The book by Dominique Lecourt, Lyssenko: histoire réelle d’une science prolétarienne (Maspéro, 1976),395 is addressed to a Marxist public. Its author, disciple of Louis Althusser, develops a hypothesis ad usum internum396 that attempts to explain the success of Lyssenko by Stalin’s ‘deviationist’ views on epistemology and general theory of science. But as Maurice Fleury observes (Lyssenko: un savant sur mesure),397 it is difficult to see why the ‘cult of personality’ must ‘lead to the negation of the role of chromosomes and of Pasteur’s work’. In reality, ‘Lysenkoism owed its success to the fact that it appeared to be the only scientific doctrine that was ultimately in accord with the dialectical model’ (La Recherche, February 1977).398
Lysenko’s principal book, Agrobiologuia, published in Kiev in 1940, was translated into French in 1953 by éd. de Moscou: Agrobiologie génétique, sélection et production des semences.399 It was subsequently withdrawn from sale.
Towards Biopolitics
In presenting the symposium ‘Biology and the Future of Man’, held from 18 to 24 September 1974 at the Sorbonne, Robert Mallet, Chancellor of the Universities, declared:
‘The universal is generally better treated by qualified individuals than by quantified nations. A head of state ignorant of genetics and ecology is much more serious for the future of the world than a wealth of tradesmen who cannot read or write’.
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing responded to him on Tuesday 24 September, in the great amphitheater of the Sorbonne, by comparing society to an organisation:
‘The fate of men is not distinct from the future of man: the spiritual inheritance of a collectively lived civilisation responds to the genetic inheritance of biological descent. And the natural rejection of any attack on either of these inheritances is a factor we must take into account when we are led to analyse the choices governing our future’.
One hundred and fifty individuals from thirty-six nations, including several Nobel-Prize-winners, came to Paris to investigate the new powers of science and the new responsibilities of man.
A Definition of Tomorrow’s Revolution
This symposium, an initiative of the universities of Paris, made it possible to verify the important role that biology now plays in our everyday life. In the twenties, the queen of the sciences was physics. Today, biology reveals a new image of the universe to us. The discovery of the genetic code, the ensuing synthesis of cells, the prospects for viral transplantation and genetic ‘engineering’, the rise of neurobiology, molecular biology, eugenics, control of procreation, advances in immunology, haematology, organ transplantation, constitute the most striking aspects of a development which is now at the stage of ‘technological’ application.
Any policy today involves biopolitics.
‘In the not-too-distant future, and in all likelihood, during the twenty-first century’, declared Professor Jean Bernard, ‘the execution of the genetic program, or even its structure, can be modified in order to correct its defects and to introduce supplements’.
Mallet anticipates a day when ‘the genetic code could contribute to informing civil codes’.
‘I have a feeling’, said Giscard d’Estaing, ‘that the scientific revolution of tomorrow will come to us from biology.
From such a symposium the best and the worst could emerge. The best: a presentation of the principal results of current research. The worst: a nebulous ‘planetary’ morality, replacing the responsibility of the scientist with a sort of castrating, apocalyptic discourse.
An important round table had been devoted to the biological foundations of behaviour. Professor Lhermitte, who presided over the meeting, had approached the problem of the process of acquisition of the brain. It had been brought up to critique ideologues giving too great an importance to the environment and neglecting the necessary complementarity between hereditary cultural factors. (In passing, he had even touched on the notion of acquisition in utero).
Any break between the psychosocial context and biology’, says Dr. Escoffier-Lambiotte in Le Monde, ‘is as stupid and archaic as the ancient distinction between “body and soul”. The attitude of antipsychiatrists (who deny the reality of mental illness and attribute the responsibility for these disorders to the family and society) is “completely irrational” and constitutes an appeal to an equally archaic metaphysics for the explanation of behaviours that biology makes obvious to us’.
These remarks are similar to one of the conclusions reached during the International Pharmaceutical Meetings held a few weeks earlier in Paris: ‘In biology, the brain and thought are two aspects of an indivisible unity’.
