Customer Reviews

Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The current battle between "natural" and genetically modified (GM) crops has in many instances taken on the intensity and silliness of the battle between the advocates of AC and DC power in the early years of the twentieth century. The advocates of natural foods it seems will go to any length to portray the "dangers" of GM crops, but have no evidence to support their campaign of vituperation. The biotechnology/scientific community for the most part has shied away from countering these tactics, hoping maybe that by ignoring them they will go away. In only a small number of cases have a few confident individuals stepped up to the plate to defend the virtues and science behind biotechnology.

The author of this book is one of these individuals, and he has given the reader a fascinating account of what is possible, and what is not, in genetic engineering and twenty-first century biology in general. He thankfully does not hold back in countering the exaggerations and misrepresentations that emanate both from religious circles and "New Age secularists." But the book contains more than just counterarguments, for the author discusses some of the modern developments in biology that may have not caught the attention of the average reader. These developments are awesome if viewed by what was possible in biotechnology only two decades ago. Breathtaking advances have occurred since then, and with even more coming in the years ahead, one could argue easily that this is the best time ever to be alive.

And life is what this book is about, that is, natural life, which the author argues correctly constitutes genetically modified organisms as well as organisms that have come about without the intervention of humans. To claim otherwise is usually the province of religion or some other form of superstition, is part of a vague political goal, or is at times as the author puts it "hidden in layers of self-deception." He therefore does not hesitate to criticize religious beliefs and the elusive concept of "faith" and for the most part his commentary is correct and avoids unnecessary confrontation. Even the concept of the human self as being a unique and well-defined entity is questioned by the author, quoting some of the latest research in neuroscience that supports the notion that the self is an organized conglomeration of neuronal synapses. The concept of the "soul" is criticized and set aside as being superfluous and lacking scientific support. Such concepts, along with many of the common superstitions and beliefs that seem to transcend culture can be rejected with confident Laplacian pronouncements.

But the best part of this book is the author's speculations on the future of genetics. He points out that the developmental engineering of life forms, such as the creation of dinosaur genomes, as very plausible. This would be done by utilizing `evolutionary deconstruction' to `reconstruct' genomes that are long extinct. He points out that such developments are happening even now, with the embryos of chickens engineered to have scales instead of feathers, and have teeth instead of beaks. It is extremely likely that future genetic engineers will manipulate the development as well as the metabolism of life forms. The author expresses the heartfelt wish that he will be around to witness these developments. This reviewer is in complete agreement and the fingers are crossed.

In "Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life" molecular biologist Lee Silver defends science and biotechnology from a perversely orthogonal cabal of retrograde fundamentalist Christians ensnared in faith-based fallacies abetted by progressive Gaia devotees saddled with equally mystical mumbo-jumbo. Silver positions these constituencies as allergic reactions to the increasing explanatory power of science and correctly notes that both viewpoints are spiritually motivated. He forcefully argues that eco-environmentalism simply swaps Mother Nature as a quasi-Goddess for the male God of Abraham. The President's Council on Bioethics - as presently constituted by the Bush administration - is properly excoriated by word and deed as little more than a dysfunctional mélange of befuddled science deniers, who with fox in the henhouse inanity circumscribe the activities of the US biotech community.

Silver succinctly deconstructs the ideological bias underlying essential concepts "like organic, natural, species, human being and life itself" and extends this reasoning to encompass why "nearly every literate person perceives natural as a synonym for good, whereas the opposite idea - unnatural, artificial and synthetic - evokes a reflexive negative reaction." That nature operates by natural selection "red in tooth and claw" (or green in root and branch) is dramatically framed in a pitiless examination of the vicious and unceasing struggles between Amazon rainforest organisms versus the human preference for pastoral Pollyannaism.

After realistically portraying nature, Silver tracks 10,000+ years of human biological manipulation exemplified by prehistoric plant selectors and animal breeders - astute biotechnologists given available means and their success in producing non-familiar crops such as maize and rice, along with animals such as sheep that are naturally implausible. To illustrate the dangers of the illusory "natural, good, safe" trinity Silver incisively contrasts the regulatory treatment and public perception of organic and conventional/biotech farming, along with dubious "vitalistic" claims fringe herbal/homeopathic medicines make against mainstream pharmaceuticals.

