Hilary Rose & Steven Rose - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Hilary Rose & Steven Rose

The changing face of human nature

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 to
pull a cd out of one’s pocket and say,
‘Here is a human being; it’s me.’”1
Gilbert’s brilliant piece of theater was
echoed by other leading molecular bi-
ologists in their campaign to win pub-
lic support and enthusiasm for the Hu-
man Genome Project (hgp). It seemed
not to matter how often the biologists
employed the same theatrical device,
whether in California or at London’s
Institute for Contemporary Arts: hold-
ing up a cd to a spellbound audience
and 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 molecularization
and digitalization heralded by the de-
veloping hgp. At once a science and
a technology, this technoscience of hu-
man genomics simultaneously offered
a new de½nition of human nature and
new, promethean powers to repair and
even redesign that nature.

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

deterministic gene talk and genes for
everything from the most severe dis-
eases to compulsive shopping and
homelessness. While the cd played its
part in the popularization of the hgp,
it was the representation of dna’s dou-
ble helix that came to be the dominant
signi½er of life itself. More subversive-
ly, numbers of graphic artists saw the
potential surveillance powers of geno-
mics, striking a more critical note than
the cds or the double helix by, instead,
showing people with bar-coded fore-
heads. Here human nature was reduced
to 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 powerful
and expanding ½eld, namely, neurobiol-
ogy, led to the 1990s being nominated
by the National Institutes of Health as
the Decade of the Brain. (Europe was
slower; its Brain Decade started about
½ve years later.) By 2009, on both sides
of the pond, neuroscientists claimed
that advances in brain science had been
so substantial that it had become the
Decade of the Mind. Just as the double
helix became the symbol of the hgp, so
have the vivid, false-color skull-shaped
images locating the “sites” of brain ac-
tivity come to symbolize the new neuro-

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Hilary
Rose &
Steven
Rose
on being
human

science. These sites include not only
well-understood regions within the
brain, such as those associated with vi-
sion and speech, but also new ones, like
regions thought to be associated with
London taxi-drivers’ knowledge of the
London streets,2 Per esempio, or with
“romantic love.”3 Londoners were de-
lighted to learn the location of their
cabbies’ “knowledge,” persuaded by
the high-tech images one could see in
any newspaper. For those humanists
who understand the concept of roman-
tic love as originating with the medie-
val troubadours, the claim by leading
imager 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 how
the brain and, hence, the mind work,
but also to put psychiatry on a sound
scienti½c basis. While the drivers for
the 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 less
or even unnecessary as brain scans and
gene scans are taken as speaking more
accurately about the underlying causes.
Once again the human agent disappears
and human nature becomes digitalized.
In a biotechnological age, where major
funding for genomics and neuroscience
comes from the biotech and pharmaceu-
tical industries as well as from venture
capitalism, and universities move to pro-
tect their intellectual property with pat-
ents, disinterested curiosity increasing-
ly belongs to a distant age of science.4
Tuttavia, our concern here is not so
much with these commercial implica-

zioni, but with the claims that these
technosciences now make: that they
can provide a materialist account of
human nature itself, whether body
and brain or mind and consciousness.

In this, genomics and neuroscience are

building on a materialist tradition that
runs back to antiquity, but that gained
increasing 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 the
cultural 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 without
locating 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, con-
in the explanatory realm of the natural
sciences. The early-nineteenth-century
materialist accounts of nature and hu-
man nature produced by natural philos-
ophers (questo è, scientists) found a recep-
tive audience among intellectuals. High
up in the Yorkshire Dales, the Brontë sis-
ters (Bramwell was probably in the pub)
would walk the several miles from the
Haworth parsonage down to Keighley,
their nearest town, to listen to a lecture
on phrenology, the hottest materialist
account of brain and mind. In the vivid
descriptions of the head shapes of Mr.
Rochester and Jane Eyre we ½nd the in-
fluence of the new phrenology in the
pen of Charlotte Brontë.5 In distant
Cornwall, the young chemist Humphry
Davy and the poet Samuel Coleridge
formed a lifelong friendship, and Davy’s
speculations about electricity as a life

