 We know that when there are announcements that must be given, and I have that as my fate again. I remind the physicians who are here and wish continuing medical education credits to register at the table near the entrance. I had better repeat the announcement about the Minnesota car, numbered MNA 166, a Dotson 210 whose lights are on. You may want to repair that lest the battery be dead. Next year's conference is an interesting one as well and follows I think very relevantly on the topic today since the biological area is making greater and greater use of the competencies of the computer. The topic of next year's conference will be the nature of learning, discussing the implications of artificial intelligence. The speakers include Herbert Simon, Gerald Edelman, Daniel Danette, Roger Schump, I think it is. Brenda Noner and A.R. Peacock. I have a request for those of you who leave the auditorium at the close of the lecture. I request this from people who have made it to me. If you leave, leave quietly the noise in the back from even subdued conversation interferes somewhat with hearing. There's a little bit of a bounce up here. I hear each lecture twice. There's not much we can do to correct those things. I applaud Dennis and his crew for doing the best they can. This is not just a conference though. It's a festival. There's a festive air. We get good weather, we get fine music, we get art, we get poetry, we get parables, we get paradigms. It's all very lovely. We don't regard the Nobel conference just as a strictly academic affair in the narrow sense, but as a broadly based celebration of the life of the mind, which is not just rational. I hope you enjoy it as such, and we will continue with the program now when my colleague Barbara Simpson, who teaches in the psychology department and counsels in the counseling center, will introduce our next speaker, Willard Galen. Barbara? Thank you, Bob. Good morning. Willard Galen is clinical professor of psychiatry at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is training supervisor and psychoanalyst at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center. And he is co-founder and president of the Hastings Center Institute of Society for Life Sciences, which he founded to concentrate professional time for consideration of the very issues posed by this symposium. Will believes that man has the capacity to make reason choice and that he will, through cooperative effort, make responsible choices. He is optimistic about what man can do, at least. And he believes that man is particularly well endowed to face the issues of what we ought to do in this biological revolution. In a book called Doing Good, one of the many that Will has put out, Will says this about man. Coming from the traditions of science and medicine, I stand for man. Homo sapiens to me represents an incredible gap in the great chain of life, a discontinuity that is not measurable in the traditional incremental changes from lowest species of animal to the highest. We are a splendid and peculiar discontinuity. Will says, Will, what can you tell us this morning about man? Will Galen. The first thing I have to tell you is that I come here now with a sense of relief. The last time I addressed an audience approximately this size was in Omaha, Nebraska, at the American Urological Association. That's urological as in urine, not neurological as in neuron. I came there and there were some 2,000 surgeons sitting there listening tentatively to a lecture on kidney stones and their proper removal. As soon as the speaker sat down, they introduced Dr. Willard Galen, who is going to talk about medical ethics, and en masse, 2,993 out of the 3,000 people left. So you already have won my gratitude by remaining silently in your seats after hearing my name announced. There is a kind of nostalgia for me returning to a college campus because it brings back memories of my own first time as an undergraduate in a college campus. Now, as neither as young nor as handsome as some of the gentlemen who have been taking us around today, but I did have a keen eye for aesthetics and observing things. One of the things I observed that seemed strange to me was a peculiar architectural anomaly on the college campus. That is that there was an incredibly tiny little fragile Victorian building, which at one time had obviously dominated an open space. And in the crush for space, this little framed structure had been almost completely surrounded by ugly jaws of a red brick building. And for all the life of me, it seemed to me as though that little fragile structure was about to be swallowed up by these huge monstrous jaws. When I inquired of my guide what they were, the little building was the Divinity School, and the large jaws were the buildings of the biology department. Now that was roughly the state of affairs when I was an undergraduate. Biology was about to destroy theology. There was no need for it. And then one of those strange flukes happened. And what happened is that the successes of biology led to a renewed interest in questions that theologians had been dealing with temporarily, but philosophers had abandoned completely. And those were the questions of traditional normative ethics. We biologists, rather than undoing the ethicists, created dozens of new jobs for them, for which I hope they are adequately grateful and thankful to us. I suspect not that having done this favor to them, they will continue to attack us as a danger to the group. Now, how did we go about doing it? Three changes, I would say, led to this discussion. Changes in the success of medicine. I always found that the lessons of my childhood were only half of supportive. My father was a diligent parent, and he taught me that a mature man must take responsibility for his failures. He never taught me that a mature person