Hilary Rose & Steven Rose The changing face of human nature In 1992, at the start of the surprising- deterministic gene talk and genes for ly short decade’s march toward the se- everything from the most severe dis- quencing of the human genome, one of eases to compulsive shopping and its key initiators, geneticist Walter Gil- homelessness. While the cd played its bert, claimed that “one will be able to part in the popularization of the hgp, pull a cd out of one’s pocket and say, it was the representation of dna’s dou- ‘Here is a human being; it’s me.’”1 ble helix that came to be the dominant Gilbert’s brilliant piece of theater was signi½er of life itself. More subversive- echoed by other leading molecular bi- ly, numbers of graphic artists saw the ologists in their campaign to win pub- potential surveillance powers of geno- lic support and enthusiasm for the Hu- mics, striking a more critical note than man Genome Project (hgp). It seemed the cds or the double helix by, instead, not to matter how often the biologists showing people with bar-coded fore- employed the same theatrical device, heads. Here human nature was reduced whether in California or at London’s to a mere commodity with no agency, Institute for Contemporary Arts: hold- to be read at the checkout counter. ing up a cd to a spellbound audience The explosive growth of genomics, and saying, “this is human life itself” with its relatively subdued cultural de- was a brilliantly chosen trope. The cd, bate, was not alone. Another powerful so familiar to the audience of a high- and expanding ½eld, namely, neurobiol- tech society, was recruited to symbol- ogy, led to the 1990s being nominated ize the merger of molecularization by the National Institutes of Health as and digitalization heralded by the de- the Decade of the Brain. (Europe was veloping hgp. At once a science and slower; its Brain Decade started about a technology, this technoscience of hu- ½ve years later.) By 2009, on both sides man genomics simultaneously offered of the pond, neuroscientists claimed a new de½nition of human nature and that advances in brain science had been new, promethean powers to repair and so substantial that it had become the even redesign that nature. Decade of the Mind. Just as the double dna and genomics dominated the helix became the symbol of the hgp, so media throughout the 1990s, with its have the vivid, false-color skull-shaped images locating the “sites” of brain ac- © 2009 by Hilary Rose & Steven Rose tivity come to symbolize the new neuro- Dædalus Summer 2009 7 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2009.138.3.7 by guest on 02 October 2021 Hilary science. These sites include not only tions, but with the claims that these Rose & well-understood regions within the technosciences now make: that they Steven Rose brain, such as those associated with vi- can provide a materialist account of on being sion and speech, but also new ones, like human nature itself, whether body human regions thought to be associated with and brain or mind and consciousness. London taxi-drivers’ knowledge of the In this, genomics and neuroscience are London streets,2 for example, or with building on a materialist tradition that “romantic love.”3 Londoners were de- runs back to antiquity, but that gained lighted to learn the location of their increasing authority from the birth of cabbies’ “knowledge,” persuaded by modern science in the seventeenth cen- the high-tech images one could see in tury. Previous materialist claims by phi- any newspaper. For those humanists losophers, such as Hume and la Mettrie, who understand the concept of roman- could not make the power move of of- tic love as originating with the medie- fering an alternative theory; only the val troubadours, the claim by leading cultural authority of the growing natu- imager Semir Zeki that this is a univer- ral sciences provided this. It isn’t possi- sal brain-located human phenomenon, ble to understand and interpret the con- unaffected by culture or history, is dis- struction of human nature by present- tinctly challenging. day genomics and neuroscience without Contemporary genomics and neuro- locating them, however sketchily, histor- science not only claim to explain how ically within this materialist tradition. the brain and, hence, the mind work, but also to put psychiatry on a sound By the late eighteenth century, “ani- scienti½c basis. While the drivers for mal electricity,” mesmerism, and phre- the scientists may primarily be curiosity, nology were attempting to locate men- as the conditions for exploring these lat- tal attributes, and indeed life itself, with- est scienti½c frontiers ripen, the practi- in the explanatory realm of the natural cal implications, both for medicine and, sciences. The