by Stefano Vaj
[118] Actually, in spite of the claims to the contrary by a few religious traditions, no case of asexual reproduction has ever been reported with regard to our species; but if we consider cells rather than entire organisms, our bodies are essentially composed of ... “clones,” given that the cells in the body reproduce via mitosis, a process where the genome of the mother cell is duplicated into two identical copies, one for each daughter cell. From the point of view of the organism, it is instead the case that at least 95% of the higher species resort to sex, at least when it is possible for them to do so, in order to reproduce (cf. Hervé Kempf, La Révolution Biolithique. Humains artificiels et machines animées, op. cit., p. 61). However, as we have already remarked, there also exist inside the human species many natural clones, in the form of spontaneous monozygotic twins, whose existence does not seem to affect our species’ viability in any way, no more than their presence usually causes any particular disconcert inside the community they belong to. Or at least this was true until the beginnings of today’s cultural terrorism: this writer has with his own ears heard one of a pair of monozygotic twins being called “bloody clone,” as a new form of insult stemming from the infiltration into the collective unconscious of the current bizarre propaganda in favour of an alleged “right to genetic uniqueness”!
[119] Cf. Robert P. Lanza et al., “Cloning Noah’s Ark,” in Scientific American, October 2000, p. 84.
[120] There exist in fact two kinds of artificial cloning: one that reproduces the natural mechanism of one-egg twins, and which consists in tricking the embryo to scission when its cells are still at the “totipotent” stage; and one that takes advantage of the capacity of any cell, even taken from the hair of an extinct animal, to become totipotent itself when the nucleus is extracted from it and implanted in an ovule of its species or of a compatible species. This second technique is the one implied in the so-called “reproductive cloning” of human grown-ups, or in the so-called “therapeutic cloning” which, as we will see, could enable the cultivation of particular organs (or even entire anencephalic duplicates) for a given individual in order to provide him with compatible new tissues and organs as needed.
[121] The high increase in caesareans is certainly dependent also upon a medical environment, which is increasingly inclined to view pregnancy as an illness, and such interventions as the remedying surgery. The availability of this procedure for centuries has clearly enabled women to reproduce who would otherwise have had major difficulties doing so, and who presumably have passed one the genetic component of this difficulty to their female progeny.
[122] It is interesting however to note that in Plato, as in all “eugenic” concerns in European antiquity, the “quality” of the descendants is not linked like in the “progressive” vision, especially the American one, of modern eugenics to more or less objectivised criteria (for example, to physical or intellectual performances, or to a supposed Darwinian superiority) but is inseparable from the perspective of a collective, identitarian subject: “…and the god proclaims, as a fundamental principle for the rulers, that there is nothing they should guard so jealously, or of which they should be such good custodians, as of the purity of the race” (Republic, III, 415). Cf. too Hans F.K. Günther, Platon als Hüter des Lebens, op. cit.
[123] For an extensive illustration of the ancient European practices of selection of the newborn, and of matrimonial regulations, (or more generally of access to reproduction), see Jean-Jacques Mourreau, “L’Eugénisme. Survol historique,” in Nouvelle Ecole, no. 14, January-February 1971, an issue entirely dedicated to eugenics.
[124] Adriana del Prete, “Una società razzista?,” in Missione salute, no. 5, 2003.
[125] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Book I, ch. 1, aphorism 151.
[126] Ibidem, Book II, ch. 2, aphorism 228.
[127] Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. 117.
[128] Paraodoxically, even the protection of the environment has in this sense an “anti-selective” value, because clearly pollution or an in general extremely degraded quality of life selects for carriers of the capacity to tolerate better toxic substances or other adverse conditions.
[129] Harry Harris, Prenatal Diagnosis and Selective Abortion, Harvard University Press, Boston 1975. Italian version Diagnosi prenatali e aborto selettivo, Einaudi, Turin 1978.
[130] This by the way is not true for prospective eugenic techniques, which never existed in the past, that are based precisely not a selection of the genetic lineages, but on the direct manipulation of the affected genes.
