E. O. Wilson and J. Philippe Rushton: Scientific Racists? Or Can the Science of Race Affirm Human Freedom and Equality of Rights?

In January of 1989, I was in San Francisco for the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  I attended a "Symposium on Evolutionary Theory, Economics, and Political Science," which had been organized by Roger Masters.  That caught my attention because I was spending a sabbatical year at Stanford University working on a project for applying evolutionary theory to political philosophy, and the writing of Masters had influenced my thinking.  At that symposium, J. Philippe Rushton, a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, presented a paper on "Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (With Reference to Oriental-White-Black Difference)."  

He argued that the three major races--Orientals (Mongoloids or Asians), Whites (Caucasoids or Europeans), and Blacks (Negroids or Africans)--consistently differed in "Life History Strategy."  Blacks have the fastest strategy: they live fast and die young.  Orientals have the slowest strategy: they live slow and invest in the future.  Whites are intermediate between these two poles.  On average, Orientals are slower to mature, less fertile, less sexually active, less aggressive, and have larger brains and higher IQ scores.  At the opposite pole, on average, Blacks are fast to mature, more fertile, sexually promiscuous, very aggressive, and have smaller brains and lower IQ scores.  Whites fall in the middle, but closer to Orientals than to Blacks.  This three-way pattern of racial differences arises from evolutionary and genetic causes rather than purely cultural causes.  Blacks evolved to be adapted to the tropical climate of sub-Saharan Africa.  Whites evolved to be adapted to the cooler climates of Europe.  Orientals evolved for the coldest Arctic lands. 

Even as he argued that these race differences are genetically based, Rushton insisted that this was not an argument for genetic determinism.  There were two reasons for this.  First, since there is enormous variability within each race, and since the distribution of traits shows a great overlap between the races, one cannot generalize from a group average to any particular individual.  Second, he stressed that only about 50% of the variance is genetic, and about 50% is due to the environment; and even the genetic effects are necessarily mediated by neuroendocrine and psychosocial mechanisms, which allows the individual and society to exercise some control over this.

In the technical terms of the evolutionary science of life histories, Rushton explained, Orientals are more "K strategists," Blacks are more "r strategists," and Whites are intermediate between these two.  He was employing a theory of "r and K selection" developed by Edward O. Wilson and others (MacArthur and Wilson 1967; Wilson 1975, 99-103).

In the equations used by population ecologists to describe the growth of populations of organisms, r represents the slope of the line showing exponential growth, while K represents the carrying capacity of a habitat for a certain kind of organism.  Organisms identified as r strategists typically live in unstable, unpredictable environments, where the best reproductive strategy is to produce lots of offspring rapidly, while expending little parental investment in any one offspring.  The idea is to flood the habitat with progeny so that, while many of them will die, at least a few will survive to reproduce.  Organisms that are r selected tend to be small, short-lived, fertile at an early age, fast maturing, with a strong sex drive, little care for offspring, and less intelligent (smaller brains).  Typical examples of r strategists are oysters, salmon, frogs, and insects.

K strategists, on the other hand, occupy more stable environments, in which the best reproductive strategy is to live close to the carrying capacity of their habitat by producing only a few offspring and investing a lot of parental care in each offspring.  Organisms that are K selected tend to be large, long-lived, fertile at a later age, slow maturing, with a weak sex drive, with extensive parental caregiving, and more intelligent (larger brains).  Examples of K selected organisms are elephants, the great apes, and humans.  Indeed, humans are the most K selected species of all.

While many biologists have used r/K selection theory to explain differences between species, Ruston's novel idea was to use the theory to explain differences between races or subspecies within the human species.  While humans are the most K selected species, Ruston argued, some human races were a little less K selected and more r selected than other races.  Orientals are more K selected than Whites, and Whites are more K selected than Blacks.

As I listened to Ruston speak, I noticed that there were many newspaper reporters in the room, and I thought: This guy is going to stir up a big public controversy.  And, indeed, as soon as the Q&A began, the reporters began asking hostile questions.  I learned that Rushton had sent out press releases a week before describing his paper.  He wanted publicity--bad publicity!--and he got it.  Over the next few days, newspapers around the United States and Canada published stories about the firestorm he had created by presenting a scientific theory of racial differences that seemed blatantly racist.  I thought to myself that this guy must be so narcissistic--so obsessed with being the center of attention--that he will pronounce the most offensive ideas about racial differences to create the notoriety that comes from being regarded as the most outrageous kind of racist.

What I remember most about Rushton's speech was his obsession with the size of black men's penises.  One of the primary data points for his theory was his claim that black men's penises were bigger than white men's and much bigger than Asian men's.  You can see why Rushton began to appear on American television talk shows by Geraldo Rivera and Phil Donahue to defend his ideas about racial differences.

Rushton's 1989 AAAS paper was eventually published in 1992, and it can be found online.  Later, he elaborated his reasoning in a big book--Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (1997).  He also published a special abridged edition of this book (2000), which can also be found online.

I was recently reminded of Rushton when I read some essays at the New York Review of Books (here) and Science for the People (here) showing that Edward O. Wilson had an extensive correspondence with Rushton--who died in 2012--that showed Wilson's support for Rushton's scientific theory of race differences.  A few weeks ago, I wrote a post criticizing Monica McLemore for identifying Wilson as a racist without providing any evidence for this in Wilson's published writing.  At that time, I had no knowledge of Wilson's correspondence with Rushton, which suggests that in his private correspondence Wilson was willing to express his sympathy for the scientific racism of people like Rushton.  Wilson's correspondence is found in his papers at the Library of Congress.  An index to the papers can be found online.  I have not examined the papers.  But I will assume that these two essays accurately quote from the correspondence with Rushton.

Some of the scientists who at first defended Wilson from McLemore's charge of racism--such as Jerry Coyne--have said that this evidence of Wilson's support for Rushton forces them to reconsider whether Wilson really was a scientific racist.

From what I see in the correspondence and in Wilson's published writing on race differences, I draw two conclusions.  First, Wilson's correspondence showed bad judgment in supporting Rushton, because Rushton presented his theory of race differences in such a way that it could be easily interpreted as confirming scientific racism.  This became very clear in later years when Rushton allied himself with Jared Taylor's online journal American Renaissance, which promotes Taylor's argument for promoting the "white identity" of America and restricting non-white immigration.

My second conclusion is that Wilson was not himself a racist, because he saw that the science of race differences was compatible with the Lockean liberal principle of natural human equality of rights, which denies racist xenophobia and white nationalism.

Wilson's correspondence with Rushton began in 1986.  Wilson sponsored the publication of Rushton's paper "Gene-Culture Coevolution of Complex Social Behavior: Human Altruism and Mate Choice" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (PNAS).  But there was nothing in this paper about race differences.

In 1987, Rushton asked Wilson to sponsor another paper for publication in PNAS.  But this time, the paper was on race differences; and for that reason, Wilson had to decline to sponsor it.  Wilson explained to Rushton: "You have my support in many ways, but for me to sponsor an article on racial differences in the PNAS would be counterproductive for both of us."  He told a story about being attacked as a racist and then remarked: "I have a couple of colleagues here, Gould and Lewontin, who would use any excuse to raise the charge again.  So I'm the wrong person to sponsor the article, although I'd be glad to referee it for another, less vulnerable member of the National Academy."  Wilson's feeling of vulnerability in being exposed to the charge of racism must explain why Wilson's support for Rushton was restricted to private correspondence and never expressed in any public statement.

After Rushton's presentation at the AAAS convention on January 19, 1989, he found himself under attack.  The Premier of Ontario called for his dismissal from his faculty post at the University of Western Ontario.  The Ontario Provincial Police announced that he was under criminal investigation.  At his university, there were student protests against him.  Then, on July 1, he received a report from the Promotion and Tenure Committee of his department that rated his performance for 1988-1989 as "Unsatisfactory."  The report said that members of the committee were "of the unanimous opinion that your work on the genetic basis of race differences is substantially flawed and that your published record indicates serious scholarly deficiencies."  Rushton appealed this decision.  He cited his numerous publications as evidence that his research record was good.

