Word: biologists
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...other than anatomical-are a result of conditioning by society. The opposing view is that all of the differences are fixed in the genes. To scientists, however, the nature-nurture controversy is oversimplified. To them, what human beings are results from a complex interaction between both forces. Says Oxford Biologist Christopher Ounsted: "It is a false dichotomy to say that this difference is acquired and that one genetic. To try and differentiate is like asking a penny whether it is really a heads penny or a tails penny." As Berkeley Psychologist Frank Beach suggests, "Predispositions may be genetic; complex behavior...
...combats rickets, they have believed that it must be a vitamin. For half a century this something has been famous as "vitamin D." Virtually all U.S. milk and much bread and breakfast cereals are fortified with it by a process developed at the University of Wisconsin in 1924 by Biologist Harry Steenbock. He patented the technique and the royalties have enriched Steenbock's Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Now a biochemist and Steenbock protégé at the same university, Dr. Hector DeLuca, says that the stuff is not a vitamin like the other simple, essential components in food...
...Ecologist magazine devoted 22 pages to a "Blueprint for Survival" that also projects disaster and argues for quick action to end exponential growth. The article gains its authority not from computer studies but from the endorsement of 33 of the U.K.'s most distinguished scientists, including Biologist Sir Julian Huxley, Geneticist C.H. Waddington and Naturalist Peter Scott. Unrestricted industrial and population expansion, they warn, must lead to "the breakdown of society and of the life support systems on this planet-possibly by the end of this century and certainly within the lifetime of our children...
Some years ago, a French biologist commented that science was giving us the ability to become gods before we had learned to be men. Studying the matter today, one might find that the distance between scientific knowledge and human needs is greater than it was yesterday, and that this distance is increasing with every tick of the atomic clock...
Scientific insight and knowledge point out the inevitable conclusion that we are accidents, unique but not particularly special. Monod, as a philosopher-biologist, is in the position to point this out. What western man does with this information is anyone's guess. Foresight is another casualty of Monod's theory of random biochemistry...