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force lay behind Mary Shelley’s unfor-
gettable creation of Frankenstein’s mon-
ster. Today, novelist Ian McEwan’s En-
during Love embraces evolutionary psy-
chology; UN. S. Byatt’s Babel Tower, genet-
ics and neuroscience. Thus the humani-
ties of past and present gesture toward
the new materialist accounts of human
nature.6

By the mid-nineteenth century, a fully
reductive materialism, or to use philoso-
pher Daniel Dennett’s term, a “greedy
reductionism,”7 had taken a ½rm hold
within the sciences. In 1845, four rising
German and French physiologists–von
Helmholtz, Ludwig, du Bois-Reymond,
and Brucke–swore a mutual oath to
prove that all bodily processes could
be accounted for in physical and chem-
ical terms. The Dutch physiologist Ja-
cob Moleschott put the position most
strongly, claiming that “the brain se-
cretes thought like the kidney secretes
urine,” while “genius is a matter of
phosphorus.”8 For the zoologist Thom-
as Huxley, mind was an epiphenome-
non, like “the whistle to the steam
train.” But it was above all Charles Dar-
win who provided the intellectual and
empirical bedrock for a materialist ac-
count of human origins and human na-
ture. On the Origin of Species, published
just 150 years ago, both precipitated
and symbolized a transformation in
Western society’s understanding of
human origins. As the geneticist Theo-
dosius Dobzhansky con½dently assert-
ed, “[N]othing in biology makes sense
except in the light of evolution.”9 Cer-
tainly, biologists had been challenging
the notion of the ½xity of species for a
good three quarters of a century before
Origin, but it was the Darwinian mecha-
nism that proved decisive. And indeed,
in the intervening century-and-a-half,
biologists have continued building on
Darwin in insisting on a fully material-

ist account of nature and human nature
–on what it is to be human, from our
basic physiology to our powers of cog-
nition, our emotions, and our beliefs.10
The supernatural and, hence, religious
belief became unnecessary to the expla-
nation of human nature and mind.

Origin set out a theory of evolutionary
change through natural and sexual selec-
zione, displacing the centrality of Judeo-
Christian theology and the two-page
creation story from the book of Gene-
sis. No longer were “kinds” to be under-
stood as having been created indepen-
dently in the brief interlude between
God’s separating heaven and earth and
then resting on the seventh day. Piuttosto
than having been intelligently designed,
as the Rev. William Paley had famously
insisted half a century previously, spe-
cies had evolved from a single common
origin and been transformed by selec-
tion operating on random variation over
long periods of geological time. (Evolu-
zione, according to one outraged oppo-
nent, was “the law of higgledy-piggle-
dy.”) Origin stories about who we are
and where we come from are central to
the belief systems of human cultures,
and Darwin’s contemporaries were
quick to recognize that the European
commitment to the Judeo-Christian
origin story, which insisted on the im-
mutability of God-created species, era
under challenge from a materialist and
evidence-based narrative of speciation
through variation over time and place.
The persistence of belief in creation-
ism/intelligent design in the United
States, still the research superpower,
remains an extraordinary anomaly.
While adhering to the late Stephen J.
Gould’s assertion that faith and science
are non-overlapping magisteria, IL
intensity of such beliefs among U.S.
evangelical Protestants challenges the
comfortable assumption that secular-

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Dædalus Summer 2009

Hilary
Rose &
Steven
Rose
on being
human

ism would accompany the deepening of
modernity.

Although Darwinian evolution reject-

ed the Linnaean view of the Great Chain
of Being, in which all living organisms
were ranged in a God-ordained hierar-
chy, for Darwin evolution was still pro-
gressive, with lower organisms giving
way to higher ones. Darwin represent-
ed this as a many-branched tree of life,
with Homo sapiens at 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 at
the relevance of his theory to humans.
Not until The Descent of Man, and Selec-
tion in Relation to Sex, published eleven
years later, does he ½nally af½rm human-
ity’s ape-like origins, and locate human
differences–between races and sexes–
within an evolutionary framework. E-
like some of his contemporaries, ad esempio
Huxley, Darwin embraced a monogenic
view of the origin of the human species.
Certainly Descent divides humanity into
many distinct races, describing their dif-
ferences in skin, eye, and hair color in
some detail. But Darwin nonetheless in-
sisted that there was but a single human
origin, the various human races having
separated from this common stock over
evolutionary time. This difference from
the prevailing polygenic view, in which
the races constituted separate species
with distinct origins, was a major issue
for 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 ranging
from the less evolved, degraded savages
of Tierra del Fuego to the higher Euro-
pean civilization, not least that of Down
House in the garden of England. Huxley