On April 4, 1990, Wilson wrote to the Appeals Committee at the University of Western Ontario to support Rushton's appeal.  Wilson said that Rushton's data and interpretation were "sound, being adapted in a straightforward way from well documented principles of r-K selection in biology."  He said that many biologists would agree with this, and he explained: "You may wonder why almost none have published their opinions.  The answer is fear of being called racist, which is virtually a death sentence in American academia if taken seriously.  I admit that I myself have tended to avoid the subject of Rushton's work, out of fear."  Rushton won his appeal, and he wrote to Wilson to thank him for his support.

It seems that Wilson did not publicly state his support for Rushton's work out of "fear of being called racist."  Those who wrote the essays for Science for the People and The New York Review of Books assume that he feared being correctly called a racist.  But I think his published writing about race differences suggests that he feared being falsely called a racist.

Wilson's published writing about race is remarkably skimpy.  His most extensive writing on race that I have noticed is in the fourteen pages of his 1953 article on the "subspecies concept" (Wilson and Brown 1953) and four pages in his 1978 On Human Nature (47-51).  

In their NYRB essay, Borrello and Sepkoski say that in 1975, in the last chapter of Sociobiology, Wilson "suggested, among other things, an evolutionary and genetic basis for 'the behavioral qualities that underlie the variations between cultures,' as well as for 'marked racial differences in locomotion, posture, muscular tone, and emotional response that cannot be reasonably explained as the result of training or even conditioning within the womb.'" But the passage they quote does not appear in the 1975 Sociobiology.  It appears in the 1980 abridged edition of Sociobiology (274).  This passage originally appeared in On Human Nature (48-49), but without the phrase "marked racial differences." 

For interpreting Wilson's understanding of race, the best place to begin is his early article on the subspecies concept, because for biologists, the term "race" is equivalent to the term "subspecies."  Within each species, there is heritable phenotypic variation.  Indeed, without such variation within each species, evolution by natural selection would be impossible, because there would be no variation for natural selection to work on.  When this genetic phenotypic variation shows sufficient geographic structuring, so that the geographical origins of individuals can be determined from their genetic and phenotypic characteristics, then biologists can identify these geographic clusters as subspecies or races.  These races can become "incipient species" that eventually might evolve into species.

We are all familiar with the Linnean Latinized binomial taxonomic label for a species that denotes the genus and the species.  For example, the chimpanzee is Pan troglodytes--Pan for the genus, troglodytes for the species.  The other great ape that belongs to this genus is the bonobo--Pan paniscus--which for a long time was assumed to be a subspecies of chimpanzees--the pygmy chimpanzee.  That indicates the fundamental problem in all taxonomy: the boundaries are often so fuzzy that it's hard to distinguish between closely related species and between closely related subspecies, which leads to endless debates among taxonomists as to how to draw the boundaries.

Taxonomists employ a Latinized trinomial label for a subspecies.  The four generally recognized subspecies of chimpanzees have four such labels (Stanford 2018, 184-90).  The central chimpanzee--Pan troglodytes troglodytes--is found across a wide area of central African rain forest.  The western chimpanzee--Pan troglodytes verus--is found in the Tai National Park and surrounding forests in western Africa.  The eastern chimpanzee--Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii--is found in central and eastern Africa, and it's the most studied chimpanzee, including Jane Goodall's chimpanzees in Gombe.  The Nigerian-Camaeroonian chimpanzee--Pan traglodytes ellioti--is found in forested areas across Nigeria and Cameroon, and it has been named only in recent years.  Although it is not generally recognized, primatological taxonomist Colin Groves has argued that there is a fifth subspecies--the southeastern chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes marungensis)--that arises from the variation between the northern and southern populations of P. t. schweinfurthii. 

Comparisons of genetic variation between humans and great apes have shown that the degree of genetic differentiation among chimpanzee subspecies is about the same as among human races (Fischer et al. 2006).  So we have a choice.  If we deny that human races are real, we must also deny that chimpanzee races are real.  Or if we see that chimpanzee races are real, we must also see that human races are real.

In "The Subspecies Concept and Its Taxonomic Application," Wilson and Brown criticize the subspecies concept because of its "subjective and even arbitrary nature" (1953, 100).  This must be so because it's a fuzzy concept with fuzzy boundaries.  In an Addendum to Jerry Coyne's blog post (noted above), Greg Mayer argues that this shows that Wilson was not a racist, because in rejecting the concept of subspecies, he rejected the concept of race.  "Roughly speaking, Wilson didn't believe there were races."  And, indeed, this is what many biologists have said in attacking scientific racism--race is a cultural construction that has no biological reality.

But Wilson does not really deny the biological reality of races or subspecies.  Insofar as the subspecies concept has fuzzy boundaries, it will always be to some extent "subjective and arbitrary," which is evident in the endless debates among taxonomists about how exactly to draw the boundaries.  But then every concept has fuzzy boundaries, more or less, and therefore is to some extent "subjective and arbitrary."  This is easy to see by going to any dictionary and looking at the many different definitions for the same word.  Yes, the subspecies concept is difficult to define, but then every concept is difficult to define.  If dividing between two racial categories allows us to make accurate predictions about each, then those racial categories are real, even when the difference between them is very small and fuzzy.  This is just as true for dividing between species.  The genetic differences on average between humans and chimpanzees is very small.  But no one would say that the distinction between humans and chimpanzees is meaningless.  Similarly, there are more genetic differences within breeds of dog that between the breeds; but no one would say that the differences between a Great Dane and a Chihuahua are meaningless.

When Wilson's 1953 subspecies article was reprinted in his 2006 book Nature Revealed: Selected Writings, 1949-2006, he added prefatory comments on the article, in which he wrote:  "Looking back now, I believe Brown and I overreached in our recommendations on classification.  There are populations that are both isolated, as on islands, and possess enough concordant traits to qualify as objective geographic units, and there are advantages to giving them formal trinomens.  Some of these populations are proving to be distinct species different enough so that even if they were contiguous, no interbreeding would occur, but others deserve denotation as objectively definable subspecies" (354).  So now he clearly recognizes "objectively definable subspecies," which must include human races.

He also observes, however, that human races are difficult to define; and so physical anthropologists in the 1950s "varied wildly in their definition of human races and hence their count of the number of races existing in the human species" (353).  This is still true today.

Rushton identified only three human races--Orientals, Whites, and Blacks.  But he admitted that since the races can and do interbreed, many if not most people are of mixed race.  American Blacks, for example, on average have around 25% European genes (2000, 18, 50, 54, 59, 66-68, 93).  He conceded, therefore, that "to a certain extent all the races blend into each other."  But still most people can be identified with one race or another.  And we can say that a Black is anyone most of whose ancestors were born in sub-Saharan Africa, a White is anyone most of whose ancestors were born in Europe, and an Oriental is anyone most of whose ancestors were born in East Asia (2000, 93).

Rushton cited the work of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues in The History and Geography of Human Genes (1994), who classified humans into races based on genetic polymorphisms (Rushton 2000, 85-89).  A genetic polymorphism is a gene that can be composed of alleles in different forms.  Cavalli-Sforza took polymorphic genes for blood groups, blood proteins, lymphocite antigens, and immunoglobins and calculated the different allele frequencies in populations around the world.  He then used factor analysis to see the genetic similarity of these allele frequencies to calculate the genetic differences between each population and every other population.  He could then calculate a genetic linkage tree that grouped the populations into racial clusters.  Rushton does not tell his reader, however, that instead of finding Rushton's three races, Cavalli-Sforza found ten:

1. Bushmen and Pygmies

2. Sub-Saharan Africans

3. South Asians and North Africans

4. Europeans

5. Northeast Asians

6. Arctic Peoples

7. Native American Indians

8. Southeast Asians

9. Pacific Islanders

10. Australian Aborigines and the Aboriginal New Guineans

These ten races don't fall neatly into the three-leveled pattern of Rushton's theory.

