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diversity and complexity bequeathed by evolutionary history, they are also
'playing God' by utilising ever more intrusive technologies - like synthetic
biology - whose long-run effects are impossible to predict. Degradation and
unanticipated threats and risks are thus sides of the same hubristic coin.
Others argue that this sort of environmentalist rhetoric is misplaced: if we
want to free millions of people from grinding poverty and ensure a good
standard of living for all then, it is suggested, we necessarily have to bend
large parts of the non-human world to our will.
Inhabitants of early twenty-first-century Western societies frequently
encounter these arguments in newspapers, on radio, on television, in maga-
zines, in advertisements and elsewhere. They pit 'ecocentrists' committed to
protecting and saving non-human nature against 'anthropocentrists' ded-
icated to the unfinished projects of 'development' and 'modernisation'.
However, 'human nature', in the biological sense of that term, is now
arguably just as much a focus of public interest as things like endangered
species, melting ice sheets or organic food. This is evident in a range of
arenas. I want to focus on recent 'discoveries' about human genetics and
the ways these have been disseminated and received. Because these discov-
eries are about us, they inevitably beg, in very explicit ways, fundamental
questions about our identities, potentialities and relationships to others.
Representations of human genes are, I argue, an important medium through
which a
re-naturalisation
of human self-understanding could be taking
place. To understand why, we need first to consider the rise-and-rise of
molecular biology since the 1950s.
The power of molecular biology
Molecular biology is now a large, sprawling field of basic and applied
research that spans the various life sciences. It studies what some consider
to be the building blocks of life: namely, those cellular level structures and
process that are far too small to be observed without precision instruments.
Molecular biology's numerous, highly specialised and trained practitioners
occupy university departments, publicly funded research institutes and the
laboratories and field stations of biotechnology companies. Their practices
and discourses are highly esoteric, comprising techniques like polymerase
chain reaction (PCR) and terms like 'alleles', 'introns' and 'messenger
ribonucleic acid' (mRNA). Their research has had substantial wider impacts
on various branches of biology (human and non-human), chemistry, infor-
mation science, computational science and psychology. This research has
also enjoyed significant and sustained levels of public visibility over the
past 25 years.
4
The influence and prominence of molecular biologists is not hard
to explain. First, they're associated with a set of scientific discover-
ies that appear to be as fundamental as those of Galileo, Newton or
Einstein. These include James Watson and Francis Crick's 1953 finding