Many of the most sensitive topics from a Judeo-Christian perspective are similarly dissected. Silver makes a compelling case for the lack of clear boundaries within and between species, between normal and abnormal embryonic development, and between the life of whole complex organisms and their component parts. In doing so, he demolishes fraudulent fundamentalist Christian assertions on the status of embryos and the fanciful concept of ensoulment. Chimeras (the nearly complete absorption of one embryo by another) and developmental aberrations that result in human monsters with two heads are presented as questions that shatter the smug conceits of faith - not as morbid titillations that mock real suffering.

Silver astutely notes that Asian religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism present few problems for biotechnology since these belief systems don't posit a supernatural creator with a master plan. In these worldviews "scientists playing God" ceases to be a meaningful objection since each spiritual being is responsible for its own future. Should American biotech leadership stumble - and Silver eloquently shows how this would be a socioeconomic debacle with significant quality of life and environmental consequences - the soundbyte sermons of televangelists goading pliant flocks, along with Jeremy Rifkin's postmodern luddite riff-raff, will be ultimately responsible.

As Silver notes, the most responsible thing humanity can do as a species, is to use our emergent power wisely and embrace the tools that modern biotechnology offers to meet challenging problems - such as global warming and loss of species diversity - while minimizing collateral impact. In the process he acknowledges that we will continue to modify nature, just have we have done for millennia. We should be deliberate and thoughtful, but not fearful, as we enter into a new era.

I LOVED this book!!! This wide-ranging book looks at science through the lens of different cultures in the US, Europe, Asia, and even Africa. It is extremely well-researched and often conveys information through story-telling. Even though a lot of scientific information is presented, it is done so with clarity and even in an entertaining manner. The author presents both sides of a controversy, sets out the essential facts, lets you know where he stands, but then invites the reader to make up his or her own mind. The book is a very easy read. It tackles a number of controversial topics and is extremely provocative. It deserves to be widely read!!!

Many reviewers have focused on Silver's advocacy positions, which is fine and they certainly are there. But he almost never rants, and his point of view seldom gets in the way of his superb reporting of some jaw-dropping "gee whiz science." Almost no scientific sophistication is required to understand the science he's described, although the science is not dumbed-down, and the book is well worth reading for the science reporting (and explaining) alone.

In Challenging Nature, Lee M. Silver, Professor of Molecular Biology and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton Univ. and the author of the critically acclaimed Remaking Eden, has written a brilliant exposition of "the clash of science and spirituality at the new frontiers of life."

In explaining the frontiers of modern biotechnology and genetic engineering, or genetic modification (GM), Silver, a hands-on scientist who has actually manipulated genes, offers a provocative and controversial look at the collision of science, religion, pseudoscience, and politics.

The conflict between materialism and spiritualism (science vs. religion, reason vs. faith) is not new to our era, but has persisted for centuries. However, present-day proposals for projects such as embryonic stem-cell research, cloning, and genetically modified food (which may actually be safer than organically produced food) have come under vitriolic attack not only from the "right" (religious fundamentalists and ultraconservative politicians) but also, surprisingly, from the "left" (New Age, post-Christian "defenders" of Mother Nature and Mother Earth). "Nature," says Silver, "can be a bitch."

As a molecular biologist, Silver is a rationalist, secularist, evolutionist, and materialist, or more accurately, a physicalist, for as he points out, the term "physicalism" is preferable to "materialism," since the universe contains both material and immaterial (massless) particles, such as photons, that exert forces on one another.

As a scientist, Silver is galled by the duplicity of those who, operating from hidden spiritualist motives, oppose scientific progress by disguising their religiously motivated politics with pseudoscientific gobbledygook and subtle subterfuge.

One can almost see the steam emanating from Silver's nostrils as he excoriates hypocritical double-speak, the use of code words to be picked up by the "faithful" but calculated to deceive the unwary. He deplores such attacks on science as surreptitious, stealthy, sneaky, and sinister. For example, "Intelligent Design" is "Creation Science" in disguise, a sleight-of-hand change of nomenclature that attempts to give a religious hypothesis the appearance and weight of scientific truth.

Challenging Nature is, among other things, a scathing indictment of the contrarian world view of President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics, a cabal heavily stacked with religious fundamentalists who, clinging to a spiritualist, literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis (in which man is given an "immortal soul") and who, having little or no training in the scientific method or should know better, seek to block research in science and technology.

