Ape hypothesis: he
believed that if humanity had spent a crucial period
evolving along the sea shore, this would have made
us more altruistic than we became on a broad savan-
nah, by ensuring that neighbouring tribes were more
closely related to each other. He took seriously the
Gaia hypothesis, which seems to have embarrassed
most of the Oxford zoologists who revered his teach-
ings. Most controversially, he became convinced by
the theory, elaborated by a journalist named Ed
Hooper, that the Aids epidemic was the result of a
terrible human error; that the disease had originally
been spread in Africa by a polio vaccine manufactured
with the kidneys of infected chimpanzees.
The evidence for this was entirely circumstantial.
The Wistar Institute, the drug company involved,
denied that it had used chimpanzee kidneys at all in
the preparation of the vaccine but there was no doubt
that the pattern and timing of the earliest recorded
outbreaks in Africa coincided pretty well with the
pattern of the vaccination campaigns in the late
1950s. Hamilton saw the story as an awful warning
of the dangers of modern medicine. He subsidised
Hooper’s book, The River, with the profits of one of
62 PROSPECT January 2003
his prizes; and when the book came out after nine
years’ labour, he contributed an enthusiastic fore-
word. It was his efforts to prove the book’s story that
killed him. In the winter of 1999-2000, he set off to
collect chimpanzee shit samples from the Congolese
jungle to see if they showed traces of HIV. While in
the bush, he felt himself coming down with malaria.
The expedition had anti-malarial drugs, and Hamil-
ton was given them. But he also treated himself with
insoluble aspirin. No one knows where it came from,
but it was found in his gut after it had killed him; for
he was also suffering from ulcers, and the aspirin
caused a massive haemorrhage in his stomach from
which he never recovered. He was only 63.
It was an extraordinary death, although quite of a
piece with his attitude to risk and to medicine. He had
skied regularly to work across a frozen river in
Michigan, skirting holes in the ice. He was proud of
his physical prowess, doing pull-ups on trees in his
garden, and cycling around Oxford without a helmet
even after many accidents, including one where he
was thrown through the windscreen onto the back
seat of a car and just asked to
be driven to hospital. He
didn’t think modern medi-
cine could save humanity and
it is doubtful he would have
wanted it to save him.
For his former pupils, and
admirers, scattered through
the media as well as in the
academic world, he was the
greatest biologist of the 20th century. John Maynard
Smith, Hamilton’s only rival for that title in Britain,
once called him “the only bloody genius we’ve got.”
Robert Trivers, the discoverer of reciprocal altruism,
said, “He had the most subtle, multi-layered mind I
have ever encountered. What he said often had dou-
ble and even triple meanings so that, while the rest of
us speak and think in single notes, he thought in
chords.” For The Economist, where Matt Ridley, a for-
mer collaborator, and Olivia Judson, a former pupil,
had worked, he was the man who “erected… an edi-
fice of ideas stranger, more original and more pro-
found than that of any other biologist since Darwin.”
He left his disciples—the word is hardly too
strong—with a pious duty to prove true the theory of
the origin of Aids for which he had laid down his life.
They failed. The first blow to his posthumous reputa-
tion came six months after his death, when the theory
turned out to be provably false. Hamilton himself had
suggested testing the original vaccine for traces of
chimpanzee DNA or sequences from HIV. It had been
thought, when The River was published, that all the
original samples of the vaccine had disappeared. That
is why Hamilton’s expedition was searching for traces
of HIV in wild chimpanzee populations. But a vial of
the original batch of the vaccine used in the Congo

was found unexpectedly in a freezer at a British
research institute and when this was tested, after his
death, the results were unequivocal. The vaccine con-
tained no trace of chimpanzee DNA—it was from
macaque monkeys, as the Wistar Institute had
claimed all along—and it contained no trace of HIV
either. Two other independent and highly respected
labs analysed samples of the polio vaccine preserved
at the Wistar Institute from later campaigns. They
found no trace of chimpanzee DNA either. And an epi-
demiological study released at the same time sug-
gested that the variety of strains of HIV found in the
Congo today must descend from a human host.
Hooper has still not accepted that these findings
destroy his theory, but the scientific world has.
