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Biology

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Ethics

24 May 2023

8 min read

Inheritance and environment's impact on ethics

Once discounted insights are now found important and have ethical consequences. Andrew Davison concludes his series on biology’s current developments.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

A wall tile shows a 1940s woman tend a stove below a washing line.

A commemorative tile honours Dutch woman who made 'something out of nothing. during the hunger winter.

Peter de Wit (FaceMePLS), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

There’s no more exciting work in biology at the moment than thinking about organisms in terms of their environment. That’s a crucial part of the lively current scene in evolutionary thought (which I described in my previous article), and part of how a new generation of fascinating writers is urging us to throw off the overly narrow perspectives of the twentieth century. It’s not that Darwin’s fundamental insights were wrong, just that some of his followers took them to rule out, or discount, features of biology that turn out to be real and important.

In fact, Darwin was often ahead of the game here. He was more interested in cooperation between species, for instance, than many writers who went on to champion his ideas. He wrote brilliantly about the relationship between moths and orchids, for instance, and between plants and earthworms. Similarly, as Jessica Riskin has recently pointed out, he never dropped the idea that what organisms do during their lifetime affects what they pass on to their offspring (what he called ‘use and disuse’). For much of the twentieth century, that idea, of passing on of acquired characteristics, was biological heresy, but today it’s making a comeback.

The excitement in contemporary evolutionary biology can usefully be gathered under two headings. Alongside ‘organism and environment’, there’s also ‘extended heredity’, although the two are closely related on some points. They’re both important as part of the sort of discussion presented on this site – run in conjunction with the Church of England, of all things – not just because it’s good for religious institutions to demonstrate enthusiasm for science, but also because they’re full of ethical consequences.

Passing on to the progeny

Take ‘extended inheritance’: extended, in the sense that there’s so much more that’s inherited from parent to child than just a DNA sequence. For one thing, every organism bequeaths a world to its progeny, which means a world that’s at least somewhat adapted: at least a little (as with some bacteria, although others are adept at ‘ecosystem engineering’) or massively, as when a beaver completely changes its surroundings by building a dam, or when human beings cover the Earth with marvellous and terrible things. The transformed landscape of the beaver and the human being, even of the bacterium, is part and parcel of what they each pass on to their progeny, and therefore part of biological inheritance. That really puts the environment back at the centre of our thinking about organisms and evolution.

Taking a wider view than genes-are-all-you-pass-on has no lack of consequences. In their accessible and endlessly fascinating 2018 book Extended Heredity, Russell Bonduriansky and Troy Day show that narrow-mindedness on that front has had terrible consequences. They see it behind the Thalidomide birth defect tragedy, for instance, and the strange unwillingness of medics, in the middle of the twentieth century, to take the dangers of foetal alcohol syndrome seriously. If it’s a matter of scientific dogma that all that matters is what genes parents give to their offspring, other factors – like bothering to monitor what effects alcohol have on pregnant women and developing child, or the effects on them of a new medicine – don’t look as important as they should.

Genes aren’t everything, especially in the developmental phase (from conception through childhood and adolescence). Throughout that period, in particular, genes and environment dance an intimate tango, with genes turning on and off in response to its experience of its environment, before and after birth. Moreover, recent science shows that what happens to you during your lifetime can even be passed onto your offspring, and even to their children after them.

That flies in the face of the idea that all you have to pass on is the genetic hand of cards you were delt at conception (or its equivalent, for instance for a plant). On that hallowed view, the most that life has to offer from that moment on is testing your ‘fitness’, to see whether you manage to pass those genes on, or not, or how abundantly. But that’s far too limited a picture. We don’t just pass on genes; we also pass on the pattern of how genes are tagged to be turned on or off, and that is changed by the conditions the organism has experienced.