must take responsibility for his successes. And indeed, that's the problem with medicine today. We suffer from our successes. When I talk about subjects like this in New York, I usually give it an ethnic twist with an ethnic title, something like the Jewish mother title. After all we've done for you, how can you treat us this way is the title I usually use. And my answer is it's because of what we've done for you or us that we are treated this way. And there are three developments, I think, that are focused on this. The first was the whole question of the quality of life. The quality of life questions emerge with the success of medicine. We never had to answer to these questions. As Lewis Thomas pointed out in his presentation the first day, medicine up until very recent times was essentially a care and comfort profession. It was not a life-saving profession. But there were certain inbuilt protections against philosophical and theological issues in the way that we were put together so that the kind of trauma that would be likely to take all of those aspects of you that we associate with being a human being, the capacity to love, the capacity to speak, the capacity to smell, the capacity to talk. A damage sufficient to do that normally, there were some exceptions, would also take the vegetative processes along with it and you would cease to breathe and you would die. With the development of the respirator we separated, we cleaved apart those vegetative and those human functions so that we were forced to address the questions of whether that which we were keeping alive on the machine was still human or even the way you frame the question introduces your bias or whether what, when was that human being no longer alive that we were sustaining on the machine? This raised questions of quality of life as did the increasing techniques of surgery which I alluded to yesterday. At one time surgery was quite limited but with antisepsis we began to have the kind of extravagance surgery we could never have anticipated before. In the old days it was quite easy. You could decide that surgery had 100 survival days and quantity was the solution and quantity was the index of the propriety in medicine. 100 survival days for surgery, that was preferable if there were only 50 survival days for radiation. But when surgery became so extensive and this was an actual case that was presented to us at the Hastings Center where you could remove an entire face, surgeons began to question whether those 100 days were indeed as valuable as 50 days of a person who could go out into the community and to maintain his social and his business life. And so surgeons and the rest of us were forced to talk about not just the quantity, the amount of life left for us, but the quality of life that remained. And that was the introductory kind of problems into ethics that we started with. The second group came when we began to deal with drugs, electrodes, and direct intervention in the brain. There was enormous suspicion about our capacity to change behavior through such manipulative devices as invasive mechanisms. And we at the Hastings Center spent some three years trying to say what is the distinction between psychosurgery and electroimplantation and television and operant conditioning and behavior modification. It was a very strange three years. You have to understand in those days, some 12 years ago, there was the then equivalent of the Jeremy Rifkins of today, a man named Peter Bregan who was since retired from the lecture circuit because no one is anymore frightened of the concept of psychosurgery. Now, I don't know that he's retired. He may have joined Jeremy and he may now be on the genetic engineering panic circuit, but that I don't know. But in those days, there was true panic about controlling and manipulating people from planting electrodes. After the three years, I can't go into that. That's a whole other lecture. I will say that we were a little confused and unsure of how much danger there was. And most of us felt that the dangers of control were probably with low technology rather than high technology. And that term that Karen did like was one that I authored, the Frankenstein factor, and it was meant to be something somewhat different from what Karen said. It was that people generally are more frightened about high technologies attacks on their nature than they are on low technology attacks. When I finally tried to describe the distinction, the in principle between planting an electrode and implanting an idea, the only one that I was comfortable with was that it was probably easier to withdraw the electrode than the idea. And other distinctions seemed to fall by the wayside. Well, now we're not so involved with the drugs and the brain, although I do think this is an area for us to be involved with. Now it's genetic engineering that is in the forefront. And with genetic engineering, again, this Frankenstein factor does come in because we are always unhappy when we are changing our nature. And what is happening is a concern that somehow or other we are tampering with mother nature and we are going to be made to pay a price for this. Now, I will tell you in advance that what you are gonna hear from me is the good news. I bring glad tidings. I am the optimist in the crowd and I not only think that we probably will tamper with mother nature, I think mother wanted us to do that. And I will get into this. Now, this reevaluation, though, has raised questions about what is human nature? What is the nature of the species? And rather than talking about bioethics, I'm going to address myself to a concept called human dignity. Dignity means worth and value because dignity has been under attack from a number of places. We have come to a point where I have heard people say on campus, people who should know