the changing face of human nature - rose e rose

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In 1992, at the start of the surprising-ly short decade’s march toward the se-quencing of the human genome, one of its key initiators, geneticist Walter Gil-bert, claimed that “one will be able topull a cd out of one’s pocket and say,‘Here is a human being; it’s me.’” 1Gilbert’s brilliant piece of theater wasechoed by other leading molecular bi-ologists in their campaign to win pub-lic support and enthusiasm for the Hu-

man Genome Project (hgp

). It seemednot to matter how often the biologistsemployed the same theatrical device,whether in California or at London’sInstitute for Contemporary Arts: hold-ing up a cd to a spellbound audienceand saying, “this is human life itself”was a brilliantly chosen trope. The cd ,so familiar to the audience of a high-tech society, was recruited to symbol-

ize the merger of molecularizationand digitalization heralded by the de-veloping hgp . At once a science anda technology, this technoscience of hu-man genomics simultaneously offereda new de½nition of human nature andnew, promethean powers to repair andeven redesign that nature.

dna and genomics dominated themedia throughout the 1990s, with its

deterministic gene talk and genes for

everything from the most severe dis-eases to compulsive shopping andhomelessness. While the cd played itspart in the popularization of the hgp ,it was the representation of dna ’s dou-ble helix that came to be the dominantsigni½er of life itself. More subversive-ly, numbers of graphic artists saw thepotential surveillance powers of geno-mics, striking a more critical note than

thecd

s or the double helix by, instead,showing people with bar-coded fore-heads. Here human nature was reducedto a mere commodity with no agency,to be read at the checkout counter.

The explosive growth of genomics,with its relatively subdued cultural de-bate, was not alone. Another powerfuland expanding ½eld, namely, neurobiol-ogy, led to the 1990s being nominated

by the National Institutes of Health asthe Decade of the Brain. (Europe wasslower; its Brain Decade started about½ve years later.) By 2009, on both sidesof the pond, neuroscientists claimedthat advances in brain science had beenso substantial that it had become theDecade of the Mind. Just as the doublehelix became the symbol of the hgp , sohave the vivid, false-color skull-shapedimages locating the “sites” of brain ac-tivity come to symbolize the new neuro-

Dædalus Summer 2009 7

Hilary Rose & Steven Rose

The changing face of human nature

© 2009 by Hilary Rose & Steven Rose


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8 Dædalus Summer 2009

HilaryRose & StevenRoseon being human

science. These sites include not onlywell-understood regions within thebrain, such as those associated with vi-sion and speech, but also new ones, likeregions thought to be associated withLondon taxi-drivers’ knowledge of theLondon streets, 2 for example, or with“romantic love.” 3Londoners were de-lighted to learn the location of theircabbies’ “knowledge,” persuaded bythe high-tech images one could see inany newspaper. For those humanistswho understand the concept of roman-tic love as originating with the medie-val troubadours, the claim by leadingimager Semir Zeki that this is a univer-sal brain-located human phenomenon,unaffected by culture or history, is dis-tinctly challenging.

Contemporary genomics and neuro-science not only claim to explain howthe brain and, hence, the mind work,but also to put psychiatry on a soundscienti½c basis. While the drivers forthe scientists may primarily be curiosity,as the conditions for exploring these lat-est scienti½c frontiers ripen, the practi-cal implications, both for medicine and,more disturbingly, as tools for control-ling and manipulating the mind, are pro-found. Patients’ accounts of their experi-ence of mental illness will become lessor even unnecessary as brain scans andgene scans are taken as speaking moreaccurately about the underlying causes.Once again the human agent disappearsand human nature becomes digitalized.In a biotechnological age, where majorfunding for genomics and neurosciencecomes from the biotech and pharmaceu-tical industries as well as from venturecapitalism, and universities move to pro-tect their intellectual property with pat-ents, disinterested curiosity increasing-ly belongs to a distant age of science. 4

However, our concern here is not somuch with these commercial implica-

tions, but with the claims that thesetechnosciences now make: that theycan provide a materialist account of human nature itself, whether bodyand brain or mind and consciousness.

