In summary... Small Wonder

These days I spend most my time studying, reading and writing. I am far from a scientist, but occassionaly get to write summaries about scientists. Here's one I summarized that covers a few topics from author Barbara Kingsolver about genetics, diversity and Darwin.

In “Small Wonder”, author Barbara Kingsolver writes about the many problems genetic engineering causes. In addition, she writes of the misinterpretation of theories and science, and the ignorance of our “sound bite” culture.

Charles Darwin’s theory was little more than four things:
1. Every organism produces more seeds or offspring than will survive to adulthood.
2. There is a variation among these seeds or offspring.
3. Traits are passed down from one generation to the next.
4. In each generation, the survivors succeed because they possess some advantage over the ones that don’t succeed. Therefore, they will pass on the advantage to the next generation.

Some people are ignorant too two things: one, they forget Charles Darwin was a religious man and two, what the word “theory” actually means. Gravity is a theory too, and is no more doubted among physicists than evolution is questioned by biologists. But oddly enough, a number of states have limited or even outright banned the teaching of evolution in high schools mostly due to the insecurities of certain ideologues. Certainly we should see the same bans on gravity?

Scientific illiteracy in our population is leaving too many of us unprepared to understand much of the damage we are wreaking on our atmosphere, our habitat, and even the food that enters our mouths. Darwin simply said, “Survival carries fitness forward and death doesn’t”, where is the religion in such statements? Religion has no place in the science classroom. Rather, its place is in the hearts of the men and women who study and then practice scientific exploration.

Genetic diversity is the root of everything. Nikolai Vavilov, a plant explorer founded the world’s largest seed collection. He noticed genetic variation was not evenly distributed around the world. The crops we now grow in the United States are extremely uniform genetically, due to the fact that our agriculture is controlled primarily by a few large agricultural corporations that sell relatively few varieties of seeds, which is why our shallow gene bank is highly vulnerable. The industrialized world depends entirely on crops and cultivation practices imported from what we now call the Third World (though it was the actually the First).

Magic Wheat, by special arrangement with the U.S. government, is free. Magic Wheat grows well the first year but attracts a startling number of pests. So farmers purchase pesticide by the same company that gave them the free seeds. But borrow the money from next year’s harvest. During the second year however, a drought is seen and the crops don’t survive. The reason is that seeds sold from America are not genetically fit to survive the Ethiopian drought.

To diversify, seeds must be grown out as crops year after year or they will die, as was the case during the infamous potato famine in Ireland. The entire country relied on a single genetic strain of a food crop instead of many genetically diverse strains that could survive different conditions.

Genetic engineering spliced part of a bacterium’s DNA into a corn plant’s DNA chain, so that as the corn grew, each of its cells would contain the bacterial function of caterpillar killing. As a result, the populations of monarch butterflies are plummeting fast. If butterflies are not your fancy, just wait awhile, because something that pollinates your food and builds the soil underneath it may also be slated for extinction.

The only organisms that survive these genetic modifications are those that are superresistant, in exactly the same way that overexposure to antibiotics is facilitating the evolution of antibiotic resistant diseases in humans. And the gene manipulations in corn unexpectedly created some antigens to which some humans are allergic.

Most people know by now that corporations do only what’s best for their quarterly bottom line. But other countries are beginning to ban highly profitable “terminator technology” which cause plants to kill their own embryos so no viable seeds will survive for a farmer to replant in the next generation (meaning he’d have to buy new ones, of course).

The author ends the piece by saying, “I’m a scientist who thinks it wise to enter the doors of creation not with a lion tamer’s whip and chair, but with the reverence humankind has traditionally summoned for entering places of worship, a sacred grove, as ancient as time.”

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