better, are spurred by the environmental movement. Now, you're gonna hear things that are gonna make you think I'm unkind to animals. I am not, I love dogs, I don't kick. But I do not see them as having any specific status or existence outside of the perceptions, the purposes, and the pleasures of Homo sapiens. I am a pure anthropocentrist. I think it is a better world with the butterflies and the sequoias, but if the people aren't here, you can take them right down the drain with the rest of us. So that when I hear young students say, what a wonderful world this would be if there were only no people on it, I tend to bristle because I think that the wonderment of the world is a product of our perceptions and our purposes. Now, I am therefore gonna talk about dignity. Dignity has also been under attack, the grows of academe in the last 15 years have been invaded by tigers and foxes and Lorenzes, all devouring our reputation as a species. And I am here to tell you how good we are. Now, the literature on human dignity is a very small one, surprisingly, and a relatively modern one. The ancients had no problems with it. They had no doubt at all that we were special and we were something wonderful. And the ancient Jews unencumbered by Hellenic concepts of hubris or Christian concepts of humility saw us as really being at the top of everything. And I quote a familiar quote from what seems to be the favorite source of this conference of the Bible. And in Genesis it reads as follows, and God created man in his own image and the image of God created he them and God blessed them. And God said unto them, be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every other living thing that creepeth upon the earth. Now you'll notice that that God didn't talk about our living harmoniously with the nematodes or the viruses of the earth. He commanded that we subdue it. And in that biblical passage it is not asked of us that we be one among creatures, but that we be supreme among creatures, halfway between man, between animal and God. And that was the commandment that we were given and I follow that commandment with fervor. Now we were not alone. The Greeks did have a sense of humility and hubris and they were concerned about it but still they saw the special place of God and a little quotation from Antigone, by Sophocles, the statement, the world is full of wonderful things but none more so than man. This prodigy who sails before the storm wins cutting a path across the sea's grave face beneath the towering menace of the waves. So in the Greek tradition too, the other strong tradition which shaped our culture, there is a very central place for our species. I have so many of these quotations, I have to get them out of the way so that I don't get in the way. Now for a amazingly long time, the concept of human dignity was built on that quotation from Genesis. We were created in God's image and that was the special role we had. There need be no question about it so that our dignity, our special worth, was in that kinship and in our creation and that dominated a thinking up through the Middle Ages. It was a very special kind of thinking because in the early medieval tradition, the image of God was very much dominated by an Augustinian dualism, that there was a kind of separation of mind and body and it was only in the soul that we were in God's image. It was with the early Renaissance that we first began to have the concept that there is something very special about our nature and our quality that makes us in God's image, not just in the affinity of souls but something in the very nature of us. And in two quotations, which I'm particularly fond of, you get the sense which anticipates much of what I'm going to say about what some of the special qualities of being a human being are that shape us and that make us a special creature. One of them I could not find the exact citation to come here but it's a quotation from the Talmud which raises the question, if God hadn't tended man to be circumcised, why wouldn't he have created in that way in the first place? And these medieval scholars or early Renaissance scholars answered that God created man alone among creatures, incomplete with the capacity and the privilege of sharing with his creator in his own design. And that is a very touching and very sophisticated expression of what I think is very special about human nature, our incompleteness. It was also said in somewhat more eloquent, less specific than the legalistic language of the Talmud by a great thinker of the Renaissance, Pico della Merandola who says in this beautiful quotation, neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function particular to thyself have I given the atom to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy judgment thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form and what functions thou thyself shall desire. The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of law prescribed by us. Thou constrained by no limits in accordance with thine own free will in whose hands we have placed thee shall ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. Now for the most part, little movement was made until a modern time. At that time then there became a somewhat subtle change in the whole concept and it became the concept that there was not just dignity in the species but dignity in each individual man and woman and member of the species but this was a gradual kind of change. The most profound change occurred in very recent times and that occurred with the writings of Kant who so dominated modern philosophy and modern thinking about ourselves that his definitions of man's worth became ultimately the exclusive definitions of man's worth and a dignity became an issue in all of our modern writings without ever being analyzed and implicitly always carrying