In this, genomics and neuroscience arebuilding on a materialist tradition thatruns back to antiquity, but that gainedincreasing authority from the birth of modern science in the seventeenth cen-tury. Previous materialist claims by phi-losophers, such as Hume and la Mettrie,could not make the power move of of-fering an alternative theory; only thecultural authority of the growing natu-ral sciences provided this. It isn’t possi-ble to understand and interpret the con-struction of human nature by present-day genomics and neuroscience withoutlocating them, however sketchily, histor-ically within this materialist tradition.

By the late eighteenth century, “ani-mal electricity,” mesmerism, and phre-nology were attempting to locate men-tal attributes, and indeed life itself, with-in the explanatory realm of the naturalsciences. The early-nineteenth-centurymaterialist accounts of nature and hu-man nature produced by natural philos-ophers (that is, scientists) found a recep-tive audience among intellectuals. Highup in the Yorkshire Dales, the Brontë sis-ters (Bramwell was probably in the pub)would walk the several miles from theHaworth parsonage down to Keighley,their nearest town, to listen to a lectureon phrenology, the hottest materialistaccount of brain and mind. In the vividdescriptions of the head shapes of Mr.Rochester and Jane Eyre we ½nd the in-fluence of the new phrenology in thepen of Charlotte Brontë. 5 In distantCornwall, the young chemist HumphryDavy and the poet Samuel Coleridgeformed a lifelong friendship, and Davy’sspeculations about electricity as a life


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ism would accompany the deepening of modernity.

Although Darwinian evolution reject-ed the Linnaean view of the Great Chainof Being, in which all living organismswere ranged in a God-ordained hierar-chy, for Darwin evolution was still pro-gressive, with lower organisms givingway to higher ones. Darwin represent-ed this as a many-branched tree of life,with Homo sapiensat the highest point.(Today’s Darwinists prefer the meta-phor of the bush, with all currently ex-tant species equally “evolved.”) In Ori- gin, Darwin only hints enigmatically atthe relevance of his theory to humans.Not until The Descent of Man, and Selec-tion in Relation to Sex, published elevenyears later, does he ½nally af½rm human-ity’s ape-like origins, and locate humandifferences–between races and sexes–within an evolutionary framework. Un-like some of his contemporaries, such asHuxley, Darwin embraced a monogenicview of the origin of the human species.Certainly Descent divides humanity intomany distinct races, describing their dif-ferences in skin, eye, and hair color insome detail. But Darwin nonetheless in-sisted that there was but a single humanorigin, the various human races havingseparated from this common stock overevolutionary time. This difference fromthe prevailing polygenic view, in whichthe races constituted separate specieswith distinct origins, was a major issuefor biological theory albeit minor in so-cial practice.

Darwin, like the rest of his circle,shared the con½dence of Victorian gen-tlemen at the height of Britain’s impe-rial power, of a racial hierarchy rangingfrom the less evolved, degraded savagesof Tierra del Fuego to the higher Euro-pean civilization, not least that of DownHouse in the garden of England. Huxley

went further, arguing that the evolution-arily inferior black races would in duecourse be out-evolved and defeated bythe whites. Evolution is an ongoing pro-cess so far as Darwin is concerned, with-out endpoint. Indeed, as a nineteenth-century progressivist he speculates onthe wonderful civilization of the futureas the species evolves: “And as naturalselection works solely by and for thegood of each being, all corporeal andmental endowments will tend to pro-gress towards perfection.” 11More neg-atively, his concept of variation with-in the species is trapped within a verynineteenth-century understanding of ½xed social hierarchies. Thus, despitehis hatred of slavery, Darwin’s conceptof race essentializes difference, so thatvariation within the species slides intohierarchy between the races.

Sexual selection is almost as centralto Darwinian evolution as is natural se-lection, because it explains both the dif-ferences between the sexes within a sin-gle species and some of life’s extremeand otherwise apparently non-adaptivefeatures, such as the glories of the pea-cock’s tail. Sexual selection accountsfor the fact that males and females ofthe same species often differ in shapeand size. Males compete for females;they may ½ght like stags, or displaylike peacocks. Females then choosethe strongest or most beautiful male. 12

This serves to enhance the male charac-teristics that females ½nd most attrac-tive. Like his view of race, Darwin’sview of the differences between thesexes was entirely conventional. Thus,he states, in humans the result of sexu-al selection is for men to be “more cou-rageous, pugnacious and energetic thanwoman . . . [with]. . . a more inventivegenius. His brain is absolutely larger . . .the formation of her skull is said to beintermediate between the child and the


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Thechanging face of humannature

man.” 13Nineteenth-century biolo-gists’ differentiation between the sexeswas crucial in providing a biological ba-sis for the superiority of the male andthe explanation for the near invisibili-ty of women (along with the commonpeople of both genders). While femalechoice explains sexual selection, it isthe males who evolve in order to meetthe chosen criteria of strength andpower.