went further, arguing that the evolution-
arily inferior black races would in due
course be out-evolved and defeated by
the whites. Evolution is an ongoing pro-
cess so far as Darwin is concerned, con-
out endpoint. Infatti, as a nineteenth-
century progressivist he speculates on
the wonderful civilization of the future
as the species evolves: “And as natural
selection works solely by and for the
good of each being, all corporeal and
mental endowments will tend to pro-
gress towards perfection.”11 More neg-
atively, his concept of variation with-
in the species is trapped within a very
nineteenth-century understanding of
½xed social hierarchies. Così, nonostante
his hatred of slavery, Darwin’s concept
of race essentializes difference, so that
variation within the species slides into
hierarchy between the races.

Sexual selection is almost as central
to 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 extreme
and otherwise apparently non-adaptive
caratteristiche, such as the glories of the pea-
cock’s tail. Sexual selection accounts
for the fact that males and females of
the same species often differ in shape
and size. Males compete for females;
they may ½ght like stags, or display
like peacocks. Females then choose
the 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’s
view of the differences between the
sexes was entirely conventional. Così,
he states, in humans the result of sexu-
al selection is for men to be “more cou-
rageous, pugnacious and energetic than
woman . . . [con] . . . a more inventive
genius. His brain is absolutely larger . . .
the formation of her skull is said to be
intermediate between the child and the

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man.”13 Nineteenth-century biolo-
gists’ differentiation between the sexes
was crucial in providing a biological ba-
sis for the superiority of the male and
the explanation for the near invisibili-
ty of women (along with the common
people of both genders). While female
choice explains sexual selection, it is
the males who evolve in order to meet
the chosen criteria of strength and
power.

By the mid-nineteenth century the
universalism of the Enlightenment be-
gan to show its cracks–at least to femi-
nists and abolitionists. The stirring calls
for universal equality made throughout
the revolutionary ferment of the preced-
ing century, from Thomas Paine’s Rights
of 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 convention
in Akron, Ohio, the freed slave Sojourn-
er Truth brought together the struggle
against slavery and gender with her
“Ain’t I a woman?” challenge. Darwin’s
androcentricity was not missed by his
contemporary feminist intellectuals;
within ½ve years of the appearance
of Descent in the United States, Antoi-
nette Blackwell Brown14 had published
her 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 the
critique much better armed. Ruth Hub-
bard bluntly asked of Darwinian theo-
ry, “Have only Men evolved?”15; eth-
ologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy pushed this
argument further in her 1981 book The
Woman That Never Evolved.16
Darwin did more than locate humans
within an anatomical and physiological
evolutionary continuity.17 He anchored

the human mind ½rmly into human biol-
ogy and laid the foundation for an evo-
lutionary psychology; human emotions
and their expressions were for him evo-
lutionary descendents of those of their
ape-like ancestors. Tuttavia, from Dar-
win’s day until recently, neuroscience
was unable to cash out these promisso-
ry claims. It could, as in the view of the
early-twentieth-century physiologist
Charles Sherrington, trace the great
neural pathways up from the periphery
to the brain, and out again, enabling
the organism to act on the world; Ma
although what went on inside the three-
pound mass of tissue inside the skull
could be studied chemically and phys-
iologically, science could not explain
mental processes.