Such reactionism reminds one of the story of two men who were riding a bicycle built for two when they came to a steep hill. It took a great deal of struggle for the men to reach the top of the hill, but once they got there, the man in front said, "Man, that was a hard climb!" The guy in back said, "Yes, it was. And if I hadn't kept the brakes on all the way, we would have rolled down backwards."

The villains in Silver's book, who keep their feet heavily on the brakes, are men such as Leon Kass (and most of the other members of President Bush's Council on Bioethics) and Jeremy Rifkin, who churns out volumes of pseudoscience debunking "the hubris of modern science and technology that wants to 'play God.'"

Silver's heroes are men like Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, James Watson and Francis Crick, and Richard Dawkins, perhaps the best-known contemporary popularizer of Darwin's theory of evolution.

In the Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote: "All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves. . . . What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Overman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. Man is something to be surpassed. What have you done to surpass man?"

Nietzsche expounds a world view diametrically opposed to that of religious fundamentalists. To the latter, no essential difference exists between 21st-century human beings and Adam and Eve, to whom, according to the Genesis myth, "God breathed into their nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." According to the Genesis account, after the creation of man, God rested from his works. In other words, Adam and Eve are God's masterpieces, the crown of his creation, and, as such are "finished works" (biologically speaking).

For Nietzsche, writing in the spirit of Darwinian evolution, man is not a finished product but a work in progress. We are qualitatively different now, not only from our simian ancestors but also from Neanderthal man living in the caves of Europe. Moreover, Nietzsche envisions future humans who will have evolved into beings quite different from and superior to us.

A momentous discovery was made a little over half a century ago: "The birth of molecular biology is generally dated to February 28, 1951, the day Francis Crick burst into an English pub with James Watson in tow and exclaimed triumphantly, 'We have found the secret of life!' Undoubtedly, everyone within earshot thought he was a madman, but nearly all molecular biologists today agree with Crick's outrageous claim. The secret lies in the structure of DNA. ... The amazing thing about DNA is that to see its structure [the double helix] is to understand immediately not only how megabytes of genetic information can be encoded within a chemical, but how all living things on earth have reproduced and evolved over the last 4 billion years."

Modern biotechnology provides a marvelous opportunity for health therapies, the prevention and cure of diseases, for improving agriculture and feeding the world's population, and for helping restore the earth's ecosystems. Such felicitous developments, however, will be delayed if atavistic spiritualists keep their feet firmly pressed on the brakes of progress.

Silver points out that biotechnology presents little problem for Eastern religions that believe in reincarnation. In the words of one Buddhist scientist, therapeutic cloning "restarts the cycle of life." Challenging Nature, therefore, is a wake-up call for the West, where the economic ramifications of pseudoscience may be enormous: a future in which Asia, unhampered by the strictures and sanctions of reactionary spiritualist fears and moralistic anger, becomes dominant in biotechnological advances.

Matt Ridley, author of Genome, writes, "[Challenging Nature is] imbued with courage, suffused with humanity, and written with grace." I agree. This is an important book filled with scientific wisdom.

In 1633 Galileo was put on trial by the Catholic Church because he dared to challenge the church's belief that everything revolved around the earth. The church could have looked through his telescope and seen the evidence but they preferred to keep their beliefs and thought they could by sentencing Galileo to life under house arrest. At that he was treated better than Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake for essentially the same 'crime.'

That's what happened in the study of physics. The key was the church's support of the basic belief that mankind was at the absolute center of the universe. This same belief seems to be at the heart of the current debate in biology. 'We, mankind, are too important to not be the center of everything. God made us special. No, don't bother me with details about how the world really works.'

The current debate has garnered support from the political liberal's Mother Earth myth about anything 'natural' is better. They forget that natural corn has a small hard kernal, that natural cattle are tough and mean. It took centuries to selectively breed what we have now Biotechnology can move it along faster.

In this book Dr. Silver presents a scientific challenge to the anti-biology crowd. It is well thought out, well reasoned, and will probably convince no one.

Mr. Silver's book was a joy to read. Very engaging and full of information. I would highly recommend this to anyone. It's been a couple of months since I've read this book now, but as I recall I blazed through it pretty quickly.