By the mid-nineteenth century theuniversalism of the Enlightenment be-gan to show its cracks–at least to femi-nists and abolitionists. The stirring callsfor universal equality made throughoutthe revolutionary ferment of the preced-ing century, from Thomas Paine’s Rightsof Man to the Declaration of Indepen-dence, were seen by pioneering femin-ists as excluding the claims of women.At an 1851 women’s rights conventionin Akron, Ohio, the freed slave Sojourn-er Truth brought together the struggleagainst slavery and gender with her“Ain’t I a woman?” challenge. Darwin’sandrocentricity was not missed by hiscontemporary feminist intellectuals;within ½ve years of the appearanceof Descent in the United States, Antoi-nette Blackwell Brown14had publishedher critique. But it was not until a cen-tury later that suf½cient numbers of women had entered the natural scien-ces, and so were inside rather than out-side the production system of science,that feminist biologists returned to thecritique much better armed. Ruth Hub-bard bluntly asked of Darwinian theo-ry, “Have only Men evolved?” 15; eth-ologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy pushed thisargument further in her 1981 book TheWoman That Never Evolved .16

Darwin did more than locate humanswithin an anatomical and physiologicalevolutionary continuity. 17He anchored

the human mind ½rmly into human biol-ogy and laid the foundation for an evo-lutionary psychology; human emotionsand their expressions were for him evo-lutionary descendents of those of theirape-like ancestors. However, from Dar-win’s day until recently, neurosciencewas unable to cash out these promisso-ry claims. It could, as in the view of theearly-twentieth-century physiologistCharles Sherrington, trace the greatneural pathways up from the peripheryto the brain, and out again, enablingthe organism to act on the world; butalthough what went on inside the three-pound mass of tissue inside the skullcould be studied chemically and phys-iologically, science could not explainmental processes.

Over the past three decades, geno-mics and neuroscience have been trans-formed in scale, from small sciences tofull-scale technosciences. While geno-mics’ goal is to read the book of life inthe genes, neuroscience offers to solvethe mind-brain problem. Both alsoshare medico-technological ambitions:to eliminate disease, treat mental andneurological distress and disorder, andenhance technologies of social control.The scale of these new enterprises isprodigious. The scope and scale of ge-nomics is familiar, but neurosciencebegins to rival it. More than thirty thou-sand neuroscientists attend the annualmeeting of the American Society forNeuroscience, including a large interna-tional contingent. Conferences, thoughfew on this scale, proliferate in the richresearching nations. Add to the cost of the many conferences, those of salaries,laboratories, and the hugely expensivetechnologies and it becomes self-evi-dent that the neurosciences, with theirpowerful, empirically rich knowledges,are funded on a totally different scalefrom the academic humanities and so-


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cial sciences, with costs running intohundreds of millions of dollars annually.

This huge growth of investment inneuroscience from governments, includ-ing their military establishments, privatefoundations, and the pharmaceutical in-dustry has not yet resulted in anythinglike a generally accepted theory of howbrains/minds may work; rather, it hasendorsed a multitude of new reductiveinsights and approaches, of which wesingle out four: two theoretical and twoexperimental. Theoretically, sociobiol-ogy and, later, evolutionary psychologyclaimed a closure of the Darwinian evo-lutionary program by integrating humansocial behavior within it. The theoreti-cians of informatics have sought in cog-nitive neuroscience to locate in the com-puter a mechanical metaphor for brain/mind processes that transcends themere hand-waving of the past. The ex-perimental advances in genetics andimaging have enabled the biomedicalgaze to penetrate ever deeper into thebrain to levels hitherto inconceivable.Thus if phrenology was a prematurematerialism, and Moleschott’s claimwas more of a provocation than a re-search program, the last years of thetwentieth century, those of the Decadeof the Brain and the current Decade of the Mind, have witnessed a resurgentcon½dence among neuroscientists. Fi-nally they have in their hands the keyswith which to open the mind to natu-ral science’s objectivity.

