"we are born selfish," "they, genes, have created us body and mind," . . .
DENIS NOBLE'S talk that I've been transcribing and commenting on ended very laudably with this:
Now I want to come to a final plea, back to the question of water. Because I want to finish this talk by returning to the unusual and amazing properties of water. And you People in Iran will know only too well the importance of water. You have sessions at this congress on the importance of water preservation. And you might think this is a concern only in the traditionally arid areas of the world. But I tell you it's much more serious than that. My own country, England, illustrated in this image is also suffering a drought this year. The whole of the Eastern part of my country is, at the moment, in a disastrous drought state. You can see the ground is brown, not green. So, even in England's "green and pleasant land" water is now a scarcity and the countryside is no longer green. It is, therefore, urgent. Young People everywhere in the world should plead with their rulers to save the world because life, as we've seen, cannot exist without water.
So, I want to finish this talk with a wake-up call to the world everywhere, not only in Iran and my country, England, but everywhere in the world because the challenge is on a scale which human society has never faced before. The climate change problem is a problem for a new generation, to create a world fit for the challenges of the 21st century. They, that upcoming generation, they will face many looming signposts to warn them what went wrong. The fires, the droughts, and the other problems. So their generation will be the one that has to take responsibility for the way in which the Earth's ecosystems need rescuing. Even for our own species, we humans, to survive. Theirs will be a generation who can try to recover from the damage to society that results from reductionist models of physiology and evolution that have metaphorically shaped our ideas and models in fields as diverse as economics, sociology, philosophy, ethics, politics, , , The list goes on because no aspect of today's society can have escaped dogmas like "we are born selfish," "they, genes have created us body and mind," "it's in his DNA," and all the myriads of other tropes of related types that we now use almost without thinking. Those future generations will also need to rewrite the textbooks, not only because they see the virtue of, "let us therefore teach our children" to quote Richard Dawkins, but also because their politicians, economists, sociologists and philosophers will also need to find new strategies in collaboration with biologists and ecologists to lead them out of the gene-centric impasse. It is, arguably, a challenge the scale of which human society has never faced before because the very future of life, of humans on this planet is at stake. So I wish them all well.
The chemistry of life begins and ends with water.
So thank you for your attention at this congress in Iran you can download all of the articles I've referred to free of charge from my website, www.denisnoble.com
Thank you very much and thank you for asking me, yet again, to talk to the Iranian Congress of Biology.
So, you can see that my diversions into politics as well as within biology aren't that far from the thinking of Denis Noble, but that's where I'll leave it for now. I'm sure there will be more reasons to go into what he and his colleagues have said on these topics and their social, legal and political consequences.
"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
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