a Kantian definition of dignity. The use of the word dignity and the proliferation of dignity in international law and international contracts is so great that I first became interested in this subject when a professor of international law, Lewis Henkin, said to me, what do you psychiatrists know about human worth and dignity? We're writing it into every law these days and I don't know anything about that term. All I know about is autonomy and started me on this process and indeed we are writing it into the law or into our reports and just to give you, I picked one example. Let's give that quote from the Belmont report and this was the report of the National Commission on the Protection of Human Subjects which Karen knows very well and it starts right out with basic ethical principles. Number one, respect for persons. Respect for persons incorporates at least two basic ethical convictions. You'll see that the two are really one. First, that individuals should be treated as autonomous agents and second, that persons with diminished autonomy are entitled to protection. So the concept of a autonomy is written in and it is equated in this report with dignity. Now, Kant's position was very, very clear. The dignity or the worth of the human being was not based on our special reasoning powers according to Kant, although he acknowledged that we were quite different from other animals in this way but was based on our freedom, our autonomy. And I will quote briefly from Kant for you. He says, man in the system of nature is a being of slight importance, although man has in his reason something more than they, other animals and Kant set his own ends, even this gives him only an extrinsic value in terms of his usefulness. But man regarded as a person, that is as the subject of morally practical reason, is exalted above any price. For as such, he is not to be valued as a mere means to the ends of others or even to his own ends, but as an end in himself. He possesses in other words a dignity, an absolute inner worth by which he exacts respect for himself from all other rational beings in the world. He can measure himself with every other being of this kind and value himself on a footing of equality with him. He then goes on to say, autonomy then is the basis of dignity of human and of every rational nature. That last one stumped me. I didn't know what other rational nature there was besides humans. Fortunately at that time, we had a Kantian scholar visiting at Hastings and one of the things you learn is that education is a kind of wholesaling you buy from the manufacturer cheaply and then you sell it to the consumer dearly. And so I asked her what that meant, that peculiar passage and she said, well Kant conceived of the idea that there might be rational life in other universes and he didn't want to exclude them from the principle of dignity that he was espousing. So Kant was indeed looking far, far ahead. Now in this sense, if we accept the Kantian sense of dignity, man's dignity actually starts again in Genesis with the fall. In other words, man did not have dignity while he was living in that garden of Eden. He had a certain kind of respect and affection from his creator but that dignity of man starts with the fall when he chose freedom and chose autonomy with all of its pain, suffering, and risk. He chose it, we're stuck with it, we have that risk but we are elevated because of it. It is interesting when I checked with biblical scholars about how that is treated that the word sin is never used in relationship to the fall. That was not considered a sin at least according to the biblical scholars that I checked with because that was part of the option design for man and that the first sin actually was mentioned, the first use of the word Adam which means sin in Hebrew in the Bible was in relationship to Kant's attack on Abel. So we did not sin in doing it, we may have disappointed God. On the other hand, how are we to know? We may have pleased him in that respect. Okay, having said all this, what's the problem? The problem started with a contemporary or with a follower of Kant, a man greatly influenced by him. The problem started in the late 19th century when psychiatry and psychology began to attack the concept of autonomy. Now psychiatry and psychology dominated, all psychology is dominated by two strong currents, one stemming from Freud which I will call dynamic psychology which sees people as in a dynamic state of tension and vowels and unconscious, I'll go into that shortly. And the other is dominated from a stream starting from Pavlov through Watson to B.F. Skinner which is a behavioristic approach. This doesn't acknowledge feelings, emotions, unconscious, it is a measurable science, it believes in studying rats and pigeons and making projections from them onto human beings and it believes that behavior is all and all that is necessary to describe human activity. These two groups have nothing in common except that they intersect at one point. If there were a chart here I draw a line going this way for dynamic psychiatry ever upwards, this way for behavioral psychology ever downwards and I would say at the intersection is a concept called determinism. The one thing that they both agree on is that man is not free, that his behavior which he sees as a voluntary choice at any time is actually a product of inbuilt experiences, prejudices and bias that will determine his behavior. So Freud and his great discoveries and I will stick to that field which I know best evolve principles which made man less than a rational animal and certainly not a totally free agent. He decided that behavior was motivated towards a future. He decided that it was causally related to the past, that what your parents did to you, what your sister did, what your teachers did, all would influence your