That the human mind and human na-ture have been shaped by evolutionarypressures is of course not in question.Humans are long-lived social animalswhose offspring are born neotenous,requiring several years of caregiving be-fore they can live independently. Theseparameters must play a central part inthe formation of the human mind. Liv-

ing in groups requires learning socialskills–that is, adjusting an individual’sways of being and thinking to the needsof others–a theme currently being ac-tively explored by a variety of research-ers. A new ½eld, “social neuroscience,”is emerging, stimulated by neurophysi-ologists’ discovery of so-called mirrorneurons, which are active either whenan individual performs a particular actor watches another doing the same–allegedly the neural base for empathy.Empathy (or at least mirror neurons) ispresent in humans’ nearest evolutionaryneighbors. The social nature of humanexistence also must have driven the evo-lution of mind and consciousness. As aresult, evolution has ceased to be seen asan entirely biological process, and manynow speak of the emergence of modernhumans as a co-evolutionary process, in-volving both biology and culture. 18Suchan argument insists on the inseparabilityof human biology from human culture,not as a matter of arbitrary partitioning–such-and-such a percent genes andsuch-and-such a percent environment–but of the continual interplay betweenboth during development. Humans arebiosocial beings.

However, as with eighteenth-centuryphrenology, the possibilities of an em-pirically based evolutionary psycholo-gy have been sullied by a group of self-proclaimed evolutionary psychologists,the more recent avatars of 1970s socio-biology, who have hijacked these possi-bilities. Evolutionary psychology basesitself not just on the assumption thathuman nature is an evolved property,but on the profoundly un-Darwinianassertion that human nature (by con-trast with the rest of nature) was ½xedin the Pleistocene, and there has notbeen enough evolutionary time for hu-man nature to change subsequently.Thus, it is not just that the demands


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of social living may have impacted theevolution of morality, but that human-ity is, according to the evolutionary psy-chologist Marc Hauser, endowed witha universal set of moral principles, inde-pendent of culture or social context. 19Also prominent among these apparent-ly ½xed human characteristics is the ex-pression of so-called basic emotions, 20racial preferences, and gender relations.Male preferences for mating withyounger women of de½ned body shape,and female for richer, older, more pow-erful males, do little other than repeat incontemporary language Darwin’s ownassertions in Descent . Evolutionary psy-chology has been subject to severe criti-cism. Scholars across disciplines, fromthe humanities and the social and lifesciences, have challenged its theoreticalbase and empirical adequacy. 21

To evolutionary psychologists, the hu-man mind is “massively modular,” con-sisting of a large number of semi-auton-omous, innate components. (Leda Cos-mides and John Tooby liken it to a swissarmy knife. 22) However, not only is thisclaim disputed by those who argue thatthe mind’s speci½cities are formed dur-ing development through an infant’s in-teraction with a social environment, 23but brain imaging studies also ½nd noevidence for such modularity. The com-plexity of the brain, with its hundredbillion nerve cells, and hundred trillioninternal connections, still de½es compre-hension. Twenty-two thousand genescannot begin to specify in any more thangeneralities the pattern of these connec-tions, which are shaped by the activitiesof the developing child.

“Mapping the brain” is conceptual-ly and technically orders of magnitudeharder a task than sequencing the ge-nome, which is a linear and stable se-quence; the brain is a dynamic struc-ture organized in three dimensions of

space and one of time. However, thepower of informatics is making possiblea human brain project modeled on theHuman Genome Project, though moreinformally organized. The idea is to pro-duce a brain-gene map, in which all of the genes expressed in the brain are lo-calized, and from which the mind canbe divined. How such a map may changeour concept of how the brain works is,however, another matter. Identifyingsites or genes “for” particular brainprocesses or mental attributes ignoresboth the complexity and dynamism of the brain.