ORE EMBARRASSMENT was to follow. Hamil-
M ton left behind him the almost completed
manuscript of the second volume of his
autobiography and this contained a second blow to
his friends: a foreword expressing his belief that only
a radical programme of infanticide, eugenics, and
euthanasia could save the human race from an immi-
nent catastrophe. “I predict that in two generations
the damage being done to the human genome by the
ante and post-natal life-saving efforts of modern
medicine will be obvious to all.” He is never specific
about what this damage might be. The two concrete
examples that he quotes are the heavy spectacles
worn by John Maynard Smith and the spread of cae-
sarean sections. Both of these keep alive people who
would have died in the stone age and allow them to
transmit their genes to future generations. Spectacles
he could forgive, although he felt they were symp-
toms of a larger decadence in the gene pool. But cae-
sarean sections really worried him, and he thought
that women should be allowed just one, and then only
to save their lives; after that, they should be paid by
the state to have no more babies. That way, when
civilisation collapsed—as he seems to have thought
inevitable—and all births were once more natural,
fewer women with genes for narrow hips would be
around to die in childbirth.
He decided in his 20s that genocide was partly a
response to the spectacle of a competing tribe’s popu-
lation growing. He believed that differential birth
rates between groups would lead inevitably to mas-
sacres like those in Rwanda or Kosovo. The
Kosovo Albanians, he said in his foreword, should
be allowed to practice their religion, and even to
circumcise their daughters; but they had no right
to breed excessively.
He didn’t conceal these ideas in his lifetime:
his most vigorous defence of euthanasia and
infanticide was delivered at a conference in the
Vatican organised by the Pontifical Academy
of Sciences, where another attendee remem-
bers him saying loudly that he would grieve
PORTRAIT/ BROWN
more for the death of a single giant panda than for
that of “a hundred unknown Chinese.” People over-
looked such views as just further examples of Hamil-
ton’s eccentricities. However, the foreword makes it
clear that he believed them as a matter of scientific
fact: “I suppose the most direct answer to critics is to
gather evidence documenting the abundance, the
insidiousness, and the inevitability of human deleteri-
ous mutation and write a book about it, convince peo-
ple that something we don’t like will happen and we
can either forestall it or not. But the matter seems to
me so obvious that I won’t waste my time.”
Now, if one of the greatest scientists of the 20th
century believed that catastrophe was so imminent
and so obvious, surely lesser scientists should be wor-
ried. But they are not. Instead, they are almost paral-
ysed with embarrassment because even the ones who
most admire his genius don’t believe in the impend-
ing genetic doom of the species that was so obvious
to Hamilton; and because even his closest friends find
his bald expressions of eugenic prejudice upsetting.
Plenty of philosophers and ethicists do believe that
some babies are so handicapped that they should not
be kept alive by heroic medicine. So do the parents of
some of these babies. But Hamilton’s way of putting
the point was this: “If early signs of a coming severe
handicap can be detected, I hold that the kindest
thing for the family in which the defective child is to
be dependent, and for the child itself, may well be to
kill it. It is well known, of course, that such an act
can’t normally be performed without very persistent
psychological consequences for the parents, espe-
cially for the mother. But these reactions can still be
turned to advantage for what I am calling inclusive
happiness… I have little doubt that if trying to sur-
vive on Robinson Crusoe’s island with my wife I
would indeed with my own hands kill a defective
baby… I am fairly sure that I should feel sorrow that
this had been necessary but no sense of wrongdoing.
I believe that my wife would have agreed to the act.”
I asked his widow, Christine, from whom he was
separated, whether she would in fact have agreed to it.
She said that they had discussed, in broad terms, what
should happen with a severely handicapped baby. Nei-
ther was in favour of heroic medicine. But “there is a
world of difference between an idea and the practical
reality. Although we did discuss issues such as the one
you raise in your letter, and were generally in agree-
ment, my memory is a bit vague on the details.
“In the course of my work I see a number of
autistic children who are often quite beautiful,
and sense the agony of parents who love their
child but can only develop such limited com-
munication with it. The question becomes
much more difficult to answer… when the
bonds have grown stronger.
“However, in the desert island situation I
expect that a severely handicapped infant
PROSPECT January 2003 63
would not survive anyway. Since we were not put to
the test, I can’t really answer for either of us.”
Perhaps the most disturbing passages in his mem-
oirs concern one of his own brothers. Hamilton was
the eldest of seven children, and the boy who fol-
lowed him died shortly after birth. Hamilton made no
bones of his belief that this was a good thing. He was
even convinced his mother (herself a doctor) would
have wanted the child to die: “Had Jimmy been born
today I imagine he might have been saved by an
intestinal re-section, but I know from my mother’s
attitude to all these matters that she would never
have allowed it if she could have prevented it… Freya
[a dog he loved] deserves to be more loved and
remembered than Jimmy to my mind, a statement I
think my mother would have understood.”