behavior. He decided that we did not operate in an actual world but imposed a real world of our own perceptions onto that actual world so that if each of us were exposed to certain stimuli we would perceive them differently and therefore respond differently and this is why an existential thinker like William Barrett will list Freud as an existentialist and will include him in his chapter in his book The Irrational Man as along with Dostoevsky, a believer in the passions, the irrational nature of our decisions. This concept of a dynamism, of a present that is determined as a product of the past, this concept that indeed the child is father of the man in ways that were not anticipated by the poet wreaked havoc with the law and wreaked havoc with our sense of dignity. Under the influence of two giants, it's always the giants who cause us trouble, Harold Laswell and David Bazalon. Harold Laswell was a professor of jurisprudence and a brilliant man and David Bazalon was at one time the most powerful federal judge in the country short of the Supreme Court and arguably even more so because the Supreme Court justices one of nine and he was one alone. They began to expand the concept of psychic determinism into the law and we got into an absolute mess because the law demands responsibility and in medicine we do not assume responsibility. If you come into me, it's an amoral profession. I've written that to a psychiatrist, innocence is an age and guilt is an emotion and that's all we know about it. And if you can, we also operate under the sick roll. If you come into me with a smelly abscess on your hand, I don't say yet get that ugly thing out of here. How dare you do that to me? I am aware that you are non-culpable but if you are going to call every rape, every attack, every murder, if you are going to explain each of them under sociological ex-culpation or psychological ex-culpation, you are going to destroy the concept of responsibility is indeed was beginning to happen but more important, you're going to fragment the real world and the common law which depends on our having a common experience is going to be distracted by the concept of multiple realities and multiple experiences. So this was a task on our concept of the propriety of autonomy. It came to a combination with the publication of a book called Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner. Beyond Freedom and Dignity was awarded by me the first Skinner Award named in his honor. I have something I call the Skinner Quotient which is the percentage of books sold to the percentage of books read and I decided that the 750,000 copies of Beyond Freedom and Dignity that were sold, probably 7,500 at most were read. It is a difficult, alone important book and I was always amazed at how much praise it got from people who I assumed did not understand its message. Although dignity is used in the title, it is never used in the book. Dr. Skinner talks about Beyond Freedom and Dignity but he talks about autonomy and in that sense he's a true Kantian and I was curious about why he used the word dignity and how he used it. I assumed he simply used it as a synonym for autonomy and so I wrote him and asked and I got, not this answer, I got this answer. This is from a letter from Dr. Skinner. I use the word dignity rather in the French sense as meaning worth. I was concerned with the credit we give an individual for his achievements and the necessary erosion of that credit as a scientific analysis attributes more and more of a person's achievements to genetic endowment and personal history. I am very much concerned about the misuse of the term rights and the think that the right to dignity is particularly objectionable. We defend ourselves against those who would deprive us of the chance to achieve and in doing so I think defend our right to achieve. Putting it in a different way, increasing knowledge of the causes of human behavior reduces the role of a supposed free agent to whom we credit behavior. The first reaction is to reject such a science, to reserve freedom and credit for what one has done. Now what Dr. Skinner goes on to say in that letter to me is to confirm the message of his book. He is frightened by our freedom. He is afraid that that freedom is going to destroy us and he says that it is time to stop being free agents. He has the courage of his convictions, the way some of the pessimists do not and I have honored him for that. He says if freedom is going to lead us to a Holocaust, we don't want that kind of freedom, we better make sure that we breed, that we design our descendants in such a way that they are not free to choose evil and to destroy us all. His answer, which is not necessarily the answer of Dr. Offensen or Dr. LeBeck, is what's the difference anyway? All I'm asking you to give up is an illusion. There is no such thing as freedom anyway. So when I ask you to give up your freedom, you're giving up simply a myth that comforts you at certain times, but it's an illusion. Now, under that pressure, I tried to think, okay, maybe we're not free. I had a great opportunity to debate Dr. Skinner when we were both Chubb Fellows at Yale at the same time, got to know him and to honor him and respect him and he's a tough man to debate and it was partly out of the stimulation of that that I began to think, suppose I assumed that there was no autonomy, which I do not. Are there not other ways? Are there not other areas in which I can vest the special worth of the human being? And I think there are dozens and since that time I've been thinking of them and I picked five out to discuss with you today. One is conceptual thought. Two is I've changed that to the capacity for technology because technology has been getting a bum rap today and I thought I'd defend that. Capacity for technology. Three is a range of emotions. Four