The advent of brain imaging, coupledwith informatics, has technically drivensuch proposals. Placing subjects into afunctional magnetic resonance imager(f mri ) and asking them to think of Godor contemplate moral dilemmas identi-½es regions of the brain that show in-creased blood flow compared with con-trols. In such studies, blood flow is tak-en as a surrogate measure for neural ac-tivity. Another technique, magnetoen-cephalography, which measures thefluctuating transient magnetic ½eldsaround the head, offers millisecond-by-millisecond records of the brain’sactivity during such thought proces-ses. Reciprocally, focusing an intensemagnetic beam through the skull ontospeci½c brain regions can influencethoughts and emotions. The mathemat-ical manipulations that lead to the iden-ti½cation of these brain regions are dis-guised by the dramatic false-color rep-resentations that grace the plethora of popular books and articles describingthe latest aspect of human nature tobe thus given a speci½c site within thebrain. 24

Taken together, these theoretical andinvestigative tools have opened the wayto an increasingly assertive reduction-ism, in which the collapse of mind into




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brain is unquestioned. This program-matic agenda has been articulated bythe new neurophilosophers, notably Pa-tricia and Paul Churchland, with theirrobust dismissal of mind language asmere folk psychology, to be replacedby the rigors of computational neuro-science,25a project committed to digi-talization and shared by many leadingneuroscientists. Consciousness theoristGerald Edelman quotes Emily Dickin-son’s poem “The brain is wider than thesky” before asserting, “[Y]ou are yourbrain” 26; neurobiologist Eric Kandelcomfortably agrees. 27 For Semir Zeki,the brain, rather than the mind, has“knowledge” and “acquires concepts.” 28Larry Young, extending Zeki’s brain lo-calization of romantic love and repris-ing Moleschott, argued in a recent Na-tureessay that human love (by analogywith the mating practices of voles) de-pends on a polymorphism in the AVPR 1Agene.29 Francis Crick is in robust Alicein Wonderland mode: “You’re nothingbut a bunch of neurons,” he writes,before going on to speculate that “freewill” is located in the anterior cingulategyrus.30 Crick’s mischievous localiza-tion exempli½es the internal phrenol-ogy that brain imaging fosters: FranzGall and Cesare Lombroso redux.

The neuroscienti½c reach into themind has by now gone beyond evenlove and religious experience to ap-proach what many consider humans’most enigmatic attribute, that of con-sciousness itself. Consciousness stud-ies no longer inhabit a borderland be-tween the speculations of theoreticalphysicists and new-age mysterians, butinstead occupy ambitious young neuro-scientists, who employ all the armorythat brain imaging and computer sim-ulation can provide (although the stillproliferating books on mind and con-

sciousness are written mainly by theirseniors). In the past, philosophers of mind pondered the problems of qualiaand ½rst- versus third-person experi-ence, without feeling the need to relatethem to ½ndings from the neuroscien-ces; this is no longer adequate. Philos-ophers (at least in the United States)are beginning to enter labs to observescientists at work. 31But the con½dence,even hubris of neuroscientists that theiraccounts of brain functioning will ex-plain mind can indicate a failure by theneuroscientist to understand what thephilosopher is saying, as in the case of the public debate between the neuro-chemist Jean-Pierre Changeux andthe hermeneutic philosopher PaulRicoeur. 32

Perhaps this helps explain why, de-spite the explosion of literature comingfrom the neurosciences, the most satis-fying accounts of “mindedness” havecome not from “basic” laboratory-basedaccounts, but from researchers who arealso clinicians. At the birth of both mod-ern physiology and sociology, there wasan interesting debate between ClaudeBernard and Auguste Comte. Bernard’sproject was to put medicine onto a prop-er scienti½c basis, arguing that the routeto scienti½c understanding was throughthe study of normal physiological mech-anisms. Comte, by contrast, insisted thatone best approached the normal via thepathological–that is, through the clinicand patients’ lived experiences of painand suffering. The same seems true to-day. No neuroscientist studying memo-ry has explored its vagaries more richlythan the Soviet neuropsychologist Alek-sandr Luria. 33Oliver Sacks’s Awakeningscombined a study of the clinical effectsof l-Dopa in patients with a sensitive un-derstanding of their existential crisis inbeing wakened from the deep sleep of encephalitis. More recently, Pat Wall’s