Silver's approach in "Challenging Nature" is completely different from anything else I've read. His basic message is two-fold. One is that the opposition to genetic engineering is mostly emotional and instinctive, not rational; but that we are often - usually - unaware of the source of our discomfort. The other is that we've gone too far down the road to turn back. What, for instance, are we to do about global warming? Silver admits human contribution to accelerating the process but, massive climate shifts have happened and will happen with or without human activity. Rather than trying to go "back to Nature", we can use our burgeoning technology to overcome obstacles. The former Sahara Forest became the Sahara Desert due to changes at the solar system level, to which humans did not contribute at all. Now it's on its way back... estimates are that global warming will turn between 18 and 25% of the desert back to arable land again. But what if we engineered organisms that can live on the land between lush and desert? If we could pull 25% up to 50%, we could feed millions of people who will be losing their food sources elsewhere due to climate change.

Michael Pollan says that food for about a third of all people on earth depends on artificial fertilizer. Silver pegs the number at 40%. Whichever it is, Nature does not have the answers for the situation we have created. Human kind can no longer survive without our supporting technology.

Another point that I was vaguely aware of that Silver brought home to me is just how deadly and uncaring "nature" is. Even among flora, it came as a shock to Silver himself when he realized how selfish and destructive species are to one another. In the rain forest, vines choke and kill trees; other vines attack the vines that are attacking the trees; fungi attack the vines. Mistletoe is a deadly parasite, evolved to tap directly into a trees sap for sustenance, but it doesn't stop there. Some species of mistletoe parasitize OTHER mistletoe while the other mistletoe is parasitizing the tree!

Do I agree with Silver on every point? Does he have "the answer"? No, and no, I don't think he claims to. But I love reading a book that opens my eyes to points of view and aspects of life that I was unaware of. I recommend it without reservation.

This book is a great journey through sience and philosophy. If you "hot button" topics currently debated by society today. Another good book in the realm of Gould, Diamond, Boyer...

In its best passages, 'Challenging Nature' exposes interesting facts and effectively challenges unthought-through conventional `wisdom'. It then goes over, from a sometimes different perspective, some of the same ground that Jared Diamond and others have efficiently covered.

At its worst however, the book slides into factual scientific misapprehensions, in-the-box thinking, overlooking of contradictory evidence, unasked begging questions, and seemingly a measure of scorn for the fellow man. It's too bad, because a critique of the damage wrought by fundamentalism at the commanding levers of public science policy in the US is called for. However, when reading Lee Silver's effort one is sometimes left to wonder who, in this debate, plays the role of Charybdis the frying pan and who Scylla the fire.

The factual errors range from the forgiveably mundane (e.g. the assertion that the Earth will survive for another few billion years. The sun will indeed survive another 4 billion years or so, but in the process it will start heating up and eventually expand into a red giant (with a radius equal to the Earth's orbit) much earlier, making the Earth uninhabitable through radiated heat within one billion years at most), to the significant.

For instance, the debate about free will is one of the very few key unresolved debates of mankind (Valid arguments exist on both sides of the debate, which is why it is unresolved.) What appears solid however, is that at bottom the argument can only be resolved by an understanding of how quantum mechanics plays out within the human mind and in its engagement with the outside world (in toto, i.e. including any higher dimensional components.)

Now the whole debate is summed up in the book in a few seemingly valid lines: Quote : (free will can only play out) ... either through quantum interactions (which are nonpredictable but random) or macroscopic interactions (which are predictable but nonrandom). However by definition free will would be both nonrandom and nonpredictable - (Hence, free will is illusory.)

On the face of it the above argument sounds open and shut, and indeed it has been used by others. But wait a minute. Quantum effects never cease to operate and be valid, even in the macroscopic world. In fact, many properties of the everyday world, many everyday-world technological applications, emerge from quantum effects. Quantum effects in the macroscopic world are seemingly less prevalent because of statistical effects: so many zillions of particles are involved in macroscopic renditions that overall, things become mostly 'predictable'.

The assertion that therefore such effects cease to count is the equivalent of, in mathematics, rounding off numbers, of neglecting numbers that are to the right of a decimal point: to an experimental physicist, 0. 0000000000005 for instance is much the same as 0. But to an exact mathematician, the former figure is, properly and exactly, infinitely larger than the latter. Now the early history of physics is littered with such approximations and oversights which later turned out to be wrong and the overlooked, approximated-away effect turned out to have tremendous material significance. Einstein was one of the first to realize that neglected 'mathematical terms' actually meant something. In one instance, something as big and in your face as the terms leading to e=mc˛ and the bomb. A whole indepth, at least book-length analysis of the cracks opened up by quantum effects at the macroscopic level is called for: it is entirely possible that free will finds its real-world delivery through these cracks.