Over the past three decades, geno-
mics and neuroscience have been trans-
formed in scale, from small sciences to
full-scale technosciences. While geno-
mics’ goal is to read the book of life in
the genes, neuroscience offers to solve
the mind-brain problem. Both also
share medico-technological ambitions:
to eliminate disease, treat mental and
neurological distress and disorder, E
enhance technologies of social control.
The scale of these new enterprises is
prodigious. The scope and scale of ge-
nomics is familiar, but neuroscience
begins to rival it. More than thirty thou-
sand neuroscientists attend the annual
meeting of the American Society for
Neuroscience, including a large interna-
tional contingent. Conferences, Anche se
few on this scale, proliferate in the rich
researching nations. Add to the cost of
the many conferences, those of salaries,
laboratories, and the hugely expensive
technologies and it becomes self-evi-
dent that the neurosciences, with their
powerful, empirically rich knowledges,
are funded on a totally different scale
from the academic humanities and so-

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Dædalus Summer 2009

Hilary
Rose &
Steven
Rose
on being
human

cial sciences, with costs running into
hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
This huge growth of investment in
neuroscience from governments, includ-
ing their military establishments, private
foundations, and the pharmaceutical in-
dustry has not yet resulted in anything
like a generally accepted theory of how
brains/minds may work; Piuttosto, it has
endorsed a multitude of new reductive
insights and approaches, of which we
single out four: two theoretical and two
experimental. Theoretically, sociobiol-
ogy and, Dopo, evolutionary psychology
claimed a closure of the Darwinian evo-
lutionary program by integrating human
social 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 the
mere hand-waving of the past. The ex-
perimental advances in genetics and
imaging have enabled the biomedical
gaze to penetrate ever deeper into the
brain to levels hitherto inconceivable.
Thus if phrenology was a premature
materialism, and Moleschott’s claim
was more of a provocation than a re-
search program, the last years of the
twentieth century, those of the Decade
of the Brain and the current Decade of
the Mind, have witnessed a resurgent
con½dence among neuroscientists. Fi-
nally they have in their hands the keys
with which to open the mind to natu-
ral science’s objectivity.

That the human mind and human na-

ture have been shaped by evolutionary
pressures is of course not in question.
Humans are long-lived social animals
whose offspring are born neotenous,
requiring several years of caregiving be-
fore they can live independently. These
parameters must play a central part in
the formation of the human mind. Liv-

ing in groups requires learning social
skills–that is, adjusting an individual’s
ways of being and thinking to the needs
of 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 mirror
neurons, which are active either when
an individual performs a particular act
or watches another doing the same–
allegedly the neural base for empathy.
Empathy (or at least mirror neurons) È
present in humans’ nearest evolutionary
neighbors. The social nature of human
existence also must have driven the evo-
lution of mind and consciousness. As a
result, evolution has ceased to be seen as
an entirely biological process, and many
now speak of the emergence of modern
humans as a co-evolutionary process, In-
volving both biology and culture.18 Such
an argument insists on the inseparability
of human biology from human culture,
not as a matter of arbitrary partitioning
–such-and-such a percent genes and
such-and-such a percent environment–
but of the continual interplay between
both during development. Humans are
biosocial beings.

Tuttavia, as with eighteenth-century
phrenology, 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-
biologia, who have hijacked these possi-
bilities. Evolutionary psychology bases
itself not just on the assumption that
human nature is an evolved property,
but on the profoundly un-Darwinian
assertion that human nature (by con-
trast with the rest of nature) was ½xed
in the Pleistocene, and there has not
been enough evolutionary time for hu-
man nature to change subsequently.
Così, it is not just that the demands

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of social living may have impacted the
evolution of morality, but that human-
ity is, according to the evolutionary psy-
chologist Marc Hauser, endowed with
a universal set of moral principles, inde-
pendent of culture or social context.19
Also prominent among these apparent-
ly ½xed human characteristics is the ex-
pression of so-called basic emotions,20
racial preferences, and gender relations.
Male preferences for mating with
younger women of de½ned body shape,
and female for richer, older, more pow-
erful males, do little other than repeat in
contemporary language Darwin’s own
assertions in Descent. Evolutionary psy-
chology has been subject to severe criti-
cism. Scholars across disciplines, from
the humanities and the social and life
sciences, have challenged its theoretical
base 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 swiss
army knife.22) Tuttavia, not only is this
claim disputed by those who argue that
the mind’s speci½cities are formed dur-
ing development through an infant’s in-
teraction with a social environment,23
but brain imaging studies also ½nd no
evidence for such modularity. The com-
plexity of the brain, with its hundred
billion nerve cells, and hundred trillion
internal connections, still de½es compre-
hension. Twenty-two thousand genes
cannot begin to specify in any more than
generalities the pattern of these connec-
zioni, which are shaped by the activities
of the developing child.