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approach to understanding the neuro-physiology of pain has been enrichedby his listening to patients suffering in-tractable pain. 34And it is perhaps notsurprising that some of the most de-tailed attempts by a neuroscientist tocome to terms with the complexitiesof human consciousness have comefrom Antonio Damasio, whose collab-oration with the neurologist HannaDamasio has required not just brainimaging, but listening to their patientssuffering from disturbances of willand emotion. 35He describes one pa-tient with severe frontal brain injurywho showed none of the anticipatedcognitive effects; surprised, Damasiotells of how he came to realize that thenegative effects were in Elliot’s lackof emotional response despite havingbeen through terrible trauma. In thismeticulous storytelling–which alsomakes a philosophical point–Damasiosays that he realized he was more dis-tressed by Elliot’s telling him of thetraumatic events than was Elliot him-self. It is the minded clinician whomakes the diagnosis when purelycognitive tests cannot.

As this neurological example illus-trates, imaging techniques are used in-creasingly for neurological diagnoses.But, more disturbingly, there has beenan increasing enthusiasm for employ-ing them to predict potential “antiso-cial” behaviors, from attention de½cithyperactivity disorders in children tocriminality, psychopathy, and terror-ism.36 Coupled with the power of thenew genomics, for biological determin-ists this opens the possibility of a eugen-ic social policy. Such thinking stretchesback to Francis Galton’s 1869 founda-tional text, Hereditary Genius, whichsaw genius as passing down throughthe male line. Galton’s central concept

of eugenics crystallized a growing con-cern among the social and cultural elitewith the quality of the national stock inlate Victorian England. Darwinian the-ories provided a substantial ideologicalsupport to the nascent eugenics move-ment, itself given strength in the earlytwentieth century with the rediscoveryof Mendel’s genetics. The widespreadenthusiasm for the new science of eu-genics was shared by Euro-Americanintellectuals of almost all persuasions(barring Catholics) and professions,and ranged from conservatives throughpro-birth-control feminists to Scandi-navian social democrats, above all theMyrdals. For the Myrdals, eugenicswas an essential plank in the formationof the welfare state, understood as ascience-based social policy, necessaryto maintain the collective well-beingof the nation. The welfare state couldnot–would not–carry the burden ofthe un½t. Hereditarian biologists (withCold Spring Harbor in the United Statesand University College London’s GaltonLaboratory as key locations) envisagedmoral or mental de½ciency as inheritedand as weakening the national stock.The body of the nation thus took prior-ity over the body of the individual. Thechosen method of inhibiting the breed-ing of the “un½t” (above all, the learn-ing disabled) varied from country tocountry, ranging from compulsory ster-ilization in the United States and Scan-dinavia to sexually segregated incarcer-ation in the United Kingdom and Hol-land. Both social technologies servedeugenics equally well.

Such comfortable and explicit accept-ance of eugenics, at least by the culturaland political elite (though more dubi-ously by their subjects), was shatteredby the advent of Nazism and its ideolog-ical underpinnings of race science, pub-licized by the influential race scientists




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Baur, Fischer, and Lenz. 37Some races, Jews and Gypsies in particular, wereuntermenschenand therefore outsidethe de½nition of what it is to be hu-man. After 1945 and the Nuremberg tri-als, whether these were victors’ justiceor marked the advent of bioethics, theword eugenics became taboo. Geneti-cists (above all, clinical geneticists) dis-sociated their discipline from eugenicsand its hideous past. This distinctionwas uneven though, as numbers ofNazi race scientists were reappointedto leading positions in genetics labs inpostwar West Germany. The practicesof eugenics continued until the mid-1970s, still guided by biomedicine andstill ranging from compulsory steriliza-tion to incarceration and sexual segre-gation. It was the explosion of the newsocial movements of the late 1960s and1970s, not least the women’s liberationmovement, with their new demands forpersonal and cultural freedom, whichhelped terminate these practices.

