One would have imagined that the debate between nature and nurture has
died, namely, we all should by now have accepted that the human and animal
genotype is constantly being modified by everything in the existent world to
produce a phenotype and endotype, from the chemical molecular level right on up
to the level of the most abstract environment, namely culture.  Culture is probably definable as the
organism’s response to the information received via the verbal and non-verbal
working memories subserved by the neocortex, and modified constantly by the
executive functions, and the micro-motor phenomenon of public speech made
private, namely, human thought. In this vein, human creativity has allowed us
to mess around with the previously inviolate and inviolable, Nature.  Then along came Dolly.

Thanks to Eric Kandel and others, we now know that
such cultural information can change the way DNA is expressed in the
information processing centres of the brain. This brings the rapidly expanding
field of genetics thoroughly into the debate, and hence the title of this book.  This is of course not the first time the two
worlds of science and humanities collide, in their different guises, nor is it
the last, but the editors here have sought to bridge the gap between the two
worlds of cultural and biological anthropology by inviting others into a
thesis/antithesis debate, hopefully beginning the process of synthetic
anthropology necessary when the two cultures, or worlds collide in a polarized
way. The dynamic tension between any two seemingly disparate and polarized
ideologies is always likely to be creative, and indeed at the cortical level,
the tension between the verbal and nonverbal working memories is believed to
allow for just that, namely human creativity, allowing for enculturation
according to Russel Barkley and others.

Our burgeoning capacity to modify the genetic structures of food and
animals brings a new light to the tension above, and the essays in this book
reach critical mass by linking technology with biology and culture, ethics and
evolution, racial phenotypes and human cultural identity, all in a
multidimensional approach to analyzing the field and its complex debates.  Frankenstein and The Golem may just emerge
from such a mist, politics too. Great marriages have arisen across the 20^th
century in such debates, one of them literally, namely Margaret Mead and
Gregory Bateson.

Tracking through the chapters, the usual forewords and introductions are
there.  Then the book embarks on the
first of its two sections, namely Nature stroke Culture.  Ricardo Santos looks at indigenous people in
a changing  social and political
landscape contrasted with human genetics in the Amazon area, and then M Susan
Lindee, one of the editors, looks at another semi-isolated group, namely the older
order Amish drawing on the science-observer work of Victor McKusick observing
Ellis van Crevald syndrome in this culturally sidelined group.  Karen-Sue Taussig, Rayna Rapp and one of the
editors Deborah Heath take on a fascinating title with reference to flexible
eugenics and the technology of self in the age of genetics.  This wonderful title relates to the
experience of the congenital dwarfs in biocultural and biosocial conflict with
society which seeks to find a cause for this defined disease condition, and the
affected ones themselves, who, like the deaf, see themselves as normal variant
with their own society and in many ways resent the understanding that they are
in some way diseased and can be ‘cured’ or their children can.  Merely discovering the genetics of growth
factors is not the end of this issue, and little people’s associations have a
lot to contribute to the debate around their cultural identity and the
extermination of their race by engineering future genes.  The Icelandic health sector database is
discussed by Hilary Rose, again, a small and geographically or culturally
bounded group is the focus.

Mirroring this, a small subgroup of chapters examining the debate around
animals has to begin with Dolly and what comes next, and this is Sarah
Franklin; moving from sheep to sheepdogs, Donna Haraway follows with news from
the world of dog genetics and Jonathan Marks (who together with Franklin came
up with the idea of a conference on which this book draws for its content)
continues with this books penchant for zippy titles, informing us that we are
98% chimpanzee, but also part Daffodil, perhaps 35%, going on to say that we
are certainly apes, but only in the same way that we are also fish (page 146).
By this Marks points out that we are certainly part of the intersecting
paraphyletic category of chimps and orangutans, but in the same position with
regard to coelacanths and tuna, namely that true or not, the argument holds
equally in phylogentic argument that we may resemble apes, but that is an
interesting yet not as profound a statement as we might like to think.