“Mapping the brain” is conceptual-
ly and technically orders of magnitude
harder 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. Tuttavia, IL
power of informatics is making possible
a human brain project modeled on the
Human Genome Project, though more
informally 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 can
be divined. How such a map may change
our concept of how the brain works is,
Tuttavia, another matter. Identifying
sites or genes “for” particular brain
processes or mental attributes ignores
both the complexity and dynamism of
the brain.

The advent of brain imaging, coupled
with informatics, has technically driven
such proposals. Placing subjects into a
functional magnetic resonance imager
(fmri) and asking them to think of God
or 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-
attività. Another technique, magnetoen-
cephalography, which measures the
fluctuating transient magnetic ½elds
around the head, offers millisecond-
by-millisecond records of the brain’s
activity during such thought proces-
ses. Reciprocally, focusing an intense
magnetic beam through the skull onto
speci½c brain regions can influence
thoughts 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 describing
the latest aspect of human nature to
be thus given a speci½c site within the
brain.24

Taken together, these theoretical and
investigative tools have opened the way
to an increasingly assertive reduction-
ism, in which the collapse of mind into

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Dædalus Summer 2009

Hilary
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brain is unquestioned. This program-
matic agenda has been articulated by
the new neurophilosophers, notably Pa-
tricia and Paul Churchland, with their
robust dismissal of mind language as
mere folk psychology, to be replaced
by the rigors of computational neuro-
science,25 a project committed to digi-
talization and shared by many leading
neuroscientists. Consciousness theorist
Gerald Edelman quotes Emily Dickin-
son’s poem “The brain is wider than the
sky” before asserting, “[Y]ou are your
brain”26; neurobiologist Eric Kandel
comfortably agrees.27 For Semir Zeki,
the brain, rather than the mind, ha
“knowledge” and “acquires concepts.”28
Larry Young, extending Zeki’s brain lo-
calization of romantic love and repris-
ing Moleschott, argued in a recent Na-
ture essay that human love (by analogy
with the mating practices of voles) Di-
pends on a polymorphism in the AVPR1A
gene.29 Francis Crick is in robust Alice
in Wonderland mode: “You’re nothing
but a bunch of neurons,” he writes,
before going on to speculate that “free
will” is located in the anterior cingulate
gyrus.30 Crick’s mischievous localiza-
tion exempli½es the internal phrenol-
ogy that brain imaging fosters: Franz
Gall and Cesare Lombroso redux.

The neuroscienti½c reach into the

mind has by now gone beyond even
love 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 theoretical
physicists and new-age mysterians, Ma
instead occupy ambitious young neuro-
scientists, who employ all the armory
that brain imaging and computer sim-
ulation can provide (although the still
proliferating books on mind and con-

sciousness are written mainly by their
seniors). In the past, philosophers of
mind pondered the problems of qualia
and ½rst- versus third-person experi-
ence, without feeling the need to relate
them 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 observe
scientists at work.31 But the con½dence,
even hubris of neuroscientists that their
accounts of brain functioning will ex-
plain mind can indicate a failure by the
neuroscientist to understand what the
philosopher is saying, as in the case of
the public debate between the neuro-
chemist Jean-Pierre Changeux and
the hermeneutic philosopher Paul
Ricoeur.32