[131] Something more radical would however be required than the kind of life imagined in George Miller’s films Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (USA 1981) and Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome (USA 1985), where firearms, means of transportation, etc. continue to be available, at least for the time being and for some survivors.
[132] See for instance Konrad Lorenz, Civilised Man’s Eight Deadly Sins, Harcourt, USA 1974. Oddly, another feature, which amongst higher animals seem to be associated (apart from equally underlined genetic components) with domestication, is the incidence of homosexuality and bisexuality that, as is well known, is particularly high in our species. See Lester Haines, “Aussie boffins probe lesbian cows,” The Register, September 3rd, 2004.
[133] As has been remarked, we are today able to act on populations by means of three types of measures: eugenic measures (aimed at the selection of desirable genes and the reduction of the frequency of the undesirable ones), genetic measures (aimed at the direct manipulation of the genome), and euphenic measures (aimed at influencing the development of the phenotype and the expression of the genes through the manipulation of the environment in which the organism is developing: gestation, nutrition, habits, climate, exercising, therapies, etc.). The fact that the present study focuses mainly on the first two does not mean that there is not a lot to be said also regarding the third. It is for instance interesting to observe that the only country that continues to maintain special schools for the gifted, and to research the best conditions for their education, is Israel, if one does not count some very marginal efforts to this effect in the United States.
[134] Regarding how this subject finds by now echoes even at the level of the evening press, see for example Alessandro Giuli, “Il corpo si ribella all’anima e progetta l’immortalità,” op. cit. For a discussion of the “state of the art” about the issue, cf. Yves Christen, Les années Faust ou La science face au vieillissement,” op. cit.; The Scientific Conquest of Death, op. cit.; Ray Kurzweil Fantastic Voyage. Live Long Enough To Live Forever, op. cit.; and also the site of the Life Extension Foundation at http://www.lef.org, or of the Immortality Institute at http://www.longecity.org.
[135] Mortality, in the sense of a shorter or longer “manufacturing deadline,” is not a feature that is intrinsic to life. The microorganisms that reproduce by fission are in some sense immortal. Cancer cells, thanks to their capacity to avoid telomere shortening, share this privilege with the germ cells of higher animals that change into ovules and spermatozoa. Effectively, ovules and spermatozoa do not technically have dead ancestors, and this from the beginning of life on earth: it is the other cells that are inevitably fated to disappear (see Brian Alexander, How Biotech Became the New Religion. A Raucous Tour of Cloning, Transhumanism, and the New Era of Immortality, op. cit., p. 108).
[136] It is worth remarking that until today medicine and the other changes introduced by the “second man” have significantly extended the average life expectation of the individual, but not the lifespan of our species, which instead corresponds to the maximum life duration of its members of the species. To say that the average life expectation of a cave man was thirty years, or that of a Roman fifty years, does not in fact mean that the individual used to die at that age like a cat dies at twelve or fifteen years no matter what veterinary treatments it gets, but simply that the majority died in early infancy, or was murdered, or killed by some other accident or disease before reaching old age. Oc
togenarians have always existed among humans. See in this respect Michael Fumento, Bioevolution. How Biotechnology is Changing the World, op. cit., p. 25. As Gregory Stock remarks (Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. 33): “[From then on] for significant further gains in longevity, we will have to raise the maximum life span, which means manipulating the underlying process of ageing”. This would anyhow be required if we are to avoid a “tithonusation” of humanity, which in the Western countries is already at work. Tithonus, husband of Aurora, had been given immortality by the gods, but unfortunately had not also received eternal youth. An interesting rework of this myth is present in the vampire cult movie by George Scott, The Hunger, USA 1983, starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon.
[137] Or they would incur indirect costs in the longer run related to the expansion of geriatric cures, as well as to the rising density and ageing of the population.
[138] At a convention held at the Catholic University of Milan on May 21st 2005, Daniel Callahan, the director of the Hastings Centre and regarded by many as the “father” of bioethics, remarked that in any case in the basis of current trends “in 2050 health care will make up 50-60% of the GNP of Western nations,” and insisted instead on the proposal of a “sustainable medicine,” with modest goals and with a primarily “social” connotation, to be applied in a strictly egalitarian way. He was nevertheless called a fascist because of his refusal to decide what to do about the techniques that are little by little becoming available, which naturally implies a dirigisme, which in its turn is rather incompatible with other present-day fetishes such as the “Market”. Cf. Andrea Massarenti, “La medicina non insegua l’immortalità,” in Il Sole 24Ore of 22nd February 2005, p. 10.