From the first section, on human populations slash genetic resources,
this last chapter closes the first nature/culture section, and the approaches
switch 180 degrees to the culture/nature section, which looks at all of this from
the political and cultural identity side of the argument hinted at above.  Pure genes in contrast to the highly
contentious issue of genetically modified organisms in the transgenic and
trans-nationalised landscape of tinkering with MacDonald’s is the task of Chaia
(Chaia=life!) Heller and Aturo Escobar, and in this vein, the idea of the
genome scientists such as Craig Venter as sociocultural entrepreneurs is taken
up by Joan Fujimura, but referring here to the Japanese Genome Project.  In the country most famous for racial issues
within political/cultural identities, South Africa, Himla Soodyall set out to
find the commonalities amongst the various racial groups in South Africa in
order to enhance the renaissance of a continent plundered by colonialism whose
scientists considered many racial groups as either devoid of cortex, or worse,
as sub-branches of humans rather than genetically alike.

The racial and human variation section continues with Rick Kittles and
Charmaine Royal (so many nice surnames amongst these authors) looks at African
Americans and the implications of mapping the disease genes and Templeton
follows with another aspect of molecular genetics, namely race in the context
of recent human evolution.  This
importance of this field has led some of the world’s most renowned
anthropologists to call for molecular genetics to be included in the curricula
of medical schools (see Soodyall above). Troy Duster, apart from another nice
name, continues with the style of ritzy titles with "Buried Alive: the
concept of race in science" and not to be outdone, Frederika A Kaestle
finishes the book off with "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" and the
promise of the marvels hidden in ancient DNA. 
Kaestle brings to the fore the issues of having separate cultures, separate
worlds in this debate: all questions cannot be addressed with equal utility and
study must be undertaken with much more care than most analyses in the modern
world, to paraphrase her.

The book underscores that beyond the two culture divide, it is not
simply a matter of discovering the science that will dissect us into our
composite parts, fault find, and then apply the incisive knife that fixes and
changes.  The debate is similar at times
to that around the psychiatric investigation of homosexuality, and its waxing
and waning apparition in the textbooks across the latter 20^th
century.  Investigating or finding what
causes homosexuality defines it as different and thus pathological, as finding
Khoi or San peoples to be different, and then finding what causes that
difference assumes it can be ‘cured’, like dwarfism, or deafness, and leads to
the extermination by cure of that condition. It cannot ever be a simple matter
and worlds of race, politics, disease, ethics, genetic modification of crops
and farm animals, and the cultures of each of these must clash.

This book cannot be said to settle those issues, and it was not intended
to do so: to paraphrase Churchill, this is not the beginning of the end of the
debate, and I am sure it is not even the end of the beginning, but perhaps only
the very tiny tip of the beginning has emerged with the proceeds of the
conference from which this book is drawn.

The reading of the book is made easy for even the most uninitiated,
revealing the skill of the convenors of the conference in choosing those
experts who, whilst being exemplars in their field, still retain the amazing
capacity of good teachers worldwide to impart their information in clear and
understandable ways. Not just that, it constitutes such an enjoyable book that
it can be taken to bedtime reading, each chapter on its own, racy titles and
all, and details recalled easily for the makings of fascinating dinner party
conversation, as if Bill Bryson wrote the book alone.

In its way its rather like Bryson’s recent short history of nearly
everything, and since we have all read the Time magazine debates on these
subjects at least, reading and imparting the content of this book is not likely
to stop the conversation by boring all and sundry at the dinner table. The
authors who came to this particular party, with the express mission of
colliding the interfaces of biotechnology and political culture, race and
humanity, genetics and nature, understand and elaborate beautifully how vital
it is to unify the two cultures that have bred such quandaries, each on their
own and together, and to now attempt to reconcile that divide.

Anthropology is not the first discipline or theoretical approach to
humans that has had to embark on such debates. 
Marxism underwent and still undergoes such analytical debate, scientific
and critical Marxists divided, for, in Alvin Gouldner’s words, as proletariat
groups rise to power, they are forced to shake off the dialectical elements of
their theories and think of liberalism and democracy in seeking universal laws,
as opposed to those who might need to carry on some form of revolution, and
thus cling to the nature of the dialectic. 
Enlightenment rationalism is after all not enough for the two worlds debate
any more than it was for others, anywhere else.

Goodman and colleagues have done sterling work here, and left us with an
interesting and digestible book which launches a more synthetic field in
anthropology, and in this they have apparently succeeded in "championing
four-field anthropology" (page xi).

© 2005 Roy Sugarman

Roy Sugarman PhD., Conjoint Senior Lecturer in
Psychiatry, University of New South Wales, Australia

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology, Genetics