Despite the un 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, with its intended death-blow to the very idea of race, outsidethe mainstream of science biologicalracism flowed steadily as a highly con-servative response to the social chal-lenges, within the United States, of thecivil rights movement and Johnson’sWar on Poverty. This conservatism ex-tended from Jensen’s attack on Proj-ect Head Start, 38a waste of resourcesin his view because of the inheritedlower iq of black Americans, to Herrn-stein and Murray’s Bell Curve,39 whichargues that those at the bottom of thecurve formed a genetic underclass andwere outside the reach of progressivesocial policies. By the end of the centu-ry, the hierarchical difference of biolog-ical racism had been largely replacedby cultural difference, fought out polit-ically as a clash between multicultural-

ism and cultural racism. Social groupsnow identify themselves (and are iden-ti½ed by others) according to culturerather than biology or even nationality,and are still frequently seen through thehostile prism of racism. In the UnitedKingdom, Pakistanis became Muslims,subject to increasing and violent Islamo-phobia. This dangerous brew has beenintensi½ed by the rise of Muslim funda-mentalism and its terrorist attacks oncivilians and by the wars in Iraq and Af-ghanistan. Ironically, it is only now, atthe beginning of the twenty-½rst cen-tury, that the life sciences show tenden-cies to re-racialize difference throughthe discourse of genomics. 40

Even as compulsory eugenics retreat-ed, prenatal diagnostic techniques grew.By the 1960s, Down’s syndrome couldbe identi½ed during pregnancy, andwomen and their partners offered thepossibility of termination. With theHuman Genome Project, dna diagnos-tics proliferated; but despite the vocalpromises of molecularized genomics,few safe, effective gene therapies havebeen delivered: the main option offeredby dna diagnostics has been abortion.Few (other than right-to-lifers) wouldargue against the desirability of testsfor such devastating conditions suchas Tay Sachs or Lesch-Nyhan, condi-tions associated with extreme suffer-ing and death in infancy. Genetic orbrain imaging diagnostics for late-onset conditions, such as the probabil-ity of Alzheimer’s or the certainty of Huntington’s disease, raise more com-plex issues. Optimists like Philip Kitch-er41 regard this situation as offeringa “utopian” eugenics, in which the de-sire of women and their partners tohave healthy babies coincides with theutility to the state of fewer children be-ing born with severe and expensive dis-




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20 Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life(New York: Henry Holt, 2004).

21 Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, eds., Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psy-chology(London: Jonathan Cape, 2000).

22 Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psy-chology and the Generation of Culture(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

23 Annette Karmiloff-Smith, “Why Babies’ Brains are not Swiss Army Knives,” in Alas, Poor Darwin, ed. Rose and Rose, 144–156.

24 We do not wish to diminish the insights into brain processes that neuroimaging can pro-vide. But the dramatic images may hide as much as they reveal. At best they provide a cor-relative indication of those regions of the brain that are active when the brain’s owner isengaged in some mental activity; they do not mean that these regions are therefore the“sites” of such mental activity.

25 Patricia Smith Churchland, Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy(Cambridge, Mass.: mitPress, 2002).

26 Gerald M. Edelman, Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness(New Haven:Yale University Press, 2004).

27 Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (New York: W.W.Norton & Co., 2006).

28 Zeki, Splendors and Miseries of the Brain.29 Larry Young, “Being Human: Love: Neuroscience Reveals All,” Nature 457 (2009): 148.30 Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scienti½c Search for the Soul(New York: Scrib-

ner, 1994).31A classic example is Daniel Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown,

1991).32 Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think?: A Neuroscientist and a Phi-

losopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2000).

33Aleksandr Luria, The Mind of the Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory(London: Jonathan Cape, 1969).

34 Patrick Wall, Pain: The Science of Suffering (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).35Antonio Damasio, Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain(New York: G. P.

Putnam, 1994).36 Adrian Raine and José Sanmartín, eds., Violence and Psychopathy(New York: Kluwer Aca-

demic/Plenum, 2001).37Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz, Human Heredity, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul(London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1931).

38 Arthur R. Jensen, “How Much Can We Boost iq and Scholastic Achievement?” Harvard Educational Review39 (1969): 1–123.

39 Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life(New York: Free Press, 1994).

40 “Genetics for the Human Race,” special issue, Nature Genetics(2004).41 Philip Kitcher, The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities(New York:

Simon & Schuster, 1996).


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42 John Harris, Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People(Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2007).

43 The Guardian, January 12, 2009.44 Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).45

Sarah Franklin and Celia Roberts, Born and Made: An Ethnography of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

the changing face of human nature - rose e rose

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