Hunger lessons

The most striking, but gruesome, example involving human beings is the ‘Dutch Hunger Winter’ of 1944–45, when occupying German forces starved the Dutch population in retaliation for resistance victories. Children conceived during that period grew up with poor metabolism (or, to be more accurate, metabolism that would be good at surviving starvation, but was not well-adapted to healthier post-war life nutrition, which is fascinating in itself). So much for genes being everything. More startling still was the observation that their children also had poor metabolism: the grandchildren of the starved pregnant women. We can pass on acquired characteristics, which really puts the cat among the twentieth century Darwinian pigeons. As the prophet Ezekiel put it, ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’. This is full of ethical freight. The way we treat other people, and ourselves, affects those who come after us: yes, socially and culturally, which is significant enough, but even in how their bodies are programmed to develop.

A stimulating environment

There’s a similar ethical charge to what is perhaps my favourite part of the newly boisterous world of biology: phenotypic plasticity. That’s the simple idea that the same genes (the ‘genotype’) will produce a differently structured organism (the ‘phenotype’) in response to different environments. In one sense, it’s obvious enough. If I go to the gym for a year – a particular kind of environment – I’ll look different afterwards than if I’d spend an equivalent length of time on the sofa.

But it goes much further than that. Various plants will produce different sorts of leaves, for instance, depending on whether they grow in more or less shady situations. Sometimes, one species can be mistaken for two, as happened with fish, called cichlids, in Lake Tanganyika (between Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo). What scientists had thought to be separate species, because their jaws are so different, turned out to be the same species. If a fish grows up at the bottom of the lake, it develops one mouth shape, with large, strong jaws, for munching shellfish; if a it with the same genes grows up at the top of the lake, it develops delicate jaws, useful for eating other kinds of food.

Again, the repercussions of ethics are enormous, and that brings us back to the ugly subject of eugenics, mentioned in the first of these articles. At root, eugenics is based on the assumption that some people just are healthy, and others just are sick, because some have ‘good genes’, while others have ‘bad genes’. You are either blessed with the former, or doomed with the later, and that’s set in stone, from conception. It’s then (supposedly) the ‘right thing’ to promote the former when it comes to reproduction and, at its most horrific, to restrain, sterilise, or even slaughter the latter. Eugenics cast its shadow over more of the twentieth century than we might like to admit. At one time or another, it was the darling of both the political right and the political left. It hasn’t gone away.

Before we say anything else, there’s a moral flaw in thinking that concern for the gene pool trumps concern for suffering individuals. More than that, though, the biology shows eugenics to be flawed even on its own, supposedly scientific, terms. We aren’t just blessed or doomed by the genetic hand of cards we’re delt at conception. Like those plants, growing in sunlight or shade, what our genes will mean is also determined by our setting. Like those African fish, our genes can run more than one programme, so the environment matters.

Eugenics presents the all-to-convenient picture that the sick will be sick, the weak will be weak, and that’s that. But we’re not just doomed or blessed by genes. It matters, for instance, what sort of housing we have, how we’re fed, and whether we have access to fresh air and places for exercise, and to stimulus for the mind, and companionship. Putting people into groups (healthy and sick, or worthy and unworthy), then writing off one of those groups might be politically and economically convenient, but it’s bad science, as well as bad morals.

Reason to be curious

I started this series by mentioning how important the theology and philosophy of the Middle Ages has been for me, in working between theology and science. In one of his little read works, Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274) defended having the expansive curriculum used in training Dominican friars like himself. (It helped that this curriculum was being drawn up, in part, by Albert the Great – perhaps the greatest polymath of his century, and later patron saint of scientists.) One should be open to knowing about everything, Aquinas argued, because you never know what will come in useful later on. We have an excellent, and timely example of that, in how something as obscure as phenotypic plasticity bears on eugenics, and the eminently practical question of proper housing.

