Endurance of life : the implications of genetics for human life / Macfarlane Burnet.

  • Burnet, F. M. (Frank Macfarlane), Sir, 1899-1985.
Date:
1978
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Endurance of life : the implications of genetics for human life / Macfarlane Burnet. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Introduction 3 fields that I have drawn on, but, as I shall emphasize repeatedly, the complexity of biology is such that no human being can have a comprehensive knowledge of more than one very limited area. Similarly, I know from past experience that I shall be accused of a complete lack of subtlety in handling matters of human thought and behaviour. Yet subtlety in current writing is almost wholly depen¬ dent on producing sequences of words that in any scientific sense are meaningless but which for those of sensitivity and literary back¬ ground are designed to offer an appreciation of thoughts and emotions that are clearly too complex and incommunicable to be expressed in language intelligible to a biologist in his role as scientist. Good hterary English is impossible without an imprecision that would be intolerable in good scientific writing. I have deliberately tried to write on topics that he just outside the accepted realm of science in the same way that I would undertake an article on im¬ munology for Scientific American or some equivalent medium. At the age of 78,1 have no axes left to grind, and in trying to shape aspirations for the short term or for a million years I have done so to the best of my ability in terms that would in principle allow, in due course, a scientifically vahd assessment of the outcome. I have tried to extract the relevance for human affairs of modern work on genetics, on the nature of error in biology, and on the relative importance of inheritance and environment in determining differences among people's mental characteristics and behaviour. In doing so, I am sure to have been ignorant of many things and shown lack of judgement about others, but I do not admit that those lapses have been due either to self-interest or to fear. In essence, what I am seeking is an understanding that might directly or indirectly help toward something better than the twisted and tortured history of man for the last ten thousand years.