Wilson did not, as far as I know, try to distinguish all the human races.  In On Human Nature, he said: "most scientists have long recognized that it is a futile exercise to try to define discrete human races.  Such entities do not in fact exist" (48).  This passage has been quoted by those wanting to defend Wilson against the charge of racism by arguing that he denied that race had any biological reality.

But immediately after this passage, Wilson cited some research by psychologist Daniel Freedman that showed evidence for "geographical variation . . . in the genetic basis of social behavior" and "marked racial differences" in Asians, Caucasians, and Native American Indians (Wilson 1978, 48-50; 1980, 274).  Studying American newborn infants, Freedman detected "significant average differences in locomotion, posture, muscular tone of various parts of the body, and emotional response that cannot reasonably be explained as the result of training or even conditioning within the womb."  Chinese-American newborns tend to be more quiescent than Caucasian-American infants, and Navaho infants tend to be even more quiescent than the Chinese infants.  Since this cannot be explained as resulting from cultural learning, this must show genetic differences between Asians, Caucasians, and Native Americans.

Wilson observes:

"Given that humankind is a biological species, it should come as no shock to find that populations are to some extent genetically diverse in the physical and mental properties underlying social behavior.  A discovery of this nature does not vitiate the ideals of Western civilization.  We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity in order to affirm human freedom and dignity.  The sociologist Marvin Bressler has expressed this idea with precision: 'An ideology that tacitly appeals to biological equality as a condition for human emancipation corrupts the idea of freedom.  Moreover, it encourages decent men to tremble at the prospect of 'inconvenient' findings that may emerge in future scientific research.  This unseemly anti-intellectualism is doubly degrading because it is probably unnecessary.'"

"I will go further and suggest that hope and pride and not despair are the ultimate legacy of genetic diversity, because we are a single species, not two or more, one great breeding system through which genes flow and mix in each generation.  Because of that flux, mankind viewed over many generations shares a single human nature within which relatively minor hereditary influences recycle through ever changing patterns, between the sexes and across families and entire populations" (50).

Wilson quoted this last paragraph in a letter to Nature in 1981, in which he defended himself against the charge of promoting racism.  "To keep the record straight," he wrote in the letter, "I am happy to point out that no justification for racism is to be found in the truly scientific study of the biological basis of social behaviour."  But notice that saying that there is no scientific justification for racism is compatible with saying that there is scientific justification for the biological reality of race.  A biological science of racial differences does not justify the racist xenophobia that denigrates or degrades those who belong to a race different from one's own.

Genetic differences in the average propensities and traits of the human races is compatible with the Lockean liberal principle of equal liberty.  Lockean equality means not that all people are identical--in intelligence or in many other respects--but that all people are similar in resisting exploitation by others, so that no human being is good enough to govern any other human being without that person's consent.  Equal liberty requires not equality of outcome, but equality of opportunity in the pursuit of happiness.  In a society of equal liberty, those individuals who are naturally more intelligent or talented than others will reap the benefits of those superior traits, but those superior individuals will have no right to exploit those of lesser abilities.  In such a society, everyone can find valued places for themselves.

I have argued for this in previous posts: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

REFERENCES

Borrello, Mark, and David Sepkoski. 2022. "Ideology as Biology." The New York Review of Books, February 5.

Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi, P. Menozzi, and A. Piazza. 1994. The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Farina, Stacy, and Matthew Gibbons. 2022. "'The Last Refuge of Scoundrels': New Evidence of E. O. Wilson's Intimacy with Scientific Racism.'"  Science for the People, February 1.

Fischer, Anne, Joshua Pollack, Olaf Thalmann, Birgit Nickel, and Svante Paabo. 2006. "Demographic History and Genetic Differentiation in Apes." Current Biology 16: 1133-1138.

MacArthur, R. H., and E. O. Wilson. 1967. The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rushton, J. Philippe. 1992. "Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (With Reference to Oriental-White-Black Differences): The 1989 AAAS Paper." Psychological Reports 71: 811-21.

_____. 1997. Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective. 2nd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishing.

_____. 2000. Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective. 2nd Special Abridged Edition. Port Huron, MI: Charles Darwin Research Institute.

Stanford, Craig. 2018. The New Chimpanzee: A Twenty-First-Century Portrait of Our Closest Kin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wilson, Edward O., and W. L. Brown. 1953. "The Subspecies Concept and Its Taxonomic Application." Systematic Zoology 2: 97-111.

Wilson, Edward O.  1975. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

_____. 1978. On Human Nature. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

_____. 1980. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Abridged edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

_____. 1987. "Genes and Racism." Nature 289 (February 19): 627.

_____. 2000. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. 25th anniversary edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

_____. 2006. Nature Revealed: Selected Writings, 1949-2006. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Happy Darwin/Lincoln Day!

On February 12, 1809, Charles Darwin was born in England, and Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky.  They had more in common than just the coincidence of their birth.  Almost every February 12th, I have posted an essay on some of the common themes in their lives.  I see at least ten points of similarity between Darwin and Lincoln.

1. Both saw the universe as governed by natural laws, which included the natural laws for the evolution of life.

2. Both were accused of denying the Biblical doctrine of Creation.

3. Both were accused of being atheists or infidels.

4. Both spoke of God as First Cause.

5. Both appealed to the Bible as a source of moral teaching, even as they also appealed to a natural moral sense independent of Biblical religion.

6. Both rooted that natural moral sense in the evolved moral sentiments.

7. Both abhorred slavery as an immoral violation of evolved human nature, and they saw the American Civil War as a crucial turning point for the abolition of slavery.

8. Both were moral realists.

9. Both saw human history as moving through a Big History of three evolutionary eras--the foraging era, the agrarian era, and the modern era.

10. Both were classical liberals.

The COVID-19 Virus Probably Leaked from Shi Zhengli's Lab in Wuhan: Should We Blame Francis Bacon?

                                     A Transmission Electron Micrograph of SARS-CoV-2 Viruses

It has killed almost six million people over the past two years, and it continues to kill more every day.  It has made hundreds of millions of people sick, some severely so.  It has disrupted the life of almost every person on the planet.  The evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (SARS2) that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic has had--and will continue to have--a major effect on the evolutionary history of life on the Earth.  This evolutionary change will continue as the virus evolves, along with the coevolution of the human physiological and behavioral immune systems.   And yet, amazingly, we are still not sure exactly where, when, or how the SARS2 virus originated. 

There is growing evidence, however, that SARS2 emerged and was perhaps created in virologist Shi Zhengli's laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with research funding from the U.S. government, and that the pandemic began in Wuhan when the virus accidently leaked out of her laboratory.  

I have changed my mind about this.  In the spring and summer of 2020, I suggested--in posts here and here--that the virus probably evolved naturally in bats before it passed into humans (perhaps through an intermediate animal).  But then beginning in May of last year--in posts here and here--I argued that there was plenty of evidence for the virus having evolved artificially in Shi's lab and then accidently leaking out of her lab into Wuhan, when some of her lab workers became infected.

If this is true, it should provoke lots of questions about who we should blame and how we might prevent this from happening again.  But the deepest question, I have suggested, is whether we should blame Francis Bacon and the modern scientific project that he initiated, because Shi's governmentally funded research looks like the sort of publicly sponsored scientific research carried out in Salomon's House in Bacon's New Atlantis.  Bacon promised that modern science and technology could master nature "for the relief of the human estate."  Shi and her colleagues have justified their research with the same promise.  They have promised that their research would allow us to predict and prepare for new infectious viruses, so that we could avoid future pandemics and produce new vaccines to give us immunity to dangerous viruses.  But now it seems likely that this research produced not a vaccine but a plague.  

Should we conclude from this that our support for modern science and technology has been a Faustian bargain with the Devil?  Or should we say that this is a good bargain--as long as we understand that regulating scientific research to avoid unnecessary risks is part of the bargain?