Perhaps this helps explain why, Di-
spite the explosion of literature coming
from the neurosciences, the most satis-
fying accounts of “mindedness” have
come not from “basic” laboratory-based
accounts, but from researchers who are
also clinicians. At the birth of both mod-
ern physiology and sociology, there was
an interesting debate between Claude
Bernard and Auguste Comte. Bernard’s
project was to put medicine onto a prop-
er scienti½c basis, arguing that the route
to scienti½c understanding was through
the study of normal physiological mech-
anismo. Comte, by contrast, insisted that
one best approached the normal via the
pathological–that is, through the clinic
and patients’ lived experiences of pain
and suffering. The same seems true to-
day. No neuroscientist studying memo-
ry has explored its vagaries more richly
than the Soviet neuropsychologist Alek-
sandr Luria.33 Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings
combined a study of the clinical effects
of l-Dopa in patients with a sensitive un-
derstanding of their existential crisis in
being 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 enriched
by his listening to patients suffering in-
tractable pain.34 And it is perhaps not
surprising that some of the most de-
tailed attempts by a neuroscientist to
come to terms with the complexities
of human consciousness have come
from Antonio Damasio, whose collab-
oration with the neurologist Hanna
Damasio has required not just brain
imaging, but listening to their patients
suffering from disturbances of will
and emotion.35 He describes one pa-
tient with severe frontal brain injury
who showed none of the anticipated
cognitive effects; sorpreso, Damasio
tells of how he came to realize that the
negative effects were in Elliot’s lack
of emotional response despite having
been through terrible trauma. In this
meticulous storytelling–which also
makes a philosophical point–Damasio
says that he realized he was more dis-
tressed by Elliot’s telling him of the
traumatic events than was Elliot him-
self. It is the minded clinician who
makes the diagnosis when purely
cognitive tests cannot.

As this neurological example illus-

trates, imaging techniques are used in-
creasingly for neurological diagnoses.
Ma, more disturbingly, there has been
an increasing enthusiasm for employ-
ing them to predict potential “antiso-
cial” behaviors, from attention de½cit
hyperactivity disorders in children to
criminality, psychopathy, and terror-
ism.36 Coupled with the power of the
new genomics, for biological determin-
ists this opens the possibility of a eugen-
ic social policy. Such thinking stretches
back to Francis Galton’s 1869 founda-
tional text, Hereditary Genius, Quale
saw genius as passing down through
the male line. Galton’s central concept

of eugenics crystallized a growing con-
cern among the social and cultural elite
with the quality of the national stock in
late Victorian England. Darwinian the-
ories provided a substantial ideological
support to the nascent eugenics move-
ment, itself given strength in the early
twentieth century with the rediscovery
of Mendel’s genetics. The widespread
enthusiasm for the new science of eu-
genics was shared by Euro-American
intellectuals of almost all persuasions
(barring Catholics) and professions,
and ranged from conservatives through
pro-birth-control feminists to Scandi-
navian social democrats, above all the
Myrdals. For the Myrdals, eugenics
was an essential plank in the formation
of the welfare state, understood as a
science-based social policy, necessary
to maintain the collective well-being
of the nation. The welfare state could
not–would not–carry the burden of
the un½t. Hereditarian biologists (con
Cold Spring Harbor in the United States
and University College London’s Galton
Laboratory as key locations) envisaged
moral or mental de½ciency as inherited
and as weakening the national stock.
The body of the nation thus took prior-
ity over the body of the individual. IL
chosen method of inhibiting the breed-
ing of the “un½t” (above all, the learn-
ing disabled) varied from country to
country, 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 served
eugenics equally well.

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

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Dædalus Summer 2009

Hilary
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on being
human

Baur, Fischer, and Lenz.37 Some races,
Jews and Gypsies in particular, were
untermenschen and therefore outside
the de½nition of what it is to be hu-
Uomo. Dopo 1945 and the Nuremberg tri-
COME, whether these were victors’ justice
or marked the advent of bioethics, IL
word eugenics became taboo. Geneti-
cists (above all, clinical geneticists) dis-
sociated their discipline from eugenics
and its hideous past. This distinction
was uneven though, as numbers of
Nazi race scientists were reappointed
to leading positions in genetics labs in
postwar West Germany. The practices
of eugenics continued until the mid-
1970S, still guided by biomedicine and
still ranging from compulsory steriliza-
tion to incarceration and sexual segre-
gation. It was the explosion of the new
social movements of the late 1960s and
1970S, not least the women’s liberation
movement, with their new demands for
personal and cultural freedom, Quale
helped terminate these practices.