Another rather peremptory error seemingly caused both by the author's seemingly dim view of the average man's IQ, and by a mistake that says, in effect, that if it's not proven then it's false: the whole chapter about nutritional supplements. At a certain age, health can definitely be improved in manifold ways by supplements. We are, as the author well knows, biochemical machines (with waning absorbing/ processing ability and metabolism with age) and as such susceptible to the effects of added molecules and chemicals input through our system. The author dismisses without analysis the effects of supplements that can be objectively analyzed: one case in point, amongst others, is that of gingko biloba. Gingko is simply a blood thinner with viscosity-lowering properties (take gingko and cut yourself when shaving: if you really absorbed gingko rather than a fake product then you'll bleed for a long time.) The reason why it improves memory is a simple mechanism: gingko-ized blood starts flowing through capillaries in the brain where it would not be able to in its thicker, more viscous and slabber version: hence, hitherto unused parts of the brain are now oxygenated and susceptible to rejuvenation, thus useable 'online' by the larger neural network. Another case in point is vitamin supplements, lutein supplements for the eye, etc. The effects for some of the failure to take some supplements are immediately observable. That no convincing studies were conducted does not mean that the effects do not exist. If the author did not automatically think we're silly, he would perhaps pause and think that if Americans spend $100 billion annually on supplements, there just might be something there.

Now for the belief in god. Three points.
First, the author seems to make the same mistake that many Westerners seem to make, i.e. mistaking God or god for the god of sometimes anthropomorphic, overly narrow, overly artificially structured religions, perhaps laden with vast amounts of unrelated human baggage and interpretations and irrelevant history. Typically, when Westerners throw away their religion, they throw away the baby with the bathwater and become reductionist atheists.

Second, he dismisses without any analysis why sizeable proportions of populations everywhere insist on believing in something. The author's hoary, tired explanation that all of mankind's spiritual pursuits were born because we're afraid of death does not even begin to hold water (Some of the OBE experiences reported by some people, for instance, just cannot be dismissed the way the author does: there is a vast body of serious literature on that.) Once again, the author's approach here seems unscientific, and the impression is that he is guilty of the very sin he accuses, properly, the fundamentalist of: to wit, abandoning objectivity to a prior agenda.

Third, a definition of god is sorely needed, so that we know what it is we're talking about. The eschatological god of someone like Paul Davies, for instance (extremely well analyzed in his excellent latest book - titled "Jackpot" in the US and "the Goldilocks Enigma" in the UK) is a totally totally different god than most others (and closer to the only possible definition of 'god' in Buddhism, for instance.)

The problem here, as in a couple of other themes, is also a failure of imagination, of out of the box thinking. If for instance you agree with Buddhism that the whole point of life on Earth is to learn, then it can be that being a conjoined twin with someone else for some time serves a purpose: the biotech mechanism of how that happens is then largely irrelevant. Often, one has the impression that this reductionist author would critique a TV show by looking at the electronic components and nuts and bolts of his TV set. This approach does not work: a different level view is called for.


Finally, one last, but telling, example. The author says that only 5.5 % of biotech scientists believe in god (whatever that means, see above), and dismisses them as obviously idiotic. But here is where the mistake is (apart from the fact that several chapters further on, he avers that of all scientists, biomedical scientists are quote apt to be anti-visionaries rather than visionaries', and explains that biomedical scientists tend to think inside the box! There must be a reason why more quantum physicists believe in something than biotech people: quantum physics is so weird, opens so many vistas onto other unexpected worlds and different ways of looking at reality, that from its basis it's easy to conceptualize e.g. higher dimensional implicate worlds.) Anyway what is missing here, without which the 5.5% figure is meaningless: an indepth IQ test of the 5.5% and of the 94.5%.

The author's implication is that 5.5% would be less intelligent than the others. I submit that the results of a protocolled IQ test would show the opposite. All these Ph.D.s in biotech are already intelligent, or they would not be there. The 5.5% obviously see something that the others don't. Maybe they see higher level connections, other possible explanations. Maybe they understand that, as foreshadowed in Gödel's incompleteness theorem, to understand anything you have to step outside of that something : be it maths (Gödel's) or biotech. Maybe they understand that in physics, time is largely an illusion, and that therefore evolution over millions of years, seen from a higher dimensional perspective, may mean something slightly different from what first meets the eye. Maybe they understand that to understand life, you have to understand it from without.

Carry out this test, Dr. Silver.