early-nineteenth-century more disturbingly, as tools for control- materialist accounts of nature and hu- ling and manipulating the mind, are pro- man nature produced by natural philos- found. Patients’ accounts of their experi- ophers (that is, scientists) found a recep- ence of mental illness will become less tive audience among intellectuals. High or even unnecessary as brain scans and up in the Yorkshire Dales, the Brontë sis- gene scans are taken as speaking more ters (Bramwell was probably in the pub) accurately about the underlying causes. would walk the several miles from the Once again the human agent disappears Haworth parsonage down to Keighley, and human nature becomes digitalized. their nearest town, to listen to a lecture In a biotechnological age, where major on phrenology, the hottest materialist funding for genomics and neuroscience account of brain and mind. In the vivid comes from the biotech and pharmaceu- descriptions of the head shapes of Mr. tical industries as well as from venture Rochester and Jane Eyre we ½nd the in- capitalism, and universities move to pro- fluence of the new phrenology in the tect their intellectual property with pat- pen of Charlotte Brontë.5 In distant ents, disinterested curiosity increasing- Cornwall, the young chemist Humphry ly belongs to a distant age of science.4 Davy and the poet Samuel Coleridge However, our concern here is not so formed a lifelong friendship, and Davy’s much with these commercial implica- speculations about electricity as a life 8 Dædalus Summer 2009 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2009.138.3.7 by guest on 02 October 2021 force lay behind Mary Shelley’s unfor- ist account of nature and human nature The gettable creation of Frankenstein’s mon- –on what it is to be human, from our changing face of ster. Today, novelist Ian McEwan’s En- basic physiology to our powers of cog- human during Love embraces evolutionary psy- nition, our emotions, and our beliefs.10 nature chology; A. S. Byatt’s Babel Tower, genet- The supernatural and, hence, religious ics and neuroscience. Thus the humani- belief became unnecessary to the expla- ties of past and present gesture toward nation of human nature and mind. the new materialist accounts of human Origin set out a theory of evolutionary nature.6 change through natural and sexual selec- By the mid-nineteenth century, a fully tion, displacing the centrality of Judeo- reductive materialism, or to use philoso- Christian theology and the two-page pher Daniel Dennett’s term, a “greedy creation story from the book of Gene- reductionism,”7 had taken a ½rm hold sis. No longer were “kinds” to be under- within the sciences. In 1845, four rising stood as having been created indepen- German and French physiologists–von dently in the brief interlude between Helmholtz, Ludwig, du Bois-Reymond, God’s separating heaven and earth and and Brucke–swore a mutual oath to then resting on the seventh day. Rather prove that all bodily processes could than having been intelligently designed, be accounted for in physical and chem- as the Rev. William Paley had famously ical terms. The Dutch physiologist Ja- insisted half a century previously, spe- cob Moleschott put the position most cies had evolved from a single common strongly, claiming that “the brain se- origin and been transformed by selec- cretes thought like the kidney secretes tion operating on random variation over urine,” while “genius is a matter of long periods of geological time. (Evolu- phosphorus.”8 For the zoologist Thom- tion, according to one outraged oppo- as Huxley, mind was an epiphenome- nent, was “the law of higgledy-piggle- non, like “the whistle to the steam dy.”) Origin stories about who we are train.” But it was above all Charles Dar- and where we come from are central to win who provided the intellectual and the belief systems of human cultures, empirical bedrock for a materialist ac- and Darwin’s contemporaries were count of human origins and human na- quick to recognize that the European ture. On the Origin of Species, published commitment to the Judeo-Christian just 150 years ago, both precipitated origin story, which insisted on the im- and symbolized a transformation in mutability of God-created species, was Western society’s understanding of under challenge from a materialist and human origins. As the geneticist Theo- evidence-based narrative of speciation dosius Dobzhansky con½dently assert- through variation over time and place. ed, “[N]othing in biology makes sense The persistence of belief in creation- except in the light of evolution.”9 Cer- ism/intelligent design in the United tainly, biologists had been challenging States, still the research superpower, the notion of the ½xity of species for a remains an extraordinary anomaly.