Olivia Judson, a former pupil who wrote one of the
most affectionate obituaries of him, was also one of
the few people to dare to review what she called his
“disturbing” book. In Nature she wrote: “Hamilton is
an unabashed, no-fig-leaf naturist. He believes that
genetics, not nurture, accounts for a large and
important range of human
behaviour—from racism and
xenophobia to differences in Hamilton’s fears for humanity
intellectual abilities between
men and women—and that
contradict the theory of sex
only by admitting this, only on which he spent the last
by casting aside hypocrisy on
the matter, can fundamental twenty years of his life
human problems be tackled.
As an example, he argues
that a basic cause (emphatically not a justification) of
racism—and, particularly, of ethnically motivated
genocide—is a differential birth rate between groups.
And, yes, he does extend this to the Nazi extermina-
tion of Jews.” The only other extensive review of the
book to have appeared was by another sociobiologist,
the writer Marek Kohn, who drew a comparison
between Hamilton’s beliefs and the fascist and antise-
mitic sympathies of TS Eliot.
Richard Dawkins, who delivered the eulogy which
is reprinted as the book’s foreword, has declined all
invitations to review the book. If only Hamilton had
lived, says Dawkins, his friends would have persuaded
him to tone down the manuscript, and explained the
things that cannot be said in polite society.
Mark Ridley, another Oxford biologist, was both a
friend and collaborator of Hamilton’s: he helped to
edit the manuscript after Hamilton’s death, and was
thus confronted with his views in their sharpest form.
He felt he could not remove the bits that he found
offensive or wrong: “I disagree with the genetics and
the politics, and I think it’s not compellingly argued.
But sometimes Bill would see something was right
and not bother to argue the position, especially with
something as controversial as human genetics. And
he was such a genius that you wouldn’t want to cen-
64 PROSPECT January 2003
sor him. It would be too embarrassing if you deleted
something and someone found out 25 years later,
when the idea had been given six Nobel prizes. It
would be like editing Moses.”
Alan Grafen, now Oxford’s leading theoretical
biologist, believes that Hamilton may have been a
prophet: “There is a gnostic sense that many geneti-
cists have that if one interprets things in terms of a
special priestly knowledge of genes, it leads you to
different conclusions from the rest of the world.” And
although Grafen points out that Hamilton was right
about many things, he doesn’t sound like a man con-
vinced that the world faces catastrophe within three
generations: “Whether or not mutational meltdown
is an urgent question is not something I have consid-
ered. I hesitate to dismiss it entirely. The question is
whether humans will be better off in a million years
as a result of modern medicine. Mass extinctions do
happen, you know. In the long run, medicine may
have made our situation more precarious.”
Paul Harvey, the head of the zoology department
where Hamilton worked, says Hamilton wanted big
solutions to big problems. He
made his name by showing
mathematically how self-sac-
rificing behaviour can arise
and flourish in a Darwinian
world. After that, he worked
on a grand theory of sex.
Harvey thinks it in character
that he wanted a grand the-
ory of the fate of humanity.
oddest and most embarrassing thing
B
UT THE
about Hamilton’s fears for humanity is that
they contradict the theory of sex on which he
spent the last 20 years of his life. All biologists are
agreed that what makes sex a good idea is death—at
least in evolutionary terms. Sexual creatures shuffle
their genes around, which ensures that the bad ones
are unequally distributed. Some bodies end up with
lots of them, and others with none; the ones with lots
of bad mutations die quickly, which keeps the rest of
the gene pool clean.
The great argument, on which Hamilton spent
most of the last 20 years of his life, is about what
exactly makes genes malfunction so often that they
must be discarded by the radical and expensive
method of sex. One side in this argument believes
that the enemy of the genome is simply random
mutation, which produces so many bad genes in
every generation that the sexual shuffling of muta-
tions is the only way to produce some bodies that
have only good copies of genes.
The second theory holds that what makes genes
“bad” is not the malfunctions produced by mutation
but a more subtle inadequacy: the last generation’s
genes are unlikely to have enough resistance to this

generation’s parasites and disease-causing organ-
isms. Parasites have much shorter lives than the crea-
tures they attack, so if some of their mutations help
them to outwit their hosts’ defences they will develop
new weapons far faster than the creatures they
attack. This disparity works even more to the advan-
tage of pathogens such as bacteria and viruses.
Genes can be seen as our defences against a hostile
environment; faulty genes leave us with weak spots.