[139] As Gregory Stock remarks (Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. 80), the idea to restrict the scope of biogerontology only to the goal of keeping us healthy for the longest possible part of our “natural” life and of shortening the period of final decline is only admirable and sensible in appearance: “Imagine that medical science succeeded gloriously in achieving its goal of shortened morbidity… Such a death, pulling us from active life… without the ever-worsening debility that forces us to disengage from the world and confront our inevitable departure, might be far crueller than what we know today. When the time finally came to die, not only would we feel wrenched from our prime, we would leave behind a more gaping hole. Our families would not have been pushed to prepare for their coming loss, nor would they have had the consolation of knowing that we had at least escaped from pain and from a henceforth deteriorated quality of life.”
[140] A text that is entirely devoted to the most probable scenarios of extinction in the short term of the human species is Martin Rees, Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity’s Survival: Will the Human Race Survive the 21st Century? (Arrow, UK 2004) (Italian: Il secolo finale. Perché l’umanità rischia di autodistruggersi nei prossimi cento anni, Mondadori, Milan 2004.) Despite the subtitle, the book is also concerned with “catastrophic” scenarios, for which it could hardly be said that humans are directly responsible (if not, perhaps, for failing to take measures that might have have helped avoiding them: meteorites, spontaneous climate change, etc.).
[141] According to the classical definition that we all studied at school, individuals and populations belong to the same species when they are naturally able to crossbreed. Today we know that the Neanderthal, whose intelligence is commonly admitted on basis of indexes such as tools and clothes, funeral rituals and the morphologically likely existence of an advanced language, were definitely inter-fecund with us, and had even a number of chromosomes different from those of Homo sapiens. See on this subject the sources and data reported by Maurizio Blondet, L’uccellosauro ed altri animali, op. cit., p. 104; and also “Non siamo parenti dei Neanderthaliani” in Prometeo, January 2004. The Neanderthals had in addition morphological and ethological characteristics that were so different and specialised (for example they had a well-developed sense of smell, were exclusively carnivorous, etc.) that it is a long time since anyone thought of them as “precursors” of our species.
[142] The paleontological records show that there would have been five great waves of extinction, of which the second in order of magnitude, the one that 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs, has since the eighties been attributed to climatic upheavals due to a meteorite that fell to the Earth (and which yet remains uncertain, because more ancient and relatively big cold-blooded creatures, such as the crocodiles or the Komodo dragons, survived, while marine dinosaurs went completely extinct, as did those of the size of hens). Some people believe that the even more catastrophic extinction that took place in the transition between the Permian and the Triassic might be the result of a similar event; but the 250 million years that separate us from that time make it very difficult to put forward reliable hypotheses.
[143] If the vast majority of the species that ever inhabited the Earth are today extinct, equally extinct are also the majority of the germ lines that have composed our species. As is obvious, with the passage of the generations, the number of progenitors whose descendants are still alive inevitably tends to shrink, given that, at every generation, a small but always positive fraction of the existing lineages are eliminated by selection or by chance. The analysis of this phenomenon with respect to the human species, which leads one to speculate that the whole process has been going on for about 150,000 years, has had the newspapers speak of the “discovery of Eve.” Of course what really took place is not in fact the dispersion of the descendants of just two common progenitors, but on the contrary, the inevitable progressive elimination of the lines, with the passing of time, until the moment in which there remains the descendants of one female (or male); a process which continues, in such a way that the latest “ancestral couple” tends in its turn to move forward in time. Following such phenomena, the whole genetic heritage that is not present in the one surviving germ line has clearly and obviously been irremediably lost – as is lost at each generation that which is only present in the lines that go extinct.
[144] See in this respect Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology. The Doctrine of DNA, Harper Perennial, USA 1993) (Italian translation: Biologia come ideologia. La dottrina del DNA, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 1993); a truly paradoxical title, as if it were not precisely the ideology and the ancestral religion of the author that induced the “moral” requirement of this kind of conclusion.
