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).

Jane Austen‘s most excellent fan club

The very fine authors who draw inspiration from Jane.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

A book cover with a handwritten title that reads: Jane Austen volume the first

Paolo Chiabrando on Unsplash.

250 years after Jane Austen’s birth, her stories are still an incredibly significant part of our culture. The annual Jane Austen Festival in Bath is gearing up to be bigger than ever; Winchester Cathedral is set to unveil a new statue of Austen later this year; and – perhaps most controversially – Netflix has announced yet another adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

Historically, there’s been an overwhelming focus on two elements of Austen’s writing: the Regency setting, and the romance plots. There’s nothing inherently wrong with enjoying these two aspects of her novels. I know I do. But this comes at the risk of underestimating the richness of Austen’s literary legacy. The internet is littered with listicles and blog posts in the format of ‘What to Read Next If You Love Jane Austen.’ Some of these lists will point you to other nineteenth-century literary classics. Others will home in on the romance element, recommending Helen Fielding’s wildly successful Bridget Jones’s Diary, Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances, or even Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series.

I’d like to share with you an alternative and more eclectic list of books that I’ve fallen in love with as a lifelong Austen fan. Only one of these books is set in the Regency era; some have a romance as a major part of the plot, others don’t; some share Austen’s realistic writing style, one borders on magical realism. But I think each of these novels or authors brings out a fascinating and often overlooked aspect of Austen’s literary inheritance.

Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

Austen is regularly compared to Charlotte Brontë, who famously wrote Jane Eyre, but I think her younger sister Anne is a fairer comparison. Writing only a few decades after Austen’s death in 1817, Brontë’s style is closer to Austen’s realism than to her own sister Charlotte’s use of gothic tropes and supernatural themes. Like Austen, in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – as well as in her other novel, Agnes Grey – she focuses on simple language and engaging dialogue. Austen and Brontë also share a deep concern for female education. In several of her novels, notably Pride and Prejudice and Emma, Austen critiques the reality that many young women from middle-class and upper-class families were being taught to value ‘accomplishments’ like dancing and singing over any other form of education, with the aim of attracting a rich husband. Similarly, in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Brontë’s heroine Helen criticises society’s belief that boys and girls should be educated differently, with boys being taught about the dangers and vices of the world, and girls being kept in ignorance of them. Helen thinks that this attitude makes girls more vulnerable to suffering and disappointment; I suspect Austen would have agreed.

Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952)

Now somewhat forgotten, many of Pym’s stories are considered ‘novels of manners’, that is, novels that detail the costumes and values of a particular sphere of society at a particular time in history: in Austen’s case, the middle and upper classes in Regency England; in Pym’s case, the parishioners of a typical Anglican community in post-World War II London. Like Austen, Pym’s writing style is incredibly witty, and both writers favour everyday stories about ordinary people. In fact, Pym took the title Excellent Women from a phrase used by Austen in her unfinished novel Sanditon. These so-called ‘excellent women’ perform seemingly unheroic, small duties for others, the kind that may well go unnoticed, but which are often indispensable in small communities. In Pym’s novel, the first-person narrator, Mildred Lathbury, spends her life between working at a charitable organisation and helping and helping the priest at her local Anglican church. Mildred’s work is often taken for granted, much like the heroine of Austen’s Persuasion, Anne Eliot, whose family are remarkably ungrateful for all the ways in which she eases their burdens. Novels like Pym’s rightly celebrate the quiet bravery of the women who devote their lives to serving others.

P. D. James’ Death Comes to Pemberley (2011)

Detective fiction is not the first thing that crosses my mind when I think about Jane Austen. And yet, in a 1998 talk to the Jane Austen Society titled ‘Emma Considered as a Detective Story’, novelist P. D. James made a compelling case that Austen should be considered a precursor to the genre. James argued that a detective novel isn’t defined by the discovery of a murder (nobody dies in Dorothy Sayers’ acclaimed Gaudy Night, for example), but by the unveiling of a mystery. In Emma, Austen scatters clues for us readers along the way but withholds enough information as to keep us – and Emma herself – in the dark. When it’s revealed that Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill have been lying to hide their secret engagement for the entirety of the novel’s timeline, Emma realises how much she’s been deceived, and it’s this theme of deception that really links Austen’s novel to the detective genre. Yeas after her talk, James ended up writing a detective fiction sequel to a different Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice. Death Comes to Pemberley takes place six years after Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy’s wedding. A man is found dead on the grounds of Pemberley and Mr. Wickham is the prime suspect. I won’t say any more. It’s my favourite retelling of an Austen novel.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2015)

The Buried Giant tells the tale of a Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, as they set out on a quest to find their long-lost son in a post-Arthurian England where people struggle with the loss of long-term memories. Ishiguro blends a very realistic portrayal of the relationship between a married couple with magical elements such as the presence of a dragon whose breath causes forgetfulness. On paper, this is also not an obvious recommendation, yet memory is a crucial theme for Austen. Persuasion is centred around Anne Eliot’s memories of her broken engagement to Captain Wentworth, which simultaneously bring her happiness and suffering. Mansfield Park’s heroine, Fanny Price, has an equally complex relationship with her past. She often she misses her childhood home, yet part of her is glad that she was taken to be raised by the Bertram family at Mansfield Park, a place which she loves in spite of painful memories of being mistreated by her Aunt Norris. Fanny thinks of memory as the most wonderful faculty of human nature, as it can be at times incredibly ‘retentive’, at others ‘bewildered’ and beyond our control. Ishiguro would surely agree, as that’s precisely what The Buried Giant is about: the ways in which memory can both fail us and yet give us hope, recall suffering and yet brings us closer to those we love.

It’s hard to overestimate Austen’s impact on the literary world. And while she’s sparked a revival in literature set in the Regency era, it’s also fascinating to see how she’s influenced writers working in seemingly very different genres from her. Anne Brontë’s novels may be darker in tone, but they show very similar concerns to Austen’s, especially when it comes to virtue and education. Barbara Pym wrote Excellent Women over a century after Austen’s death, yet shared Austen’s interest in highlighting the joys and sorrows of ordinary life. P. D. James found inspiration in Austen despite her own background being in detective fiction. And Ishiguro, despite writing novels ranging from dystopian science fiction to magical realism, has mentioned Austen as an inspiration.

If you’ve already read all of Austen’s novels, read them again – no one writes quite like her. But once you’ve reread them all, why not try one of these novels next? They may illuminate a side of Austen’s writing that you’ve missed before.

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