Despite the un 1948 Declaration of
Human Rights, with its intended death-
blow to the very idea of race, outside
the mainstream of science biological
racism flowed steadily as a highly con-
servative response to the social chal-
lenges, within the United States, del
civil rights movement and Johnson’s
War on Poverty. This conservatism ex-
tended from Jensen’s attack on Proj-
ect Head Start,38 a waste of resources
in his view because of the inherited
lower iq of black Americans, to Herrn-
stein and Murray’s Bell Curve,39 Quale
argues that those at the bottom of the
curve formed a genetic underclass and
were outside the reach of progressive
social policies. By the end of the centu-
ry, the hierarchical difference of biolog-
ical racism had been largely replaced
by cultural difference, fought out polit-
ically as a clash between multicultural-

ism and cultural racism. Social groups
now identify themselves (and are iden-
ti½ed by others) according to culture
rather than biology or even nationality,
and are still frequently seen through the
hostile prism of racism. In the United
Kingdom, Pakistanis became Muslims,
subject to increasing and violent Islamo-
phobia. This dangerous brew has been
intensi½ed by the rise of Muslim funda-
mentalism and its terrorist attacks on
civilians and by the wars in Iraq and Af-
ghanistan. Ironically, it is only now, at
the beginning of the twenty-½rst cen-
tury, that the life sciences show tenden-
cies to re-racialize difference through
the discourse of genomics.40
Even as compulsory eugenics retreat-

ed, prenatal diagnostic techniques grew.
By the 1960s, Down’s syndrome could
be identi½ed during pregnancy, E
women and their partners offered the
possibility of termination. With the
Human Genome Project, dna diagnos-
tics proliferated; but despite the vocal
promises of molecularized genomics,
few safe, effective gene therapies have
been delivered: the main option offered
by dna diagnostics has been abortion.
Few (other than right-to-lifers) would
argue against the desirability of tests
for such devastating conditions such
as Tay Sachs or Lesch-Nyhan, condi-
tions associated with extreme suffer-
ing and death in infancy. Genetic or
brain 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 offering
a “utopian” eugenics, in which the de-
sire of women and their partners to
have healthy babies coincides with the
utility to the state of fewer children be-
ing born with severe and expensive dis-

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abilities. Many feminists, influenced
by the growing international disability
movement, have been more skeptical,
questioning the cultural assumption
that what women want is a perfect baby.
Such skepticism, reinforced by the
challenges from the disability move-
ment, has had a measurable effect in
the United Kingdom; today, despite the
increasing availability of nhs diagnos-
tic testing for Down’s, there are more
babies born with the condition, non
fewer. People with Down’s syndrome
are increasingly valued in themselves,
and are not, as ethicist John Harris42
would have it, doomed to live worth-
less lives. The complexity of what it
means to have a worthwhile life is dem-
onstrated by the recent claim of autism
researcher Simon Baron-Cohen that tes-
tosterone levels in utero can predict au-
tism and could therefore offer the pos-
sibility of termination. Baron-Cohen
himself recognizes the dilemma that
this diagnostic technique raises.43 The
same newspaper that reported Baron-
Cohen’s concerns on the front page
also carried the story of the young au-
tistic man who hacked into the Penta-
gon. While his action is reprehensible,
it was done, it seems, for fun, and it un-
questionably indicates formidable tal-
ent. Such extreme talent is rare, Anche se
those with autism share a typical lack
of social and moral sensibility. But do
we want, and can we afford, a concep-
tion of human nature that is so narrow
–and potentially so boring? Many of
the most talented in our society seem
to have more than a touch of Asperger’s.
Nor does the debate get easier. Issues
around designer babies, savior siblings,

and human cloning have led the phi-
losopher Jürgen Habermas to raise the
profound question of the desirability
of a society in which human beings are
made, not born.44 Conversely, are we to
be reassured by anthropologists Sarah
Franklin and Celia Roberts45 that this
is a false dichotomy and that human be-
ings can be both? The lines between na-
ture and culture shift: as technosciences,
genomics, and neuroscience de½ne hu-
man nature as ½xed, they also offer tech-
nologies of manipulation and modi½ca-
zione. Yet even if it is this generation that
comfortably decides what is at fault in
the fetus within a woman’s womb and
how to ½x it, and then ½xes it, it is not
the generation that has to live with the
risultati. At their bleakest, twenty-½rst-
century technosciences threaten to add
formidable powers to the burden the
poet Philip Larkin already sees: “They
fuck you up your Mum and Dad, Essi
may not mean it but they do.”

