Biology and our future world

Title

Language

English

Year

1966

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Abstract

Condensed from Harper’s Magazine, (1932) by Julian Huxley, British biologist.

Man’s power to control nature is ever growing and to the advantage of mankind.

Fulltext

■ Man’s power to control nature is ever growing and to the advantage of mankind. BIOLOGY AND OUR FUTURE WORLD The balance of nature is a very elaborate and very delicate system of checks and counterchecks. It is con tinually being altered as cli mates change and new or ganisms evolve. But in the past the alterations have been slow, whereas with the arri val of man their speed has been multiplied many fold. Agriculture is the chief of man’s efforts at the biologi cal remodeling of nature. If we reflect that agriculture is less than a 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 revo lution brought by this bio logical 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 — in to serried ranks, while na ture’s method is to divide up the space among nume rous competing or comple mentary kinds. Thus it cons titutes not merely an oppor tunity but a veritable invi tation to vegetable-feeding animals, of which the most difficult to control are the small, insinuating, and rapid ly multiplying insects. And the better and more intensive the agriculture, the more ob vious 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 ad vantage 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 inten tion, animals and plant spe cies find their way along the trade routes to new countries. They are in a new environ ment, and in such circums tances the majority fail to gain a foothold at all; but a few find in the new cir cumstances a release instead February 1966 57 of a hindrance, and multiply beyond measure. Then it is up to the bio logist to see what he can do. Sometimes, by studying the pest in its original home, he can discover what are the species that normally act as checks on its overmultipli cation. Thus in Fiji, when the valuable coconut indus try was threatened by a lit tle moth — very beautiful, with violet wings — those grubs devoured the leaves of the palm trees, biologists searched the remote corners of 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 pot 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. There were the Four Anthropods of the prickly pear’s Apocalypse; and the thickets are melting away under the combined attack. One could multiply ins tances. 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 cof fee by massed battalions of lady-birds. To cope with all the demands for anti-pest organisms a veritable indus try has sprung up. The difficulties of such work are far more severe when the pest is an oldestablished inhabitant of the country. Problems of this type are set for us by mala ria, spread by indigenous mosquitoes; human sleeping sickness and nagana disease of cattle, transmitted by tse tse-flies; plague, dependent for its spread upon the ubi quitous rat. In some parts of Africa the issue is whether man or the fly shall domi nate 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 cultivated land or in dense woodland or forest. So that wholesale clearing 58 Panorama or afforestation 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 environment and human habits. Take plague. Modern man builds better houses, clears away more gar bage, segregates cases of in fectious diseases, is less tole rant 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, agricultu ral drainage, cleanliness, and better general resistance have in many cases done as much or more than deliberate anti mosquito campaigns. There is still another an gle from which we can attack our problems. For instance, instead of trying to attack a pest by means of introducing enemies, or altering the en vironment, we can often de liberately 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 transformation 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 va rieties. Modern cows grow about twice as fast as the catFebruary 1966 59 de kept by semi-savage tribes, 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 which is res ponsible for the first stage of the process, of working up raw materials out of earth and air, must be improved correspondingly. According ly research is trying to manu facture 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 control led, 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 gardens and parks and games, what for the preservation of wild nature; what grows on any part of the land's sur face 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. — Condensed from Harper's Magazine, (1932) by Julian Huxley, British biologist. 60 Panorama

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