We now have a new book to help us think about these questions--Alina Chan and Matt Ridley's Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 (New York: HarperCollins, 2021).  In the debate between those who believe the Covid-19 pandemic began with a natural spillover of the SARS2 virus from animals (originally horseshoe bats in southern China) and those who believe it began with an accidental leak of that virus from a lab in Wuhan, Chan and Ridley concede that there is no demonstrative proof for either side.  But as of now, they argue, the greater weight of the evidence is on the side of the accidental lab leak theory.

To support that conclusion, they engage in what the medieval scholastic philosophers would have identified as "disputation."  They imagine opposing attorneys summarizing their arguments before a jury.  In chapters 12 and 13 of their book, Chan and Ridley present the attorney for the natural spillover theory followed by the attorney for the lab leak theory--with the first attorney making 12 arguments and the second making 10 arguments.  I will briefly state those arguments here.

12 ARGUMENTS FOR A NATURAL SPILLOVER

(1)  What we know about the evolution of the 2003 SARS virus indicates that it almost certainly originated through a natural spillover from horseshoe bats to humans.  Shi Zhengli and her colleagues identified the bat coronaviruses that were the precursors of the SARS virus that infected human beings.  These same scientists have argued that the SARS2 virus probably originated in the same way--as a natural spillover from bat coronaviruses.  And although they have not yet found the direct ancestor of the SARS2 virus, they have found bat coronaviruses that are remarkably similar to SARS2.  That should be enough to convince us that the Covid-19 pandemic probably originated from a natural spillover.

(2)  The primary reason that some people believe that the SARS2 virus leaked out of Shi's lab in Wuhan is that the first people infected with the virus were in Wuhan; and the researchers in Shi's lab had been sampling and studying bat coronaviruses from southern China for many years.  But the proximity of the Wuhan lab to the first identified infections is only a coincidence.  We should assume that someone was infected with the virus somewhere in southern China and then the virus was passed to people in Wuhan.

(3)  This natural spillover of infectious viruses to humans from bats has occurred many times--not just with the SARS virus but also the Ebola, MERS, Nipah, and Hendra viruses.  We should assume that SARS2 fits into the same evolutionary pattern.

(4)  The SARS2 virus appears to be the product of recombination: combining parts from many different viruses.  That happens all the time with viruses--they evolve by switching genetic parts in and out of closely related viruses.  We can assume that SARS2 emerged naturally from that evolutionary process of viral recombination.

(5)  It is true that for many years Shi and her colleagues have been visiting bat caves in the southern province of Yunnan, and therefore there could have been a spillover from a bat to the scientists.  But a small proportion of people in Yunnan have antibodies to SARS, which indicates occasional natural spillovers.  We can easily imagine that someone became infected with SARS2 and then travelled north through China until the virus reached Wuhan.

(6)  In February of last year, a team of investigators from China and the World Health Organization held a press conference at which they proposed that the SARS2 virus could have been transmitted to Wuhan on some frozen food.  This has been ridiculed as the "Popsicle Theory."  And scientists have generally rejected it as implausible.  But a good lawyer defending the natural spillover theory could rightly concede this without weakening his case.

(7)  From the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Shi and her colleagues have been remarkably secretive about their research, as if they were concealing evidence that might support the lab leak theory.  For example, on February 3, 2020, Nature published the first paper on the SARS2 virus by Shi and her colleagues, which reported that they had found in the Wuhan lab's collection a bat coronavirus called RaTG13 that was a 96.2 percent genome match to SARS2.  They did not report, however, that this RaTG13 strain had been collected in 2012 from patients who had become sick in Yunnan Province after visiting a mine cave to clean bat feces in order to mine copper.  Nor did they report that between 2012 and 2015, they had collected from the same cave eight other betacoronaviruses that were SARS-related, and that in 2018 they had obtained almost the full-length genome sequence of RaTG13.  They finally reported all of this on December 3, 2020, in an Addendum to their February Nature article.  Why did they keep all of this secret for almost a year?  Well, their defense lawyer might argue, they were afraid of being blamed for the pandemic, and so they hid any information that might be interpreted as suggesting a lab leak of the Covid virus.  But even if we can rightly criticize their lack of openness, this is no proof of their guilt.

(8)  The SARS2 genomic sequence does not match any known virus reported anywhere prior to the identification of SARS2 in January of 2020.  Even the RaTG13 virus genome is only a 96 percent match, which is still not close enough to be a direct precursor of SARS2.  Proving the lab leak theory would require evidence that scientists had a SARS2 precursor in their labs before the pandemic began.  Until such evidence appears, the lab leak theory is only an unsubstantiated speculation. 

(9)  Many of the early cases of Covid were linked to an animal market in Wuhan.  We now know that although there were no bats or pangolins in that market, other kinds of live mammals were sold there.  A transmission of the virus from these animals to humans is a serious possibility.  Although no animals have been found to have the SARS2 virus, it is possible that wildlife vendors quickly hid their infected animals when they heard about the outbreak.

(10)  One primary reason why the SARS2 virus so easily infects human beings is that it has a furin cleavage site.  Furin is an important protein in human cells, because it cleaves proteins in two so that they can change shape to better perform their functions.  Furin is attracted to the right place in each protein by special sequences of amino acids.  The furin cleavage site in SARS2 has a genetic recipe for four amino acids in a key spot of the spike gene of the virus, which attracts the furin protein to cut the spike protein in just the right way so that it forces the fusion of the virus to a human cell and allows the virus genome to enter the cell.  Other coronaviruses that infect humans attract furin, but they are not in the subgenus of SARS-like (sarbecovirus) viruses.  SARS2 is the only sarbecovirus with a furin cleavage site.  Virologists can experimentally insert furin cleavage sites in the spike genes of coronaviruses.  And so proponents of the lab leak theory have argued that the furin cleavage site in SARS2 must be the product of a lab experiment.  But the lawyer for the natural spillover theory could argue that the furin cleavage site could easily have emerged by recombination or mutation in this part of the spike gene.

(11)  Perhaps the best argument against the lab leak theory is that there is no direct evidence for it.  No one has identified an infected laboratory worker.  No one has reported a laboratory accident in Wuhan.  Even if the Chinese government has tried to suppress any evidence for a lab leak, it's hard to believe that this explains why there has been no whistleblower.

(12)  Finally, we should notice that the proponents of the lab leak theory are personally motivated to do this, because many of them are opponents of genetic engineering and of experiments with virus that might have some risks.  Moreover, there is a natural human resistance to believing that a global catastrophe like a pandemic can arise from random events in nature.  When we suffer from a plague, we want to blame someone; and in the tradition of the Frankenstein story, many of us want to blame the mad scientist.

10 ARGUMENTS FOR A LABORATORY ACCIDENT

Now let's hear the response from the attorney for Chan and Ridley.  This attorney would begin by making it clear that he is not trying to argue that the scientists in Wuhan intentionally created the pandemic.  They were not designing a bioweapon.  Their intention was good: they wanted to study potentially dangerous viruses so that they could predict pandemics and find ways to avoid them.  If there was a lab leak, it was accidental.  A scientist was accidentally infected with the SARS2 virus either through contact with bats in the wild or in the laboratory, and then this infection was transmitted to others in Wuhan.

(1)  The first point to make is that lab leaks do occur.  Alison Young, a journalist who has tracked lab leaks in the United States for the past 15 years, has written about this in USA Today ("Could an Accident Have Caused Covid-19?," March 22, 2021).  Around the world, in even the most secure labs, there have been accidental releases of SARS, anthrax, smallpox, foot-and-mouth, Marburg virus, and other pathogens.  Luckily, there has been no clearly identified case of a major pandemic caused by a lab leak.  There is only one possible case of a pandemic that began in a lab, although there is disagreement about it among the scientists who have studied it.  In 1977, an Influenza A (H1N1) strain of flu swept over the world, beginning in China.  This strain of flu was genetically identical to an H1NI flu that had been common in the 1950s but then disappeared.  One theory about this is that in some lab somewhere, this flu strain from the 1950s had been thawed out to develop new vaccines, and that the live attenuated virus used as a vaccine recovered its ability to cause the disease.  There's a dispute, however, as to whether this should count as a lab leak (see Chan and Ridley, 148-51).  In any case, as long as lab leaks occur, causing a pandemic is possible.