[145] This represents the success of a very old meta-political project of repression. At the height of fascist rule, Benedetto Croce published a chapter called “Natural species and formations by history” in the book History as the Story of Liberty, in which he openly states that “the racial prejudice” is “the objective of a vigilant and continuous battle by the moral man, in order to continuously restore the idea of humanity as one” (our italics, p. 301-305 of the Italian edition La storia come pensiero e come azione; first ed: Laterza, Bari 1943. New English edition by Liberty Fund Inc. 2000). The following year at the promulgation of the Laws of Nuremberg, in 1936, he managed to reaffirm similar ideas in an article published in …Germany (!) by the Deutsche Literaturzeitung, in which he openly condemned the National Socialist interest in this theme (see Rosella Faraone, Giovanni Gentile e la “questione ebraica,” Rubbettino, Messina 2003, p. 21)
[146] The author mentions the skin colour (white, brown, sallow), the form of the skull (dolicocephalic and braciocephalic), the structure of the head- and body-hair (straight or frizzy); in reality anthropology and anthropometry have from the beginning always defined races on basis of mixed criteria and with the addition of various other parameters, such as medium height, long-limbed or short-limbed prevalence, iris pigmentation, the form of the lips, chin and forehead, etc.
[147] See Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetic Diversity and Human Equality, Basic Books Inc., USA 1973 (Italia translation: Diversità genetica e uguaglianza umana, Einaudi, Turin 1975), in particular the second chapter, “The Evolutionary Genet
ics of Race.”
[148] In matters of taxonomy of the human species based on the individuation of types, the so-called “Polish school” is of particular postwar relevance. Cf. Czekanowski, “The Theoretical Assumptions of Polish Anthropology,” in Current Anthropology, 3, 1962; and in the same issue, T. Bielicki, “Some Possibilities for Estimating Interpopulation Relationship on the Basis of Continuous Traits,” and A. Wiercinski, “The Racial Analysis of Human Populations in Relation to Their Ethnogenesis.”
[149] Equally absurd is for example the definition, by Western propagandists, as “ethnic cleansing” of practices of mass rape attributed to the Serbs during the conflicts with the Bosnian or Kosovarian peoples, practices of which the only plausible result would on the contrary be…the mixing of the Serbian ethnic group with the two other populations. If anything, such an improbable policy would objectively have been ethnic pollution from a “purist” point of view.
[150] Perhaps, as experienced by the Southern slave traders, through the massive importation of the manpower of “inferior races,” and the “lightening” contribution of their own semen, with the benefit of raising the commercial value on the home market of the products of their breeding operations. Such a context and its pertaining mentality are present in, among other, the novels by Kyle Onstott such as Mandingo, ult. ed. Fawcett 1986 (ult. Italian ed. Mondadori, Milan 1983); see too the film with the same name by Richard Fleischer, USA 1975.
[151] Julius Evola, Indirizzi per una educazione razziale, ult.ed. Edizioni di Ar, Padova 1979, p. 52 [Title means “directions for a racial education”]. Although the part he played in elaborating the doctrine of Italian fascism was relatively minor, as known, Evola was recognised by Mussolini for his importance in the formulation of the doctrine of race of the Italian regime, given the “velleity of diversification” of National Socialist Germany (moreover, as Giorgio Locchi remarks, Evola specifically adhered to one among many German racialist conceptions, that is to the one, although minoritarian, of the “‘völkisch-spiritualist’ racism.”) In this respect, see Pino Rauti, Rutilio Sermonti, Storia del fascismo, vol. V, CEN, Roma 1977, p. 320. Oddly, Giovanni Monastra tries instead to substantiate, with the obvious goal of a “rehabilitation,” a kind of fascist “persecution” of Evola’s theses in matters of racism (which in any case he cannot do unless he also criticises its most glaringly politically correct aspects), in an article with the heading Julius Evola, des théories de la race à la recherche d’une anthropologie aristocratique, surprisingly published in Nouvelle Ecole, no. 47.