They say rapid advances made in biological research in recent decades are raising questions about what they mean for our wider understanding of life itself and how to define the debate as it evolves.

Whether "new biology" - which stems from developing technologies such as genetic engineering and human enhancement - is leading the life sciences away from a strict Darwinian approach towards a holistic view more compatible with Christian thinking remained open at the end of the conference.

Organisers say the conference goal was not to reach an agreement but for participants to air their diverse views.

Nonetheless, participants did agree on one thing: the growing understanding of genetics — including how genes are turned on or off and how the now mapped genome can be edited to produce desired results — has meant important strides forward in the way science views how genes influence development.

"We realise how much we were missing in the original image without even realising we were missing it," said Donovan Schaefer, an Oxford lecturer in science and religion and co-organiser of the conference.

This naturally has an effect, he said, on "the grander questions about biology, religion, the humanities and evolutionary theory generally".

Source

• RNS
• The Tablet
• Crux
• Image: Religion News Service

A highlight of the visit was two interactive broadcasts Lord Winston held for Year 7-10 and Year 12-13 students throughout New Zealand and the Pacific on the 13th March.

The focus of the Year 7-10 broadcast was "Puberty: Let's Talk About it with the Experts", and the Year 12-13 broadcast: "Reproductive Technologies: An Issue for our time".

The Lord Winston TALKFEST 2014 took place on Thursday. It was broadcast live with a selected student panel and student audience from the Fale Pasifika, the University of Auckland.

The Best Student Bloggers from the Pacific made up the selected panel, and had been identified from the winner of Blog BLAST entries

Lord Winston is patron of Gravida and a Professor of Science and Society and Emeritus Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College, London.

Source

• Gravida
• Image: l.yimg.com

Although Haldane apparently understood the principle of kin selection, it was a further 30 years before another English evolutionary biologist, W D Hamilton, nailed the mathematics of the theory in The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour (1964), one of the most important works in the field of evolution since its inception. The Selfish Gene (1976) by Richard Dawkins, and many other popular science books, were based on kin selection theory, which exposed the selfish machinations and calculations inherent in apparently altruistic behaviour.

So why hadn't Haldane — a brilliant and inventive biologist ­— taken the idea of kin selection to its natural conclusion? In a startlingly honest interview for the Web of Stories website in 1997, the eminent evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith, a former student of Haldane's, said that this failure was partly political:

I have to put it down, to some extent, to political and ideological commitment… Continue reading

Sources

• Aeon Magazine
• Image: Tennessee Journalist

It seems that, as a result of our growing understanding of the unrealized potential we possess, there is a perception that human beings are infinitely plastic and that we can mold ourselves into any form we choose. This attitude the latest manifestation of an age-old human tendency to overweening pride - hubris; we think we can become as God is. It is the contemporary version of the story of Adam and Eve.

I am no Usain Bolt; no matter how much I tried, even in my younger days, I could never have covered 100 metres in less than ten seconds unassisted on a horizontal surface, even if I was being pursued by a fierce mountain lion. The only way I could manage such a feat would be by being rolled on my side down a very steep hill, or jumping from an airplane.

I am neither a materialist nor a duelist - (I hope). I do not think I am just a body. My visible being is just the surface of an unknowable multi-faceted mystery. But I am a body, and because I am a body, a particular, unique body, there are some things I cannot do.

Who I am and what I can become does depend a lot on my attitude to life, but there are limits. These limits are set my genetic inheritance - the 46 chromosomes that ensure I am a human being and not a fruit fly, and the particular arrangement of genes lined up on those chromosomes that ensure a I am white, short, balding, male human being. These possessions gave me the potential, should I have had the passion earlier in life, of aspiring at least, to being an All Black front rower but never a twinkle-toed ballerina.

There are some things I cannot do. I cannot fly.... never been able to. I cannot be nourished by the sun, like plants can. And although cloning is now a possibility, I cannot, as some primitive animals can, split down the middle and become two people. Imagine if we could! Because I am a man I cannot give birth to a baby. Because I am not as young as I was, I cannot climb the stairs five at a time.

I wonder if some people are uncomfortable about being animals. Animals are such messy, smelly, unpredictable, swishy things aren't they? We burp - and worse! We wear out with use; we start to sag wrinkle and stretch. Hair stops growing where is should and starts growing where it shouldn't. The mind plays Russian roulette with our memories. We get hungry, tired and weary. We die.

But I like being an animal, with all its limitations. Being an animal is what makes living such fun. It would be so boring to be an angel or a pure spirit of any kind. I love the heat of the sun on my body earth under my feet. The taste of food, the coolness of water, the wild untamed instincts that may my body fizz and bubble... even if some of them seem longer very useful and can sometimes get me into trouble.

The human species is evolving of course, and it is possible that one day we will be genderless beings giving birth by parthenogenesis. Maybe, as described in Aldous Huxley's "A Brave New World", human beings will be brewed in batches of 88 identical beings all colour coded depending on their designated task in life, and spontaneous baby making will be criminalised. If this happens it will take a lot of the fun out of life but everything will be much tidier.

We may in centuries to come be able to fly, to absorb energy directly from the sun and to pass instantaneously from one place to another. But for the time being we would do well to just accept our limitations and enjoy our animal pleasures and endure the limitations.

Denis O'Hagan is a Marist priest, the editor of CathNews New Zealand, and among many other things, a former teacher of biology.

If we fail to understand and take care of the natural world, it can cause a breakdown of these systems and come back to haunt us in ways we know little about. A critical example is a developing model of infectious disease that shows that most epidemics — AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, Lyme disease and hundreds more that have occurred over the last several decades — don't just happen. They are a result of things people do to nature.

Disease, it turns out, is largely an environmental issue. Sixty percent of emerging infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic — they originate in animals. And more than two-thirds of those originate in wildlife.

Teams of veterinarians and conservation biologists are in the midst of a global effort with medical doctors and epidemiologists to understand the "ecology of disease." It is part of a project called Predict, which is financed by the United States Agency for International Development. Experts are trying to figure out, based on how people alter the landscape — with a new farm or road, for example — where the next diseases are likely to spill over into humans and how to spot them when they do emerge, before they can spread. They are gathering blood, saliva and other samples from high-risk wildlife species to create a library of viruses so that if one does infect humans, it can be more quickly identified. And they are studying ways of managing forests, wildlife and livestock to prevent diseases from leaving the woods and becoming the next pandemic.

It isn't only a public health issue, but an economic one. The World Bank has estimated that a severe influenza pandemic, for example, could cost the world economy $3 trillion. Read more

Sources

• The New York Times Sunday Review
• Image: Ohio State University