Recently, in fact, the Church of England has been working hard on housing. The Bishop of Chelmsford, Guli Francis-Dehqani, has the new housing brief among the bishops. The church’s council for Mission and Public Affairs has also been busy, not least with the publication of Coming Home: Christian Perspectives on Housing in 2020. What might have seemed like rather abstract wranglings among biologists, over where to put the emphasis in their theories about nature, turns out to show how right it is to be passionate about good housing (and, it turns out, about keeping abreast of biology).

Alice Roberts’ new book is the Da Vinci Code without the pretence of fiction

Tomes like Domination are part of the problem of public discourse about Christianity, not the solution

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Alice Roberts.

alice-roberts.co.uk.

Alice Roberts would like you to read her book, thank you very much.

She recently took to X to bemoan the “epidemic” of people offering thoughts about her latest offering, without actually having read it. The person who prompted Roberts’ exasperation was a senior lecturer in Biblical Studies and the latest in a long of professional scholars of Christianity who had greeted the release of the book with little more than a weary eyeroll.

The reason so many people felt as though they didn’t need to read it is because it is utterly predictable. Even a cursory glance at any of the marketing that has accompanied the publication of Domination: The Fall of the Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity really does tell you all you need to know. It really is the book you think it is.

You already know what this book is going to argue. Just like you already know how this review is going to go. I’m a theology lecturer who works for the Church of England; Roberts is an outspoken atheist and former president of Humanists UK. Of course I’m going to disagree with this book. It’s hardly the sort of plot twist you endure an M. Night Shyamalan film for.

But, for the avoidance of doubt, let me be clear: I don’t dislike Alice Roberts’ book because I’m a Christian and she’s not. I dislike Roberts’ book simply because it’s not very good.

Roberts seeks to “lift the veil on secrets that have been hidden in plain sight.” (Always be wary of someone who claims to have noticed something no-one else has for the last 2,000 years). These ‘secrets’, she suggests, are that “the main reasons [Christianity spread so successfully] were not to be found in the pages of the Bible, but in a powerful alliance born of complex – and very human – incentives”.

For Roberts, the central, overriding reason why Christianity flourished was simply economic and political power. In her own words, “the worldly aspects of the Church are undeniable. Wealth and power go hand-in-hand, and the Church had both in abundance.” It’s never clear who actually is thought to be denying this, except a vague group described as “apologist historians (including some who claim not to be Christian, but seem to be suffering from some kind of Stockholm syndrome) and theologians”.

And this power-grab has been the aim since the earliest moments of the Church’s existence. The Apostle Paul is painted in cartoonishly Machiavellian tones: “As a Pharisee, a member of an established Jewish sect, Saul would have been a small fish in a big pond. The switch to this new breakaway sect [Christianity] would make him a prominent figure in a small but rapidly growing movement”.

A few pages later – in a section that made me laugh so hard I had to put the book down for a few minutes to collect myself – Roberts offers a genuinely baffling reading of one of Paul’s early letters, to a group of Christians in the city of Corinth. In the letter, Paul speaks about divisions in the Church, with Christians claiming to ‘follow’ different leaders (such as Paul and Apollos). Roberts writes that “there’s a hint that Paul may have viewed Apollos as competitor” and continues:

“When Paul wrote his first letter to ‘the Corinthians’ … he exhorted them to see themselves as united, whether they were following him, [or] Apollos … Paul, however disgruntled he might have been about the competition represented by other, potentially more eloquent, preachers, had decided it was best to team up. Still, he couldn’t quite resist suggesting his superiority – or at least, his priority – to Apollos: ‘I have planted, Apollos watered.’”.

See?! SEE?! It’s all about power!!

Well, that last bit is a quote from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, the third chapter and its sixth verse. Now, what Roberts doesn’t tell the reader is that she has left off the rest of the verse, and the verse that follows. “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.”

But this is very different indeed to the impression Roberts gives us. Paul is quite clearly not claiming any sense of superiority over Apollos. No, he claims they’re both nothing, and that God alone deserves credit for anything good done by either of them. Not that you would know this from Roberts’ butchering of biblical texts.

