Biology and our future world

Title

Creator

Huxley, Julian

Language

English

Source

Panorama Volume XX (No. 10) October 1968

Year

1968

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

BIOLOGY AND OUR FUTURE WORLD The balance of nature is a very elaborate and very de licate system of checks and counterchecks. It is conti nually being altered as cli mates change and new or ganisms evolve. But in the past the alterations have been slow, whereas with the arrival of man their speed has been multiplied many fold. Agriculture is the chief of man’s efforts at the biological remodeling of nature. If we reflect that agriculture is less than paltry 10,000 years old out of 300,000,000 years that green plants have been on earth, we begin to grasp something of the revolution wrought by this biological discovery. But agriculture is, if you like, unnatural; it concen trates innumerable indivi duals as a single species — and always of course, a par ticularly nutritious one — into serried ranks, while na ture’s method is to divide up the space among numerous completing or complementary kinds. Thus it constitutes not merely an opportunity but a veritable invitation to vege table-feeding animals, of which the most difficult to control are the small, insin uating, and rapidly multiply ing insects. And the better and more intensive the agri culture, the more obvious the invitation. Mile upon square mile of tender, well-weeded wheat or tea or cotton offers the optimum possibilities for the rapid multiplication of any species of insect which can take advantage of man’s good nature toward his kind. Finally, man’s insatiable desire for rapid and easy transit has capped the trou ble. By accident or intention, animals and plant species find their way along the trade routes to new countries. They are in a new environ ment, and in such circum stances the majority fail to gain a foothold at all; but a few find in the new circum October 1968 19 stances a release instead of a hindrance, and multiply be yond measure. Then it is up to the biolo gist to see what he can do. Sometimes, by studying the pest in its original home, he can discover what are the other species that normally act as checks on its overmul tiplication. Thus in Fiji, when the valuable coconut industry was threatened by a little moth — very beautiful, with violet wings — whose grubs devoured the leaves of the palm trees, biologists searched the remote corners or the Pacific for a parasitic fly. This fly quickly reduced the menace to the status of a minor nuisance. And in Australia, when prickly pear — first introduced into the country as not cacti for lone ly settlers’ wives — increased so prodigiously that it was covering the land with impe netrable scrub at the rate of an acre a minute, biologists sent out a mixed team to fight it: a caterpillar to tun nel through the “leaves” a plant bug and a cochineal insect to suck its juices, and a mite to scarify its surface. These were the Four Anthropods of the prickly pear’s Apocalypse; and the thickets are melting away under the combined attack. One could multiply in stances. How the sugar cane of Hawaii was saved from its weevil destroyers; how an attack is being launched upon the mealy-bugs that are such a pest to Kenya coffee by massed battalions of lady birds. To cope with all the demands for anti-pest or ganism a veritable industry has sprung up. The difficulties of such work are far more severe when the pest is an old-estab lished inhabitant of the coun try. Problems of this type are set for us by malaria, spread by indigenous mosqui toes; human sleeping sickness and nagana disease of cattle, transmitted by tsetse-flies; plague, dependent for its spread upon the ubiquitous rat. In some parts of Africa the issue is whether man or the fly shall dominate the country. Here the remedy seems to be to alter the whole environment. Most tsetse flies live in bush country. They cannot exist either in quite open country or in cul tivated land or in dense woodland or forest. So that 20 Panorama wholesale clearing or affores tation may get rid of them. That pests of this nature can cease to be serious is shown by the history of ma laria and of plague. In va rious parts of Europe and America, these diseases, once serious, have wholly or vir tually died out. And this has happened through a change in human evironment and human habits. Take plague. Modern man builds better houses, clears away more garbage, segregates cases of infectious diseases, is less to lerant of dirt and parasites and, in fine, lives in such a way that his life is not in such close contact with that of rats. The result has been that rats have fewer chances of transmitting plague to man, and that the disease, if once transmitted, has less chance of spreading. With regard to malaria, agricul tural drainage, cleanliness, and better general resistance have in many cases done as much or more than deliberate anti-mosquito campaigns. There is sitll another angle from which we can attack our problems. For instance, in stead of trying to attack a pest by means of introducing enemies, or altering the en vironment, we can orten deli berately breed stocks which shall be resistant to the at tacks of the pest. Thus we can now produce relatively rust-proof wheat; and the Dutch have given us specta cular examples of what can be accomplished by crossing a high-yielding but diseasesusceptible sugar cane with a related wild species which is disease-resistant and, in spite of the fact that the wild parent contains no trace of sugar, extracting from the cross after a few generations a disease-resistant plant with an exceptionally high yield of sugar. Thus science offers the prospect of the most radical transformations of our envi ronment. Cows or sheep, rubber-plants or beets repre sent from one aspect just so many living machines, de signed to transform raw ma terial into finished products available for man’s use. And their machinery can be im proved. Modern wheats yield several times as much per acre as unimproved varieties. Modern cows grow about twice as fast as the cattle kept by semi-savage tribes, October 1968 21 and when they are grown produce two or three times as much milk in a year. This has thrown a new strain on the pastures; for if the cow eventually draws its nourish ment out of the soil, and if the animal machine for uti lizing grass is improved, the plant machine is responsible for the first stage of the pro cess, of working up raw ma terials out of earth and air, must* be improved corres pondingly. Accordingly re search is trying to manufac ture new breeds of grass which shall be as much more efficient than ordinary grass as a modern dairy beast is than the aboriginal cow. These few examples must suffice to show the kind of control which man is just realizing he could exert over his environment. But they are enough to give us a new picture — the picture of a world controlled by man. It will never be fully controlled, but the future control of man will enormously exceed his present powers. The world will be parceled' out into what is needed for crops, what for forests, what for gar dens and parks and games, what for the preservation of wild nature; what grows on any part of the lands’ surface will grow there because of the conscious decision of man; and many kinds of ani mals and plants will owe not merely the fact that they are allowed to grow and exist, but their characteristics and their very nature, to human control. — By Julian Huxley condensed from Harper's Magazine. TRIVIAL In ancient Rome, the Forum was the place where great questions were debated and news of outstand ing importance was announced. In the city proper, there is a place where three streets came together. This is the Tri-via, meaning three roads. Here peo ple met and gossiped so much that an idle story was branded as of tri-via source, or trivial. 22- Panorama

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