| While Dobzhansky's humanism is to be admired ("Changing man," 27 Jan., p. 411), his "evolutionary optimism" is incongruous, not because man cannot change, but because of long life-span and genetic limitations he cannot change fast enough! Today, technological ef- fects are so enormous and rapid that man soon will live in a radically changed environment where his heridity will be out of phase with the natural forces that shaped it. Thus, evolutionary optimism is ill-founded. Anyone driv- ing from New York to Washington or from Palo Alto to San Francisco can see, not a better world, but a nature- less ecological nightmare. Can man function here as a well-adapted hu- man? Will selection to "higher" evolu- tionary levels really occur? Dobzhansky seems blind to the technological im- pact on a highly vulnerable nature, especially in the tropics. As highly evolved as we are, our core of biologi- cal adaptations are still programmed to the natural environment and not to the big cities. Is it sensible to suggest that natural or even rural environments are of no value to man, that "we must certainly prefer an adaptedness to the present environments, not to those long defunct?" In effect, has there been, or will there soon be sufficient selection by polluted metropolitan environments to erase man's unspoken needs for open spaces, wild mountains, clean lakes, or small towns? Does Dobzhansky mean it is desirable to permit (let alone en- courage) adaptation to New York-type cities, their bleak lifeless canyons of stone crawling with humanity, their noisy sunless streets and overcrowded subways? He sounds like so many of our big city students who brag of dis- like for nature: who glory in tech- nological sophistication, but are blind to flowers or songbirds in the spring. Yet without nature, they, as members of the human species, are unadapted and meaningless. Dobzhansky decries |
the prophets of doom. Yet their
em- phasis on the interrelatedness within the web of life, of man's dependence on living nature, is quite realistic! That "evolution may some day be directed by man" independent of nature, which presumably by then will have gone the way of all Dodo's, seems more absurd. Recently, in San Francisco, I heard two symphonies, Roger Sessions' caco- phonics followed by Beethoven's melo- dies. And why did I prefer Beethoven? Because it is like a sunny day on Cape Cod compared with downtown New York. I don't know whether Dobzhansky has forgotten what it was like to walk the dunes in solitude or to swim in the ocean, but to most humans, as products of natural selec- tion it is pleasanter than basking in 5 p. m. traffic on Fifth Avenue. Man will never become genetically adapted to technological society and remain hu- man. Even if he could adjust genetical- ly to this disbiological change, a bi- ological and cultural absurdity would result. Blind faith in the ecological good sense of man has dug graves for many human societies. Long before the prob- lems which geneticists fear become realities, the population explosion will have destroyed those very qualities of nature to which we, as vertabrates, mammals, and finally as humans, have become adapted through 200 million years of natural selection. The most precious values of man, the enjoyment of life and of living, will then cease to have meaning for Homo post- sapiens. He will end as a species which has devoured its evolutionary mother, with a culture which has lost its bi- ologic roots. Beethoven and Shake- speare, like flowers and hummingbirds, wild geese, and the free human spirit, will be incomprehensible curiousities. Let us realize that future human evo- lution can develop only within contexts of diverse environments which are at least partly untamed in a nature pro- |
tected as man's silent ancient
com- panion in evolution. Only by defending a biological equilibrium, and not by manipulations of our genotypes or tech- nological constructions of "better" en- vironments, can a self-enlightened hu- manity give valid evolutionary direc- tions to the changing of man. Hugh H. Iltis Department of Botany, Univeristy of Wisconsin, Madison 53706 |