(2)  Consider also that although it has been over two years since the SARS2 virus was identified, there is still no direct evidence for its natural origin.  By contrast, in the case of the SARS epidemic in 2003, it was quickly determined that the first people who were infected were food handlers.  Scientists visited a live animal market in Shenzhen, Guandong, in southern China.  The SARS virus was isolated from five of the animals.  They also found that some of the animal handlers had antibodies to SARS.  The highest antibody prevalence was found in those who primarily traded civets.  No evidence like this has been found for SARS2.  None of the animals from the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan tested positive for SARS2.  Thousands of animals across China have been tested, and there is no sign of the SARS2 virus in any of them.

(3)  Unlike the SARS virus of 2003, which was seen to evolve during the early months of the outbreak to become better adapted for infecting humans, the SARS2 virus was well adapted for infecting humans from the start of the outbreak.  We have to wonder whether the SARS2 virus had developed its remarkable ability for infecting and transmitting among humans through evolving in a laboratory.

(4)  Why have the Chinese authorities and the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) refused to release the two kinds of data that could refute the lab leak theory?  The WHO investigators have not been permitted to see the hospital records of the early Covid-19 cases or the information about the locations and professions of the first people infected.  If this showed no connection to any laboratory in Wuhan, this would be evidence against the lab leak theory.  Another important kind of data is the WIV's database of fifteen thousand bat samples from southern China.  That database could be found online until it was taken offline in 2019 on September 12 between 2 a.m. and 3 a. m.  Why?  What's the point of building such a database over many years and then not allowing anyone to see it?

(5)  Another big question is: why Wuhan?  Is it just a coincidence that the SARS2 virus emerged first in the one city in the world with the largest collection of bat sarbecoviruses and the most active lab studying these viruses?  Isn't it odd that this city is over 620 miles from the region of China where SARS-like viruses are found naturally?

(6)  It was almost a full year after the beginning of the pandemic before the WIV revealed that it had a collection of SARS-like viruses collected in an abandoned copper mine in Mojiang with many bats, where workers had been sickened with a SARS-like illness in 2012.  This collection had nine viruses very genetically similar to the SARS2 virus.  Why the delay?

(7)  International journalists trying to visit that Mojiang mine have been blocked by police and by people guarding the entrance to the mine.  Why?  Shouldn't this create some suspicion that the SARS2 virus might have originated there, and that the WIV scientists taking samples from the bats there might have taken the virus back to their lab in Wuhan?

(8)   Some of the best evidence that laboratory scientists were probably responsible, even if unintentionally, for the pandemic is the record of their research.  Here's how Chan and Ridley describe that research:

"They did not just bring viruses from caves and mines in southern China to the laboratory for storage; they sequenced their genomes, made infectious clones of them, rescured live viruses from culture, passaged them through a range of laboratory-made cell lines of different animal species and cell types, synthesized and altered their genomes to insert specific sequences, hybridized genomes to combine parts of one virus's spike gene with backbones from another virus, and used these viruses to infect human respiratory tract cells and humanized mice genetically engineered to have human ACE2 in them.  This type of research carries a risk of, unintentionally, generating a more virulent or infectious version of a virus or selecting for bat viruses that are efficient at infecting human tissues and humanized animals" (287).

Moreover, we now know that Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance in collaboration with Shi Zhengli and others submitted a grant proposal in March of 2018 to the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  A leaked copy of this proposal was published a few months ago by The Intercept.  They proposed to insert cleavage sites into engineered SARS-like viruses: "We will analyze all SARSr-CoV S gene sequences for appropriately conserved proteolytic cleavage sites in S2 and for the presence of potential furin cleavage sites . . . we will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in Vero [monkey kidney] cells and HAE [human airway epithelial] cultures."  The proposal was rejected.  One of the criticisms coming from a DARPA program manager was that the proposal "did not mention or assess potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research and DURC [Dual Use Research of Concern]."

Although this grant proposal was unsuccessful, we know that Daszak and Shi have had other sources of funding that they could have used.  We also know that scientists often write proposals to support research that they have already undertaken, and so it is likely that Daszak and Shi have been inserting furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses, which could have created the SARS2 virus.

(9)  Another argument for the lab leak theory is that many of the scientists who rejected the lab leak idea in the spring of 2020 had changed their minds by the spring of 2021 as the evidence for a lab leak piled up.  The critical turning point was a letter signed by eighteen scientists published in Science in the middle of May 2021, which said that the lab leak idea needed to be taken seriously.  For example, Bernard Roizman, a virologist at the University of Chicago, had rejected the lab leak theory in February of 2020.  But in May of 2021, he said: "I'm convinced that what happened is that the virus was brought to a lab, they started to work with it . . . and some sloppy individual brought it out . . . they can't admit they did something so stupid."

(10)  Moreover, we now know that the first reaction of many scientists early in February of 2020 was that the SARS2 virus must have been leaked from a lab, but that this should not be said in public for fear of promoting distrust of scientists.  Some Republican congressmen have recently forced the release of emails exchanged between scientists after a conference call on February 1, 2020, that show that these scientists were privately worrying about a lab leak even though they publicly denied this.  Ridley has written about this on his blog.

Jeremy Farrar organized the call on February 1 with Patrick Vallance, Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci, and a group of virologists.  In the emails after the call, many of the participants indicated that they thought a lab leak was the most likely source of the SARS2 virus.  But then a few days later, many of these people signed their names to public statements and articles rejecting the lab leak theory.  None of them has explained why they changed their minds, but their emails suggest that they thought publicly stating the truth would be too dangerous for science.

BLAMING BACON'S SCIENCE?

In those emails, Ron Fouchier warned that taking seriously the lab-leak theory would "do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular."  Similarly, Francis Collins warned about "doing great potential harm to science and international harmony."  Anthony Fauci said: "I would not do anything about this right now.  It is a shiny object that will go away in time."

If it were to become generally accepted that the Covid-19 pandemic was caused by a leak from the Wuhan lab, would that force us to reassess the whole Baconian project of modern science and technology?  In Bacon's New Atlantis, the scientific laboratories in Salomon's House are regulated by the scientists themselves, who decide what should be made public and what should be kept secret.  Can scientists be trusted to regulate themselves in deciding whether the likely benefits of their research outweigh the likely risks?  Or should ordinary citizens and politicians demand regulatory restrictions on what the scientists can do?

Even if we end up blaming Bacon's science for causing the Covid-19 pandemic, we must remember that Bacon's science also created the Covid-19 vaccines that have saved millions of lives.  Amazingly, the biotech firm Moderna completed the design of its experimental messenger-RNA (mRNA) vaccine to fight the SARS2 virus by January 13, 2020, only a few days after the sequencing of the SARS2 genome was made public!

We should also notice that Bacon's science seems to be close to developing a new universal coronavirus vaccine that could prevent future SARS-like coronavirus pandemics.  Ralph Baric and his colleagues have developed and tested such a vaccine in mice.  They started with mRNA--like the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines used today--but instead of including the mRNA code for only one virus, they created a hybrid or chimeric mRNA from multiple coronaviruses.  When presented to mice, this chimeric vaccine generates antibodies against multiple spike proteins, which viruses use to enter healthy cells.  This vaccine has the potential to be effective against every variant of the virus (David Martinez et al., "Chimeric Spike mRNA Vaccines Protect against Sarbecovirus Challenge in Mice," Science 373 [2021]: 991-998).

Even as we restrict Bacon's scientists to reduce the risks from accidental laboratory leaks that could cause another pandemic, we need to promote that research of Bacon's scientists that is likely to lead to new vaccines and therapies that protect us from dangerous pathogens. 

Has the Liberty Fund Departed from its Founder's Original Intent? Can Liberty be Promoted by the Intellectual Study of Liberty without Political Partisanship?

