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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).

The constant pull of David Lynch’s direction

What made the director’s films so universally resonant?

Sonny Tindall

Sonny works creatively with videography, graphic design, fashion, and photography.

Lynch painting.

At the age of 16, initially wanting to experience the infamous performances of actors, John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins, I decided to watch The Elephant Man (1980). This was the film that opened up the weird and wonderful world of director, David Lynch, a world I immediately wanted to dive headfirst into.

I did so by watching the film that became the catalyst for world-renowned director and producer, Mel Brooks, offering Lynch the chance to direct The Elephant Man. The film in question? His very first, Eraserhead (1977).

It was, and remains to this day, the most singular cinematic experience of my life.

I’m of the opinion that almost all filmmakers fall in to one of two categories; those who become artists through the medium of filmmaking, and those who are already artists who choose the vehicle of filmmaking to create their art. David Lynch is, for me at least, the ultimate embodiment of the latter. Proof of such can be found in his status as a renaissance man.

Originally a painter, a practice he continued throughout his life, his desire to transition to making films was borne out of wanting to see his paintings move. He was also an actor, a musician, and sound designer. Not to mention, a furniture designer who regularly built props for his films, author of several books and designer of his very own comic book.

The television show, Twin Peaks, is perhaps the best example of just how impossible it was to bind Lynch to a single artistic form. The seminal TV show revolutionised what television could be, as it was the first show to stray from the episodic storytelling format, instead choosing to follow one continual storyline through an entire series.

David Lynch exists within an exclusive category of artists, those whose names have become an adjective. Lynchian, similar to Kafkaesque, Brechtian or Daliesque, is recognised as an official word in the Oxford dictionary. An eponymous adjective is an honour reserved for only the most unique and distinct of artists.

Although it could be argued that the term – Lynchian - is now too loosely applied to anything deemed to be somewhat counter-cultural within mainstream cinema, its true meaning relates to the often indefinable style and voice of the man himself.

He invoked the spiritual depths of us, the existential longings and cravings, the questions that seem intrinsic to the human condition, the wonderings that feel as though they originate from somewhere deep within us, our souls, perhaps.

I’ve come to think that it’s the ultimately the spiritual essence of Lynch’s films that make them truly unique, and him a worthy recipient of an eponymous adjective. Lynch’s films exist within their own world, frequently reminiscent of a dream.

Sometimes euphoric, often a nightmare.

He was an avid practitioner and advocate of transcendental meditation, so it’s perhaps not too surprising that when speaking on his creative process, Lynch attributed many of his creative ideas as emerging from his own subconscious through the practices of meditation and daydreaming. He’s often compared ideas to the act of fishing, they aren’t created, they already exist, you’ve just got to have the right bait to catch them.

I wonder if this process is what makes the worlds housed within Lynch’s films unlike any others. He invites us into his own subconscious, by allowing it to bleed out onto the screen.

Despite his allusivity in style and format, what I’ve always found most confounding about David Lynch’s work is its universality.

I feel as though the term ‘fringe artist’ has scarcely been better applied to anyone other than Lynch.

How has a man who’s created some of the boldest, most avant-garde and, at times, downright disturbing art of the last century picked up four Oscar nominations (and an honorary win), a Masterclass and a Disney movie (The Straight Story)?

Surely translating your own subconscious, something we view as idiomatic to each individual person, onto the screen is a guaranteed recipe for alienating your audience?

So why does Lynch’s work, instead of pushing us away, so consistently pull us in?

I could pontificate on the different potential techniques Lynch employed to keep his work just grounded enough to allow us to relate to it. His films being rooted in instantly recognisable symbols of Americana, for example. Or perhaps his deployment of easily digestible genres and conventions, Twin Peaks is a melodramatic murder mystery TV show, Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001) are, at their core, noir films and even Wild at Heart (1990) is a textbook road movie.

But Lynch’s work has taught me to dig far deeper than that.

He invoked spiritual depths of us, the existential longings and cravings, the questions that seem intrinsic to the human condition, the wonderings that feel as though they originate from somewhere deep within us, our souls, perhaps.

That, for me at least, is the answer to his universality.

But how did he do it?

As has already been mentioned, it’s by mining his own subconscious and the spiritual within himself, and allowing it to flow into the worlds he created. But, most importantly, he never definitively characterised these things, he simply let them exist, depicted them. His work doesn’t come to us with the answers, it comes to us with questions. David Lynch’s questions: questions about the world. Questions about himself.

The very same questions we all ask ourselves on a daily basis: is evil within us or is it the product of what is around us? How can we allow light to prevail over darkness?

His work allows us to sit, ruminate, and respond to those questions.

I didn’t anticipate how profound of an effect David Lynch’s passing would have on me. It’s undoubtedly the strongest feeling of loss and grief I’ve felt from the passing of someone in the public sphere.

So deep were my feelings that I felt I needed to process it through the writing of this piece.

And despite the myriad of feelings and thoughts that have been swirling around my head since originally reading the news headline, I find myself continually returning to the very first thought I had. It was a quote from American comedian, Theo Von. When mourning the death of fellow comedian, Norm Macdonald, Theo said,

‘It feels like you’re losing a book that nobody has copies of.’

I feel despair that I’ll never be able to see the world through David Lynch’s eyes again. But I find great comfort that he, through his art, has passed his vision onto us, ensuring that we’ll always be able to see the Lynchian in our world.