It is only by shuffling the genes for disease resistance
around with sex that large and relatively slow-breed-
ing organisms can defend themselves. It was this the-
ory of sex that Hamilton passionately defended. He
argued, for instance, that the gorgeous displays of
birds like peacocks were advertising the health and
freedom from parasites of a really glossy specimen.
He would have loved the modern slang term “fit”
because he thought that our judgements of who and
what is worth mating with are actually judgements
about their health and condition.
But this makes all the more extraordinary his
belief—expressed in the prefaces to the papers—that
human beings are threatened by the medical suppres-
sion of mutation and not of disease. The kind of high-
tech modern medicine that horrified him has very lit-
tle effect on the gene pool, if only because most of the
beneficiaries are past breeding anyway. In western
countries, up to half of the expenditure on health over
a person’s lifetime comes in the last six months of
their lives. The number of babies rescued from death
by high-tech medicine is certainly larger than it was
100 years ago, but it is still pretty low.
The statistics of infant mortality show clearly that
the real selection pressure on the human race comes
from parasites and pathogens. In those parts of the
world where natural selection still operates on
humans with unhampered cruelty, the figures are
staggering. According to one estimate, in 1998, wars
killed 308,000 people in Africa alone, but diarrhoeal
disease killed more than twice as many.
We in the developed world have relaxed the pres-
sures of natural selection. We do not expect 40 per
cent of our children to die, as they used to in Europe,
and still do in traditional peasant societies. So in one
sense, we are inviting dysgenic mutations and there
is some evidence that they are building up, although
not at the rate Hamilton supposed. But the medical
and technological advances which have led to this
have nothing to do with high-tech maternity hos-
pitals, caesarean sections or the preservation of
obviously handicapped children. The things that
have removed the sting from natural selection
are clean water, adequate food and vaccinations.
So any serious Hamiltonian programme to
clean up the human gene pool would start with
the abolition of antibiotics, of vaccination, and
of sewage works. All that would be left of
modern medicine, if we were to adopt a rigor-
PORTRAIT/ BROWN
ously eugenic stance, would be surgery and
painkillers. These seem to have been the only forms
of medicine that Hamilton approved for himself.
(There is a hideous irony in the circumstances of his
death, caused indirectly by the malaria parasite, but
directly by his own treatment of himself with the
low-tech painkiller aspirin.)
But should the weirdness and wrongness of his
eugenic fears discredit the rest of his ideas? Some
evolutionary psychologists fear that this will happen.
The association between genetics, eugenics and fas-
cism is already embedded amongst many people on
the left. Hamilton was not a racist: in fact, his eugen-
ics led him to completely anti-racist conclusions and
to an enthusiastic advocacy of miscegenation. He
believed that crosses between human races were a
wonderful and perhaps necessary way to improve
humanity, by blending our various resistances.
That is not racist; but it is far from the pieties of
what is normally meant by anti-racism. There is no
doubt that fear of supplying ammunition to the ene-
mies of sociobiology contributes to the reluctance of
pro-Hamilton scientists to say anything about the
book. Yet the fact that some of Hamilton’s ideas were
absurd does not contaminate the rest of them. In fact,
there is almost a tradition among great evolutionary
biologists of stupid or downright wicked political
beliefs. Konrad Lorenz was an enthusiastic Nazi in
the 1930s; in Britain, at the same time, JBS Haldane
was a committed communist throughout the years of
Stalinism. RA Fisher, who united genetics with Dar-
winism in the 1930s, spent the last five chapters of his
book The Genetical Basis of Natural Selection on an
extraordinary argument to prove that civilisation
was threatened because upper-class women never
had enough babies.
Hamilton’s political ideas were far less harmful
than those of Lorenz or Haldane. Yet in his prefaces
it is easy to find many of the ideas that made fascism
attractive in the 1930s: the admiration for nature, the
distrust of democracy and the pose of doomed heroic
stoicism. There is in Hamilton a remorseless pes-
simism of the intellect, a certainty that things will
end wrongly, the evidence for which is tempting for
liberals to overlook or forget. In his case, a pessimism
of the intellect was balanced by a tremendous relish
in life, a kind of optimism of the imagination.
“He didn’t particularly value human beings above
animals,” says Alan Grafen, and almost his most
famous essay was a request, first published in a
Japanese journal of entomology, that his body be
left out in the Amazon jungle to be chewed up
by one of his favourite species of beetle, and
used to nourish their larvae. The wish was
entirely characteristic of the man and so, too,
was the fact that he never bothered to get his
will witnessed and was buried conventionally
in a country churchyard in Oxfordshire. ■
PROSPECT January 2003 65