is the fact that we are a Lamarckian animal, which means that, I will discuss what that means and five is something that is, if not autonomy, is very close to it and that's freedom from instinctual fixation, which was what was indicated in those two renaissance or media evil quotes that I gave you early. I see I'm running short on time, so I'm gonna cut some of this short, whiz through it, maybe just give you some of my quotations. Conceptual thought is a purely human function and is a function of that extraordinary thing called the human brain. I list only four aspects of it and that is language, symbolism, anticipation and imagination but there are many ways in which you can think of conceptual thought. It is uniquely human, no other animal can do anything like it. A dog can say woof woof meaning I want something but he doesn't tell you whether he's in the mood for cheese or crackers or what and he never will be able to nor will a computer. Language is the primary example. I know I had trouble with this in recent times when everybody seemed to be training apes to do all sorts of interesting things and the headlines and the science journals and the public press were monkeys can talk. My retort to that in case some of you are thinking of passing that question, please don't tell me about it until they say something worth quoting then I'll get concerned about our uniqueness. I was very happy to see Herb, I can't remember his name now, the man, a colleague of mine who trained Noam Chomsky, the ape that presumably had a language all his own. He said he's really a dummy. He's no more than a computer who responds and don't believe that he's speaking at all and I find him a big bore. So that's from the man who created one of them but one of my favorite, all of my favorite philosophers are biologists as you'll see and one of my favorite is a man named Julian Huxley who had this to say about it. Conceptual thought could have arisen only in a multicellular animal, an animal with bilateral symmetry, head and blood system, a vertebrate is against a molestor and arthropod, a land vertebrate among vertebrates, a mammal among land vertebrates. Finally it could have arisen only in a mammalian line which was regarius which produced one young at birth instead of several and which had recently become terrestrial after a long period of arboreal life. There is only one group of animals which fulfills these conditions. Thus not merely has conceptual thought been involved, evolved only in man, it could not have been evolved except in man. Now I suspect he had his tongue in cheek there but it's a good quote anyway. Language and what we do with language is a nobling aspect of the human being and indeed Cicero based his concept of the uniqueness in man on language. And he has this little parable since everybody came up with their parables, I've gotta have mine and it goes like this. For there was a time when man wandered at large in the fields like animals and lived on wild fair and they did nothing by the guidance of reason but relied chiefly on physical strength. Although their ignorance and error blind and unreasoning passion satisfied itself by misuse of bodily strength which is a very dangerous service. At this juncture a man, a great and wise one I am sure became aware of the power latent in man. I'm skipping around, there's lots of dots in these quotations for Cicero scholars I'll tell you that. He introduced them to every useful and honorable occupation though they cried out against it at first because of its severity. And then when through reason and eloquence they had listened with greater attention he transformed them from wild savages into a kind and gentle folk. And I think the fact that Cicero introduces eloquence meaning the use of ideas and the use of languages as the distinguishing feature is not by chance. Now the next thing I have I think needs very little to say and that's the use of symbolism and symbolism allows us to do all sorts of extended things of the world of mathematics depends on symbolism and for purposes of brevity I'm gonna have to skip that discussion. Anticipation I did want to mention anticipation is an enormous power of human beings. There is a kind of development and again I'm gonna have to rush through it very briefly but for some of you who've read some of the things I've written you know that I deal with it extensively in other areas. There's a development among the species for survival. The first creatures the amoeba have no sophisticated mechanism survival. They ingest certain things and if they're non-nutrient they spit them out. If they're nutrient they swallow them and digest them and that's it. As you move up the ladder of biology you begin to find animals have a kind of tropism towards nourishing things and away from painful things. You can see the design of godness if you wish or you can simply see Darwinian anticipation. It's possible that a mutant occurred at one time that simply loved poisons and fire and hated veggies and things on which one survives but probably that mutant wouldn't have elasted very long one generation so you can see either mechanism of design but that helped along the way. Then there were the development of the primary emotions the stress emotions of fear and rage which you share with a lot of lower ugly beasts. That meant that we could be frightened. You see if you depend on pain alone you only know that you're in danger when the alligator presses his teeth into your flesh. At that point it doesn't do you terribly much good to know that you're in a bad situation but if you have the concept if you'd once develop fear or rage then you can anticipate the pain and run like hell. Now in order to anticipate the pain you have to have something called distance receptors a sense of smell touch along will not do it because that's