‘Intelligence’, Professor Lhennitte also pointed out, ‘is significantly determined by heredity’.
And to recall this formula of René Zazzo: ‘Just because social inequalities confuse the issue it does not mean we have the right to deny biological inequalities’.
Numerous data have been provided concerning the genetic, biochemical, or enzymological origin of certain mental diseases. Professor Kety (USA) has indicated that the correlation of the disease among adopted schizophrenic children is nonexistent with their adoptive parents, while it is very strong with their biological parents. On the other hand, the heredity of manic-depressive psychosis is now well established. ‘Psychiatry has no future without biology’, concluded Professor Freedman (USA).
The round table of 20 September was devoted to the problems posed by therapeutic trials on humans. Professor Mezey from the University of New Jersey recalled that experimentation on a healthy man is a necessity, provided it is carried out under strict control:
‘If it had not been for the first kidney transplant, there would have been no such progress in immunology. There would not be so many thousands of people alive through haemodialysis’.
Many interventions have unfortunately been drowned in a universalist pathos, a cataclysmic ‘pessimism’ inspiring the utopias of the Pugwash Movement as well as the regressive and reductionist analyses of the Club of Rome. This chatter has given birth to a Universal Movement of Scientific Responsibility, which is concerned with ‘foresight’, but which will depart with difficulty from the vast domain of general propositions, lyrical flights, and ‘generous’ ideas.
‘We are faced with a serious contradiction’, one of the British participants declared at the end of the conference. Science rests on fundamental principles, such as reliance on the experimental method and the acceptance of results, whatever they may be. Yet scientists now claim to select such and such of these results according to their desirability, that is to say, their suitability with regard to dominant ideologies. They attempt, for example, to make believe that all problems must be ‘globalised’ and that a universal consciousness is in the process of being born in the laboratories. This is wrong. What they express is their personal opinion, and nothing more.
Against the Mythologies of this Time
The question is at the centre of a very current debate. It is claimed that science is not ‘neutral’. In reality, it is the scientists who are not.
‘Science tells us what is, not what ought to be’, remarked a young biochemist. The belief in the unanimity of the scientific world is pure illusion. Giscard d’Estaing has stressed that: ‘Progress will instead come from a collaboration between scientists and other men, especially politicians, rather than from a room of scientists contemplating among themselves’.
The influence exercised on researchers by ideological systems shows that, outside their specialties, they are only too vulnerable to the frame of mind and mythologies of their time.
In a joint essay by Dr. Watson Fuller under the title Responsabilité scientifique (Hermann, 1974),400 Professor Geoffrey Beale points out that some scientists have argued for the elimination of affected research credits401 whose results don’t align with universalist beliefs or fashionable egalitarianism. (In the Scientific American, for example, Bodmer and Cavalli-Sforza proposed that research into racial psychometry be systematically discouraged).
Professor Jacques Monod from the Institut Pasteur replied: ‘I cannot accept the idea of authoritatively ceasing research in a legitimate field where there is knowledge to be gained. I think that in attempting to get this, far from confronting our responsibilities, we instead try to escape them.
*
The proceedings of the World Symposium held at Sorbonne in September 1974 were published at the beginning of 1976 at Ediscience/McGraw-Hill under the title Biology and the Future of Man. The best pieces in the volume are those by Jean Hamburger, Paul Nez, François Lhermitte, Roger Gautheret, Jean Frezal, Henri Bequignot, and Georges Canguilhem.
A book devoted entirely to the current problems of biopolitics was published in 1976 under the direction of Professor Albert Somit of the State University of New York at Buffalo, Biology and Politics (Mouton, The Hague). It collects the papers presented at the conference Biology and Politics, held in Paris from 6 to 8 January 1975, under the patronage of the International Association of Political Science and the Guggenheim Foundation. Among the participants were Roger D. Masters, John H. Crook, Lionel Tiger, John Wahlke, etc.