I have been thinking about the two questions in the title for this post after reading a disturbing article by Adam Wren in the Indianapolis Monthly about the turmoil within the Liberty Fund and the tragic suicide of Nicolas Maloberti last summer after he was fired from his position as a Liberty Fund Fellow.

On this blog, I have often mentioned my participation in conferences organized by the Liberty Fund.  From 1989 to 2019, I have participated in over 30 conferences, and I was the organizer for 15 of them.  I regard this as one of the highlights of my intellectual life.

The Liberty Fund was founded in 1960 by Pierre F. Goodrich, a successful Indiana businessman.  Its headquarters was in Indianapolis until it was moved a few years ago to Carmel, a suburb of Indianapolis.  Goodrich was a lawyer, with his law degree from Harvard.  His family was prominent in Indiana.  His father had been Governor of Indiana.

He was an avid reader of the Great Books--the classic texts of Western Culture in philosophy, poetry, theology, history, science, and the arts.  For a time, he was President of Mortimer Adler's Great Books Foundation.

In his reading of the Great Books, his primary interest was the idea of liberty.  For many years, he worked on making a list of those written texts that taught something about liberty.  This led to his supporting the building of the Goodrich Seminar Room at Wabash College, which had the names of the authors of these texts arranged chronologically on the marble walls.  The first symbol on the walls was the cuneiform symbol amagi, which is thought to be the Sumerian word for "liberty." The room has bookcases containing the books identified on the walls and a huge seminar table in the middle of the room.  I have written about this room.

This room manifests Goodrich's vision.  He wanted people to consider how the history of thinking about liberty could be traced through the Great Books, which would require that people read those books and then meet around a seminar table to talk about them.

Goodrich founded the Liberty Fund to execute this vision, endowing it with most of his wealth, which was close to $400 million.  The Liberty Fund would support the publication of some of the Great Books of liberty, and it would also support scholars who were writing about those books.  But the primary activity of the Liberty Fund would be conferences in which small groups of people (about 15) would be invited to read some texts and then meet for two or three days to talk about those texts that taught something about liberty.  The participants would be paid for their travel expenses and also receive a small stipend.  The number of these conferences per year has been as high as 200.  Now it's around 100.

Goodrich had a classical liberal's understanding of liberty--in the tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith, and Friedrich Hayek.  He was a friend of Hayek and one of the founding members of Hayek's Mont Pelerin Society.  As one might expect, therefore, the Liberty Fund has been generally identified as politically right-wing, conservative, or libertarian.  But those invited to Liberty Fund's conferences have always included many people who would identify themselves as left-wing or progressive liberals.  At the beginning of each conference, the Liberty Fund representative made it clear that the conference was not intended to promote any particular point of view, because people should be free to speak their mind without feeling compelled to agree to any pre-determined conclusions.

And in any case, in Goodrich's founding documents for Liberty Fund, he made it clear that this would not be a politically partisan organization; and that as a tax-exempt educational organization, it would be legally prohibited from engaging in any political activity, political journalism, or any attempt to influence public policy making.

In recent years, however, there has been some controversy over whether the Liberty Fund has departed from Goodrich's founding vision for the organization, because some people within and outside the organization have seen it as becoming politically partisan in favoring the Republican Party (and particularly Donald Trump's Republican Party), and thus violating Goodrich's plan that Liberty Fund would be free from partisan political debate.

The most shocking effect of that controversy was Maloberti's suicide on June 22.  Although I did not know him well, I was acquainted with him from meeting him at a Liberty Fund conference in 2015 on "Liberal Thought in Argentina, 1837-1940."  He was an Argentinian who had moved to the United States for his graduate education in philosophy.  He then worked for Liberty Fund for almost 14 years.  His most important work was organizing conferences about liberty in Latin America, many of them located in Latin America.  When he died, he was only 46 years old.

In recent years, Maloberti had become worried that Liberty Fund was moving away from Goodrich's purely intellectual and educational mission in studying liberty in the Great Books.  He saw that the organization was sponsoring political journalism--commenting on political events and politicians--with a slant favoring the Republican Party and political conservatism.  He saw this most clearly in the blog that the Liberty Fund had started in 2012--"Law and Liberty."

As you can see if you go to this blog, much of what it publishes is conservative political journalism.  (I have written one essay for this blog on "The Biological Sociology of the Good Society.")  Maloberti and other Liberty Fund Fellows have complained to the Liberty Fund's Board of Directors that this political journalism is not what Goodrich wanted the Liberty Fund to do, and that it is illegal insofar as it violates the legal terms for the organization's tax-exempt status.  

In his article for the Indianapolis Monthly, Adam Wren suggests that the political slant of "Law and Liberty" clearly favors Trump and Trumpism.  But I would say that's an overstatement.  For example, Wren notes that the title of one of the essays on the blog is "The Trump Trial Is Unconstitutional."  But if you look at the essay, you will see that the author (Stephen Wirls) is actually criticizing Trump: "I am generally conservative in political matters and lean toward the Republican Party, although less so given the loyalty of some and craven silence of others in the face of Trump's gross disregard for the constitutional and legal order.  I would be very pleased if Trump were disqualified from ever holding any national office.  There is, however, no constitutional path for achieving this outcome."

Wren also says that "Law and Liberty" has published essays on "the virtues of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban."  But if you look at Richard Reinsch's essay praising Orban for his Christian democratic populism, you might notice that on the same day that this essay was published (May 13, 2019), "Law and Liberty" published Marc Plattner's essay on "Orban's Misapprehension of Liberalism," in which Plattner criticized Orban for praising "Christian democracy" as "illiberal" and superior to "liberal democracy."  Plattner indicated that what we see in the debate among conservatives about Orban is a disagreement as to whether conservatives should support the classical liberal tradition initiated by John Locke or whether true conservatism requires endorsing the illiberal Christian nationalism of people like Orban.  Apparently, the editors wanted to present both sides of this debate, which probably shows the debate inside Liberty Fund between the classical Lockean liberals and the traditionalist Burkean conservatives--a debate over the meaning of liberty.

Goodrich wanted to promote this debate over the meaning of liberty.  He included the names of both Locke and Burke on the wall of the Goodrich Seminar Room.  And I can testify to the fact that many of the Liberty Fund conference discussions have become debates between Lockean liberals and Burkean conservatives.  But Maloberti's point was that Goodrich would not have wanted such discussions directed towards partisan political controversies like the debate over Orban's illiberal populism.

Maloberti joined with David M. Hart, another Liberty Fund Fellow, in arguing that Goodrich's founding documents for the Liberty Fund make it clear that he did not intend that the organization would engage in political activity or political journalism.  I can agree with that from having studied those documents for a Liberty Fund conference some years ago.

From his reading of these documents, Hart proposed a standard to guide Liberty Fund:

"I think the rule of thumb for LF should be that we should never mention by name any sitting politician or political party, any piece of legislation which is currently before Congress, or any other policy matter currently under discussion.  If we want to talk about 'free trade' or 'peace' we should do so historically (by referring to past historical debates about free trade vs. protectionism) and theoretically (by referring to classic texts like Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations). That way we can be true to PFG's 'founder's intent' and our tax exempt status as an educational foundation."

Hart was fired from Liberty Fund in 2019.  Maloberti was fired in May of last year.  He took his life a few weeks after that.

The President and Board of Directors have not provided a clear response to the claim of Maloberti and others that Liberty Fund no longer follows the founding mandate of Goodrich.  There would seem to be two possible responses.  They could say that Maloberti misinterpreted Goodrich's founding documents, and that Goodrich actually intended that Liberty Fund should engage in partisan political journalism in promoting liberty.  Or they could say that the current leaders of Liberty Fund have decided to set aside Goodrich's original mandate, so that they can engage in conservative Republican political activity in a way that Goodrich would not have endorsed.

The deeper question in this controversy is whether Goodrich was right in thinking that the intellectual study of liberty through reading and discussing the Great Books is the best way to promote liberty itself, or whether the proper promotion of liberty necessarily requires partisan political activity and political journalism that goes beyond purely intellectual study.