(As a slightly technical aside, the bit Roberts does quote should read ‘I planted,’ not ‘I have planted’. This sounds trivial but in the Greek text, Paul writes in a different tense than the one Roberts translates it as. This made me wonder what translation of the Bible was using or whether it was her own. However, there are no notes in the book. At all. And no mention of Bible translation that I could find. If we’re engaging in character assassinations of folk no longer alive to defend themselves, we might think that attention to the precise wording of their thought might be important. Apparently not).

And there’s the rub. Roberts leave precisely zero room for earnest belief in God. Not her belief in God, obviously, but that the people whose words she has hacked and placed before us might earnestly think that their actions seek the betterment of those around them because of their belief in God. No. It’s all about power. I’ve highlighted her treatment of Paul in particular (again, because I found it genuinely hilarious), but time would fail me if I tried to recount all the ways that other figures in Church history are treated similarly.

Roberts’ has complained about Frank Cottrell-Boyce (whom, she notes, is “a Catholic” as though this is in any way relevant to whether he’s right) for describing Domination as ‘cynical’. But how else could we possibly describe this? Yes, it is – of course – completely reasonable to highlight the social, cultural, political, and economic forces at work in and around the development of Christianity (is anyone actually suggesting otherwise?). And yes, of course some people have used Christianity for personal gain (seriously: is anyone actually suggesting otherwise?).

But Roberts goes far beyond both points. Instead, she is simply stripping back the theological content of Christianity and claiming to have found “secrets that have been hidden in plain sight” having done so. But of course human motivation is all that is left once you strip belief in God out of religion, because what else could there be? Roberts’ prose may be captivating, but her argument is deeply immature and reductive. It’s like a toddler who’s just read Michel Foucault’s work on social power for the first time: an impressive toddler, to be sure, but a toddler nonetheless.

Roberts does acknowledge that “people are complex, human societies are complex”, but this is little more than lip-service to nuance. None of this complexity is found in the actual argument of her book. It reminds me of someone saying, “no offence, but …” before going on to say something deeply offensive. A fleeting caveat doesn’t redeem a simplistic argument.

In this respect, it’s quite telling that the front-cover endorsement comes from Stephen Fry who describes it as “a historical thriller of the highest quality.” In one respect, he’s not wrong. It reads like a thriller and – questions of content aside – might easily grip read readers with its compelling prose and rhetorical flourishes. But that’s because this is The Da Vinci Code without the pretence of fiction. A compellingly told conspiracy theory dressed up in just enough spliced-together reality to feign plausibility.

Public discourse about religion and faith is too often conducted with a sneering cynicism that seeks to ride roughshod over the sincerely held beliefs of actual people who would actually describe themselves as religious. Books like Domination are part of the problem, not the solution.

Maybe this is why I find Domination bordering on offensive. Not because of its content. (If I got upset every time someone ascribed bad motivations to the Church I’d never leave the house.) No, I find it borderline offensive because of its sheer existence. Whether you like it or not, religion has been and is an irrevocably vital part of who we are and where we’ve come from. Religious belief deserves at the very least to be understood, even if not agreed with. And so, when I finished Domination, I was left wondering: is that is? Is this the highest standard of discourse society can really be offered about religion? Dan Brown in an academic gown? Heaven help us, if so.

The covers may be similar, and the titles may sound alike, but this is not Tom Holland’s Dominion. Where Holland’s work remains one of the most insightful and thoughtful accessible books about the development of Christianity and modern society, Roberts’ cynicism (for that is what it is) is both tiresome and tiring. (Moreover, that Holland’s book is not even mentioned once speaks volumes about Roberts’ work. That Roberts insists she has read it only makes that absence more baffling).

The Church deserves more rigorous champions of atheism to scrutinise its belief; society needs a better class of conversation about religion and its role in our history. I fear Alice Roberts is not the former; Domination is certainly not the latter.

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