Ethology
The Innate and the Acquired
He raises graylag geese and calls them by name. He knows the customs of jackdaws and Siberian wolves. He knows why ducks roll their eggs with their beaks, and why squirrels seem particularly ‘kind’ to us. Everyone recognises his silhouette: hair like snow, the white beard, his pipe, his laughing eyes.
His name is Konrad Lorenz.
With the ninety-one year old Austrian, Karl von Frisch, and the seventy year old Dutchman, Nikolaas Tinbergen, he was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for their work as a whole.
Konrad Lorenz, seventy-four years of age, was born in Vienna, where his father, Adolf Lorenz, a court adviser and friend of Emperor Francis Joseph, was an orthopaedic surgeon also interested in the problems of eugenics. In 1940, he became Professor of Comparative Psychology at the University of Königsberg. Imprisoned by the Russians, released in 1948, he founded the Institute for the Study of Comparative Behaviour in Altenberg the following year. In 1961 he became director of the Max-Planck Institute of Comparative Physiology in Seewiesen, near Lake Starnberg in the heart of Bavaria. Since 1957, he has been an Honorary Professor at the University of Munich.
Returning to his native village of Altenberg near Vienna for some years, he continued his work as director of the Institute for the Study of Comparative Behavior, an organisation attached to the Austrian Academy of Sciences. ‘
‘Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen can be regarded as the true founders of ethology, that is to say, of the science of comparative behavior’, writes one of their disciples, Professor Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt.
The Origin of Instinct
More precisely, ethology is the branch of scientific research which applies certain lessons learned from the theory of evolution to the analysis of the behaviour of men and animals; it treats, says Lorenz, ‘animal and human behaviour as a function of a system’. That is, it tries ascertain why such a system presents such a character, and how this character has been acquired.
This new science developed from 1935, essentially under the influence of Lorenz, Tinbergen and the Englishman Julian Huxley. The first volume of the Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie (Journal for Animal Psychology) appeared in 1937. The journal Behaviour was born in 1948; The Revue du comportement animal (Review of Animal Behavior), in 1966. In 1963, a book by Robert Ardrey, Les enfants de Caïn (Stock),402 helps to popularise the works of Konrad Lorenz. A few years later, his works began to be translated throughout the whole world.
When presenting him with the Cino Del Duca world prize in Paris, the biologist Jean Rostand declared:
‘Konrad Lorenz has renovated the methods of behavioural psychology by introducing direct observation of nature’.
Freud had been ‘blinded by his sexual theories’ because he had only observed animals in captivity. Lorenz chose the opposite approach. He respects the savagery of beasts, and wants them to remain themselves. He does not put them in cages. It is he who adapts to their lives.
For the ethologist, words like ‘hate’, ‘anger’, ‘fidelity’, ‘respect’, ‘property’ are translated by aggressiveness, hierarchy, territoriality, etc. Concepts considered as innate behaviours.
Innate behaviours are those that were once called ‘instincts’. But while instincts seemed by their very nature to escape all analysis, innate behaviours became objects of study.
For the ‘vitalists’, instinct is a ‘directive factor’ resisting all causal explanation. For the ‘behaviourists’, it is a pure illusion: individuals are only supposed to learn under the influence of the environment.
Lorenz shows that not only does instinct exist, but that it is explained in a perfectly rational way, through innate mechanisms which are transmitted by heredity and which are formed in the course of evolution. ‘Natural selection’, he explains, ‘generates adaptation, which is a cogenitive process by which the organism incorporates information existing in the ambient environment, extremely important for its survival (…) The existence of structures and functions created by adaptation is characteristic of living beings. There is no such thing in the inorganic world’.
The American Charles O. Whitman as early as 1898, and the German Oskar Heinroth (Beiträge zur Biologie) since 1910, had hypothesised that behaviour was based on innate processes of more distant origin than we thought. The developments of contemporary science have confirmed these views.