After all, some of the authors of those Great Books of liberty--such as Locke and Burke--were not only political philosophers but also political partisans putting into political practice their intellectual understanding of liberty.  Or would Goodrich have said that the political theory of liberty needs to be developed intellectually by organizations like Liberty Fund separate from and prior to the political practice of liberty?

Even if liberty requires partisan political activity, one must wonder which political party best promotes liberty.  If the choice in the United States is between the Democrat Party and the Republican Party, it's not clear that either of those parties has consistently promoted liberty in all of its forms.  Or should one turn to the Libertarian Party, despite the fact that it has had only very limited success in electoral politics?  Does the fact that the proportion of the American electorate identifying as "Independent" is greater than those identifying as either Republican or Democrat suggest the possibility that a third party devoted to liberty could win if it appealed to the Independents?

Five Moral and Legal Questions Raised by the Covid-19 Pandemic

The world has now endured two years of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Four days ago--January 23--was the second anniversary of China's announcement of the lockdown of Wuhan.  The World Health Organization officially declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020.  On March 16, President Trump initiated the move to lockdowns in the United States in announcing "The President's Coronavirus Guidelines for America."  Within a few weeks, most state governors in the United States following Trump's lead and many political leaders around the world announced compulsory lockdowns.

In recent months, the Covid numbers--rates of infection and death--in many parts of the world have been as high as they were in the spring of 2020.  And yet, most governments have refused to reimpose the hard lockdowns.  There seems to be a move among many leaders to saying that this Covid virus is not going away, and so we might as well learn to live with it.  If so, doesn't this imply that the lockdowns of the spring of 2020 were mistaken, because most of us can see now that the likely social costs of prolonged lockdowns are greater than the likely social benefits?  I began arguing for that conclusion in April of 2020.

That was my answer to one of five moral and legal questions raised by the Covid pandemic that I have considered on this blog over the past two years.

Here are the five questions: (1) When and how did the public health experts decide that the Covid pandemic justified a lockdown of our social and economic life?  (2) Do the benefits of a hard lockdown exceed the costs?  (3) In the United States, are governmentally imposed lockdowns constitutional?  (4) When, where, and how did the SARS2 virus originate?  (5) If the virus leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, should we blame Francis Bacon, because the virologists in Wuhan were carrying out the modern scientific project first proposed by Bacon?

The surprising answer to my first question is that in fact public health experts have never done the moral analysis that would rationally justify the lockdowns.  After studying the history of public responses to pandemics and the pertinent documents about the deliberations in the winter and spring of 2020, I cannot see that public health experts ever demonstrated to themselves and others that a moral cost-benefit analysis showed that the costs of a governmental lockdown of society were far less than the public health benefits.  Political leaders stumbled into issuing lockdown orders without any rational justification for doing this.  I wrote about this in April of 2020.

To the question of whether in fact the likely benefits of a lockdown outweigh the likely costs, my answer has been no.  I wrote about this in April and November of 2020.

To the question of whether the lockdowns in the United States were constitutional, I have answered no.

In answering the last two questions about the origins of the SARS2 virus, I have changed my mind.  Originally, in May and August of 2020, I agreed with the popular belief that the virus originated by natural evolution through a spillover from bats to humans, perhaps through some intermediary animals such as pangolins.

But then, in May and August of 2021, I argued that there was increasing evidence for the claim that the virus probably leaked out of Shi Zhengli's laboratory in Wuhan, and that the virus was probably created in her laboratory by "gain-of--function" research funded by the U.S. government.  Over the past six months, the evidence for this has continued to increase; and I will write about this in my next post.

Now I am sure many readers are thinking that there is a sixth great moral and legal question raised by the pandemic that I have not addressed:  Are the legally coercive mandates for Covid vaccinations justifiable restrictions of individual liberty?  

This question has come up only briefly in my post with references to the U.S. Supreme Court case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), which upheld the constitutionality of compulsory smallpox vaccinations.  In his opinion for the majority in that decision, Justice Harlan rightly appealed to the Lockean principle that the liberty of the individual may be properly restricted to prevent injury to others.  I may freely exercise my rights to life, liberty, and property so long as this does not harm others in their life, liberty, or property.

I have decided that for me the likely benefits of Covid vaccination are far greater than the likely costs.  I have had three shots of the Moderna vaccine. Like most of the people who have been vaccinated, I have made a rough calculation of the risks:  if I were unvaccinated, there might be a one percent chance that Covid would make me severely ill or kill me; and being vaccinated reduces that chance to almost zero.

Those who refuse to be vaccinated make a different calculation.  They reason that since there's a ninety-nine percent chance that they will not be killed by Covid, but there is some serious risk of harm from vaccination, it's best for them not to be vaccinated; and they should be free to make that choice for themselves.

We should agree with that only as long as we can see that their free choice to refuse vaccination does not impose any unreasonable harm on others.  It has been said that since the development of the vaccines, the Covid pandemic has become a "pandemic of the unvaccinated."  In that case, we could say that the unvaccinated are harming society by prolonging the pandemic.  But this might be debatable considering that even the vaccinated have some slight chance of "breakthrough" infections (maybe 1 in a 100).

The clearest harm to society from the unvaccinated is that they are more likely than the vaccinated to become so severely ill that they need hospitalization, and this can create a scarcity of hospital beds.  If this creates a need for "triage" rationing of scarce medical resources, this might justify telling the unvaccinated who need medical care for severe Covid cases that they will have to go to the bottom of the waiting list.

In any case, it seems to me that it's generally better to rely on social persuasion rather than legal coercion in promoting vaccination.  But that social persuasion would include allowing private individuals and organizations (including businesses and employers) to enforce vaccination mandates.

The Darwinian Liberalism of Monet's Water Lilies: The Evolutionary Invention of Water Lilies and Their Markets

 

                                    Video of Monet's Water Lily Garden and Japanese Footbridge

                                 Two of Monet's Water Lily Paintings, 1900 and 1906

One of my favorite locations in the world is Gallery 243 in the Art Institute of Chicago, where some of Claude Monet's series paintings are displayed--one painting of water lilies ("Water Lily Pond," 1919), six paintings of wheat stacks (from 1891), and three of the foggy London paintings (Charing Cross Bridge, Waterloo Bridge, and the Houses of Parliament).  Every time I go there, I am reminded of the day when I first became fascinated with Monet's paintings, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago.  It was March 13, 1975, and it was the first day of an exhibition at the Art Institute--"Paintings by Monet"--that had 122 of Monet's paintings from around the world.  I was particularly moved by the series of huge water lily paintings.  Ever since then, I have been trying to understand the attraction of these paintings.

A few days ago, I arrived early at the museum so that my wife and I could be the first people in the gallery.  I had recently read an article by Gloria Bloom--"The Real Water Lilies of Giverny"--that started me thinking about the Darwinian liberalism of Monet's water lily paintings.  

The paintings are Darwinian in many respects. The water lilies in Monet's water garden were products of evolutionary artificial selection by horticultural domestication, which is a process of plant-animal coevolution.  Monet's landscaping of his gardens and his gardening of the plants can be understood as evolutionary niche construction.  The paintings and the plants were also products of a liberal order of global trade and free markets, which allows for the evolutionary economics of entrepreneurship in the markets for plants and art.  This also illustrates how Darwinian liberalism satisfies the natural desire of evolved human nature for the aesthetic pleasures of nature represented in visual art.  The universality of these aesthetic pleasures is indicated by the fact that these paintings by Monet have become some of the most popular images in the history of art.  They have also been commercially successful.  In recent years, some of the paintings have sold for over $50 million.  Amazon sells canvas print reproductions for about $37.

LATOUR-MARLIAC: THE INVENTION AND MARKETING OF MONET'S WATER LILIES

There are over 300 paintings of water lilies or Nymphaea (the subgenus of hardy water lilies) that Monet made over the last 27 years of his life (1899-1926) at his home in Giverny, a village 50 miles northwest of Paris.  Wikipedia has a good list of these paintings.