Over the two hundred thousand
years since the appearance of recog-
nizably modern humans on earth,
human nature has been subtly trans-
formed in response to the evolution-
ary pressures resulting from rapid eco-
logical, social, technological, and cul-
tural change. Whether this “nature”
has the resilience to respond adequate-
ly to these latest challenges remains to
be seen. Big and powerful brains may
not be the best of all survival strate-
gies. After all, as Darwin pointed out,
the fossil record is full of once success-
ful and now extinct species. And at
the core of evolutionary thinking is
the recognition that the future is not
predictable.

ENDNOTES
1 Walter Gilbert, “A Vision of the Grail,” in The Code of Codes: Scienti½c and Social Issues in
the Human Genome Project, ed. Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood (Cambridge, Massa.: Har-

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vard University Press, 1992); quoted in Amade M’charek, The Human Genome Diversity Proj-
ect: An Ethnography of Scienti½c Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
2 Eleanor A. Maguire, David G. Gadian, Ingrid S. Johnsrude, Catriona D. Good, John Ash-
burner, Richard S. J. Frackowiak, e Christopher D. Frith, “Navigation-Related Structur-
al Change in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sci-
enze 97 (2000): 4398–4403.
3 Semir Zeki, Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Hap-
piness (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).
4 Steven Shapin, The Scienti½c Life: A Moral History of a Late-Modern Vocation (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2008).
5 Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1996).
6 Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and
Terror of Science (London: Harper, 2008).
7 Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York:
Simone & Schuster, 1995).
8 From Moleschott’s 1852 text Das Kreislauf des Lebens; quoted in the introduction to
Jacques Loeb, The Mechanistic Conception of Life, ed. Donald Fleming (1912; Cambridge,
Massa.: Belknap Press, 1964).
9 Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolu-
zione,” American Biology Teacher 35 (1973): 125–129.

10 Elisabeth Roudinesco, Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser,
Deleuze, Derrida, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
11 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. J. W. Burrow (1859; Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1985), 459.

12 It should be noted that although biologists today regard sexual selection as one of the core
features of evolutionary theory, and popular writing, especially from evolutionary psy-
chologists, accepts it unquestioningly, attempts to demonstrate it empirically among, for
esempio, peacocks have not proved very successful. Inoltre, there is evidence that
both sexes have other potential sexual strategies. Così, while massively antlered stags are
rutting, females may choose to mate quietly with less well-antler-endowed males–a strat-
egy memorably described by the evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith as that of the
“sneaky fuckers.”

13 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd ed. (1879; London: Penguin, 2004), 622.
14 Antoinette Blackwell Brown, The Sexes throughout Nature (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1875);
cited in Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Heni½n, and Barbara Fried, eds., Women Look at Biology
Looking at Women: A Collection of Feminist Critiques (Cambridge, Massa.: Schenkman, 1979).

15 Hubbard, Heni½n, and Fried, eds., Women Look at Biology Looking at Women.
16 Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Woman That Never Evolved (Cambridge, Massa.: Harvard University

Press, 1981).

17 In this respect, Darwin contrasts with Wallace, his co-proposer of natural selection, who

in later years demurred from extending the principle to the emergence of humans.
18 Vedere, for instance, Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness

(New York: Norton, 2001).

19 Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong

(New York: Ecco, 2006).

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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).

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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 is
engaged 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, Massa.: mit

Press, 2002).

26 Gerald M. Edelman, Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (Nuovo paradiso:

Stampa dell'Università di Yale, 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).

31 A 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).

33 Aleksandr 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).
35 Antonio 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).

37 Erwin 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 Review 39 (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:

Simone & Schuster, 1996).

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Hilary
Rose &
Steven
Rose
on being
human

42 John Harris, Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2007).

43 The Guardian, Gennaio 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).

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Dædalus Summer 2009
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