The Vestiges of our Animal Past
Working from 1935 on the central nervous system, Erich von Holst has experimentally demonstrated that a sequence of innate movements can be coordinated in a purely central fashion, that is to say without the aid of any external ‘stimulation’. These observations, first carried out on eels and fish, have been found among mammals and primates (see Erich von Holst, Electrically Controlled Behaviour, in Scientific American, March 1962). The explanation of ‘reflexologists’, according to which instinct will be produced by stimulation depending first and foremost on a nervous pathway from the afferent nerves (from the exterior) to the centre, is thus inadequate. The stimulations are in fact spontaneously produced by the central nervous system, and it is these which lead to the ‘appetitive behaviour’ necessary to the ‘triggering’ of the instinctive impulses.
The physiological nature of the instinctive movements thus finds itself identified: the behavioural sequences are not based on ‘reflexes’, but on an elementary ability of the central nervous system to spontaneously produce automatically regulated stimuli. At the same time, a causative physiological explanation of the spontaneity of certain movements is provided.
‘Instinct is given at birth’, writes Konrad Lorenz. ‘It is independent of education, social influences, and experience. The instinctive act has nothing to do with acquired behaviour or intelligence’.
Among animals, the role of the innate in behaviour is extremely important: certain instinctive behaviours attested in the individual from birth have been ‘programmed’ (acquired) phylogenetically, that is to say, during the evolution of the species. ‘A jackdaw, even if he has been deprived of all relations with his kind at an early age, practically possesses all the qualities and behaviours that would be his in the context of a normal society. (Studies in Animal and Human Behaviour).403 A cichlid fish ‘knows’ the colour of other fish species likely to attack it, even before it is removed from the egg. The greylag goose that has never seen a fox in its life ‘knows, by reason of an innate triggering mechanism, that a furry, red-brown, elongated, form which creeps is dangerous for it’ (On Aggression).404
Man does not escape the rule. He has inherited certain innate patterns of behaviour from his animal ancestors. ‘He possesses certain qualities’, writes Lorenz, ‘because of his belonging to a species, and not because of his fortuitous membership in society determined by this species. And these qualities are not influenced by their formation in socie
ty’.
In the newborn, the existence of many innate behaviours are noted: rhythmic seeking for the teat, swimming and crawling movements, reflexive grip of the fingers, etc.
It is not the brain that dictates these movements: during the first two months of life, the behaviour of anencephalic children (lacking cerebral cortex) does not differ essentially from that of normal children. The environment no longer intervenes: Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt has shown that in children born blind, deaf, and mute, reflex movements and expressions (anger, sulkiness, fear, sadness) are exactly the same as in other children.
For the grown adult, it is the domain of emotions (directly placing into question the relationship between the physical and the moral) that constitutes an area of choice for the ethologists.
Why do we tilt our heads to express approval? Why does the victorious athlete raise his arms as a sign of triumph? Why does the mistress of the house almost always raise her eyebrows when she welcomes her guests?
These ‘spontaneous’ gestures are vestiges of our animal past. They constitute a sub-verbal language.
In 1969, a zoologist from the University of Birmingham, Dr. Ewan C. Grant, analysed over one hundred human gestures and facial expressions, including eight types of smiles. It was noticed that most of these expressions are found in neighboring species. Thus, the habit of raising the eyebrows when asking a question seems to be a specific way to attract attention. This movement rounds the eye and emphasises the importance of the look. Great apes use it to ‘ask for communication’.
If a man wants to show arrogance and contempt, he adopts a rigid attitude, which consists of lowering his head and throwing it back slightly. He keeps his lips closed and expels the air he breathes through his nose. This attitude is found in baboons.
If a man erupts in anger, he reveals his teeth and raises the edges of his mouth, like a dog ready to bite.
If he wants to impress an interlocutor, he accentuates the size and width of his shoulders. Although he no longer has fur, the hair muscles of his back contract, giving him a thrill. In the chimpanzee who takes this posture, the figure seems enlarged.
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