As Bloom indicates, art consumers and art historians have taken for granted the colorful water lilies planted in Monet's water garden, assuming that Monet must have found these plants easily available in the landscape of France.  But that is not true.  At the end of the 19th century, the only water lily that grew naturally in France was the hardy white species Nymphaea alba, which had been first identified by Carl Linnaeus.

                                                                         Nymphaea alba

In the 19th century, European botanist-explorers were importing colorful water lilies found in tropical regions of the world.  The gardening public was excited by these new brightly colorful water lilies, but these tropical plants could not tolerate the European winter.

In 1889, at the World's Fair in Paris, the French horticulturalist Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac won a prize for his exhibition of water lilies that he had created by crossbreeding hybridization.  By crossing European species with species found in America and the tropics, he had created colorful lilies that were hardy enough to grow in the European climate (Holmes 2015).  

                                                           Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac

Monet was himself a horticulturalist, and he was impressed by Latour-Marliac's hybrids at the World's Fair.  At Giverny, Monet was diverting a stream through his property and landscaping to create a water garden.  By 1894, he was ready to begin planting, and he placed an order at the Latour-Marliac greenhouses for a wide variety of plants, including three types of water lilies: Nymphaea Mexicana, Nymphaea "Laydekeri Rosea," and Nymphaea "Odorata Sulphurea Grandiflora."

                                                                    Nymphaea Mexicana

                                                           Nymphaea "Laydekeri Rosea"

                                                 Nymphaea "Odorata Sulphurea Grandiflora"

In 1904, Monet placed his second order for plants from the Latour-Marliac nursery, and this time it was only for red water lilies.  Now, he could compose his palette of colors balanced between yellows, pinks, and reds--both in his garden and in his paintings of the garden.  His garden would be in full bloom during the warmest months of the year--from May to September or October.  During the colder months, the tender plants could be overwintered in his large greenhouse.

Latour-Marliac's precise method for making his crosses is unknown.  But the general method for horticultural hybridizing is well understood.  The pollen parent plant provides the male reproductive material.  The seed parent plant provides the female material--the fertile womb.  To make a cross, the hybridizer takes the pollen from a plant that has some desirable characteristics (such as flower color or hardiness) and applies it to the female reproductive part, the pistil, of another plant.  Each seedling produced from this match will be a unique combination of traits from the parent plants.

This domestication and hybridizing of plants are important for Darwinian evolutionary thinking in six ways.  The first is that Darwin developed his idea of evolutionary natural selection from his understanding of the artificial selection exercised by human beings in domesticating plants and animals.  He made this clear in the first two chapters of the Origin of Species, where he compared "variation under domestication" and "variation under nature," and in the Introduction to his book The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication.  He explained that it was through his study of "domestic productions" that he "acquired a just idea of the power of Selection" (1998, 1:10).  He saw that the term "natural selection" was "so far a good one as it brings into connection the production of domestic races by man's power of selection and the natural preservation of varieties and species in a state of nature" (1:6).  Just as the human breeder of plants and animals selects those traits that show "adaptation to his wants and pleasures," nature selects those traits that give an organism some adaptation for survival and reproduction in the struggle for life (1:4).

The second important contribution to Darwinian thinking here is that the human domestication of plants illustrates the ecological coevolution of plants and animals, so that plants and animals evolve to be mutually dependent.  This is true not just for human beings but for other animals as well.  For example, fungal species have been domesticated by bees and beetles, which shows that agriculture evolved millions of years ago among these animals, long before the emergence of human agriculture (Farrell et al. 2001; Nygaard et al. 2016; Purugganan and Fuller 2009; Schultz and Brady 2008).

The third point is that the human domestication of plants is a form of Darwinian niche construction.  In creating his water garden and planting it with Latour-Marliac's hybrid water lilies, Monet was creating a niche in which he could cultivate his artistic imagination.  Other animals and plants also engage in niche construction, so that instead of just adapting to the given natural environment, they construct their environment so that it is more hospitable to them.  I have written previously about this here and here.

The fourth way in which this contributes to Darwinian thinking is that understanding the artificial hybridization of plants helps us to think about the possibility that new species could have evolved by natural hybridization.  There is now a growing recognition that hybridization has been important for the evolution of many species--including the evolution of iguanas and finches in the Galapagos and even human evolution.  I have written previously about this here and here.

The fifth point is that the human breeding of Monet's water lilies illustrates the Darwinian evolution of a sense of beauty that could be crucial for a biological science of art.  In the Origin of Species, Darwin observed that the human domestication of plants and animals showed "adaptation, not indeed to the animal's or plant's own good, but to man's use or fancy."  And a plant might be adapted for man's "fancy" if it was made "beautiful in his eyes" (1859: 30).  The vibrant colors of Latour-Marliac's hybrid water lilies made them beautiful in Monet's eyes and the eyes of those who have contemplated his water lily paintings.  They human visual system has evolved to detect and appreciate colors that are wavelengths of light within the visible range for the human eye.  Similarly, the visual system of some other animals makes certain colors attractive to them.  This is part of what Darwin in The Descent of Man identified as the "sense of beauty" that human beings share with other animals.  One reason for this is what Darwin called "sexual selection":  in some animals, females prefer to mate with males they find colorful, or males select females that seem beautiful to them (2004, 114-16, 430-32, 461-65, 640-52, 664, 686-87).  In a future post, I will say more about this as part of the biology of art.

Finally, Latour-Marliac's breeding of Monet's water lilies can also be understood as evolutionary economics.  After all, Latour-Marliac's nursery was a business enterprise that had to struggle to survive in a competitive market.  This nursery is still operating and still selling water lilies, as you can see at their website.  In 2007, the business was purchased by Robert Sheldon, a professor of entrepreneurship at a business school in France.  He has written about the economic history of the business as an illustration of Joseph Schumpeter's evolutionary theory of economics, in which a capitalist economy is understood as a process of creative destruction: the economy is in a constant state of flux, with firms failing and freeing resources for innovative entrepreneurs who invent new products and services and thus create new markets.  Latour-Marliac showed this because to survive he had to innovate both in creating new plants by hybridization and in creating the markets for these plants.  The popularity of Monet's water lily paintings helped to create the demand for Latour-Marliac's water lilies, and Latour-Marliac had to cultivate a network of customers around the world.  After Sheldon took ownership of the firm, he innovated by creating a restaurant at the nursery and promoting the nursery as a tourist attraction (Sheldon 2017).

Another part of this story of evolutionary economics is the marketing of Monet's art and impressionist art generally, which was largely the work of the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel--the subject of a future post.

You can see that going to Gallery 243 has given me a lot to think about.

REFERENCES

Darwin, Charles. 1859. On the Origin of Species. London: John Murray.

Darwin, Charles. 1998.  The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. 2 vols. 2nd ed.  Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Darwin, Charles. 2004. The Descent of Man. 2nd ed. New York: Penguin.

Farrell, Brian D., et al. 2001. "The Evolution of Agriculture in Beetles (Curculionidae: Scolytinae and Platypodinae)."  Evolution 55 (10): 2011-2027.

Holmes, Caroline. 2015. Water Lilies and Bory Latour-Marliac, the Genius Behind Monet's Water Lilies. Woodbridge, UK: Garden Art Press.

Nygaard, Sanne, et al. 2016. "Reciprocal Genomic Evolution in the Ant-Fungus Agricultural Symbiosis."  Nature Communications 7:12233, July 20.

Purugganan, Michael D., and Dorian Q. Fuller. 2009. "The Nature of Selection During Plant Domestication." Nature 457: 843-48.

Schultz, Ted. R., and Sean G. Brady. 2008. "Major Evolutionary Transitions in Ant Agriculture." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (14): 5435-5440.

Sheldon, Robert Charles. 2017. "Inventing Water Lilies: Latour-Marliac and the Social Dynamics of Market Creation." Entreprises et Histoire. Number 88: 147-65.