already there. You have to have a sense of smell, hearing, vision what have you. That then allows for the kind of anticipation which allows for fear and rage responses to mobilize ourselves for the attack and you don't have to wait for the alligator. If you have imagination and anticipation you don't even have to wait for the alligator. You can know that you shouldn't go walking in the swamps at night and that's what we mean by anticipation. Now anticipation also causes a great deal of problems. You can anticipate that which is going to come. You can also anticipate that which is never going to come like cloned Hitler soldiers. In either case we do know that the price we pay for freedom and anticipation is the possibility of creating terrors for our own amusement. Now I will skip anticipation and go to imagination. An imagination I think is specifically a human quality and that allows us to be the poets and to experience as Karen was suggesting a kind of feeling that transcends pure rationality the kind of learning that comes from a lot of relationships and from poetry. And there's a wonderful quotation which I choose to think. Sometimes I twist these quotations to make them mean what I want them to mean. But this is a quotation from Prometheus. The Prometheus legend as Ovid deals with it in his metamorphosis. And the Prometheus legend is an interesting one which is always intrigued me because there's two independent legends. The crime of Prometheus according to one tradition was that he created man, that he was the creator of our species. The sin of Prometheus and another legend was that he gave fire which is usually seen as a symbol of technology to man and that was his crime. That it was too great a gift to be given to man. I think that the answer may be that technology shapes our humanhood to such a great degree that the technological animal is the human animal and there's simply two different versions of the same concept. But Ovid says, and though all, he talking about the creation that he made Prometheus, the son of Hepethus, mixed with fresh running water and molded into the form of the all controlling gods, molded us in God's image. Here again, an Old Testament thing. And though all other animals are prone and fixed their gaze upon the earth, he gave to man an uplifted face and bathed him, stand, erect, and turn his eyes to heaven. And I think that this is a poetic expression by Ovid, the poet, about the aspiring nature of our species. The capacity for technology. Dr. Thomas, in response to what he felt was an attack on science by Dr. Labax, said no, no, no, it isn't science it is the culprit, it is technology. So in defending science he dumped on technology. And he said nothing, real facts and real truth, real knowledge never harmed anybody. Well as a psychoanalyst, I have almost the opposite thing. Very few technical things, it's real knowledge that you are about to die, that you are an inadequate person in relationship to those around you, that your wife was entitled to divorce you because you're a mean, nasty person. It's the real knowledge that is often the most painful and destructive things. But on the other, to be consistent with my somewhat hyperbolic anthropocentric stand today, I would say that I'm not really much concerned about real knowledge, I don't really care about it, until it's translated into action. I don't care if Dr. Thomas found something that conceivably could have said something about cancer until some of the technologists take that real knowledge and transfer it into a drug that can be used to relieve the misery. So science is the servant of technology as far as I'm concerned, rather than technology being the kind of whore of science as it is often a thought to be. It is when those guys with their brilliant thoughts and their noble minds translate that stuff which I don't quite understand into the kind of comforts that promote decency among the poor and the rest of us that I realize the glories of science. So I'm all for technology. The third thing is the range of emotions. I'm gonna have to skip that, but I wrote a book on that called Feelings, but let me just tell you that while lower animals share with us guilt and fear, they don't share any of the nobler emotions. My wife who's sitting in this audience has argued with me for 20 years, she's convinced that when our dog does some outrageous canine feet, he's terribly guilty and he shouldn't be punished. That dog is never guilty. What she is seeing is guilty fear. He's terrified that he's gonna be caught. Guilt is an entirely different emotion. The way I distinguish it is if you're going 65 miles an hour in a 40 mile speed zone and you hear aah, the emotion you feel is guilty fear. The test of it is if that cop passes you by and arrests the guy in the Porsche in front of you and you feel relief, that's guilty fear. You no longer need to be afraid. If you feel disappointment, that's true guilt. So guilt is a uniquely human emotion which expiates for wrongdoing. It implies that we have internalized a set of noble standards by which we judge ourselves and that if we have done wrong, we punish ourselves. In one outrageous do good book, whose name I will not dignify before this audience, there's a chapter called guilt and anxiety, the useless emotions. Now anxiety is the principal emotion for individual survival and guilt is the principal emotion for group survival and by eliminating them, he eliminated two of the struts on which our foundation, by which our foundation is built. I do not worry about excessive guilt. I know it causes much pain. I am much more relieved than inadequate guilt. I am not thrilled when I find these young people who have managed to exercise all guilt and demonstrated by earning their living by knocking little old ladies over the head with lead pipes to collect $4.57 cents that's in their purse. Those are guiltless individuals and I do not think that we're better off for having them with us. The fourth point which I must mention is that we are a Lamarckian animal and that I think cuts directly to our concerns about genetic engineering. For those of you who are not biologists, there was a great debate some 50 years ago resolved, I would say, about how the mechanisms of Darwinian evolution were transmitted, the genetic nature. There were two theories. One was Mendel's theory, which happened to be brilliant and happened to be true and was almost universally accepted, although quite late because Mendel worked in his backyard with sweet peas and he was a monastic person and we didn't hear too much from him. There was another theory, Lamarckian theory, that said acquired characteristics are transmitted. That's the whole idea that the giraffe by stretching his neck for leaves gets a longer neck and so is children. No one believed that except the Russians who are prone to believe whatever they choose to believe and they suffered the sin of Lysenkoism by having a totally decan and destroyed agriculture that they have yet to recover from. The intriguing thing, however, is that in one species alone is a true that acquired characteristics are transmitted and the power of culture, the power of being able to transmit on, we do not have to learn. After all, the things that an earthworm or a bird must know are genetically fixed. So they don't have to learn that because of genetic fixation. We are not genetically fixed. How in the world do we know how to start a fire, et cetera? Do we have to relearn it each time? No, we have language, we have culture and we can transmit it. And this is expressed most beautifully by a particular hero, teacher and mentor and eventually friend of mine, Teodosius Dobzhansky, one of the great seminal thinkers, I think in biology of our time. And in his book, and if you get nothing else out of this lecture, I urge that you read Mankind Evolving by Dobzhansky. Our genes determine our ability to learn a language or languages but they do not determine just what is said. The structure of neither the vocal cords nor the brain cells could explain the difference between the speeches of Billy Graham and of Julian Huxley. Culture is not just another mechanism of adaptation. It is vastly superior to the biological mechanism which spawned it. It is more rapid and efficient. When genes are changed through mutation, the gene is transmitted solely to the specific offspring and only with generations of times enters into the species at large. Changed culture, on the other hand, may be transmitted to anybody regardless of biological parentage or borrowed ready made from other people. In producing the genetic basis of culture, biological evolution has transcended itself. It has produced the super organic. In other words, the kind of brain capable of conceptual reasoning is not only the product of a certain development but is capable of dictating a future development. The fifth point I've already discussed and that is our freedom from instinctual fixation and I would make the point that if it, we are not truly autonomous agents, that freedom from instinctual fixation is another definition as close to autonomy as is necessary to ensure our dignity. Now, having said all of this, isn't this a bit anthropocentric? Isn't this the product of a human being rather than a turtle? Yes, so what? Couldn't you turn Ovid upside down and couldn't the mice say, look, the human beings have their head up there in the air, airy, spacey things. We're down at the roots of a matter at the fundaments of truth down here on the earth. That's obviously true and I will be happy to get involved in the first debate with a mouse who writes that. But so far he hasn't and I'm safe and the reason I'm safe is expressed by another biologist who has influenced my thinking a great deal, a man named George Gaylord Simpson. The second piece of homework for you is to read the book, The Meaning of Evolution. And he says the following, even when viewed within the framework of the animal kingdom and judged by criteria of progress applicable to that kingdom as a whole and not peculiar to man, man is the highest animal. It has often been remarked that if say a fish were a student of evolution, he would laugh at such pretensions on the part of an animal that it's so clumsy in the water and that lacks such features of perfection as gills or a homo-circle coddle fin. I suspect that the fish's reaction would be instead to marvel that there are men who question the fact that man is the highest animal. It is not beside the point to add that the quote, fish end quote, that made such judgments would have to be a man. Is it necessary to insist further on the validity of the anthropocentric point of view which many scientists and philosophers affect to despise, man is the highest animal. The fact that he alone is capable of making such a judgment is in itself part of the evidence that this decision is correct. So what am I saying in conclusion? I am saying that I center my hopes on this freedom while I am not so foolish as to not share the fears of some of my other panelists. I recognize that that is a price we have always paid for it. But I also know that that is intrinsic to what makes our species worthwhile, that if we sacrifice that freedom, if we sacrifice that special inquiry, that capacity to look to the stars, to reach out for something new, we cease to be that which is worth saving. And I have very little sympathy for people like Singer who talk of the rights of animals, although I respect that human dignity would demand that we treat animals with a certain amount of worth. And I certainly do not go along with stone in the feeling that trees should have standing. If any place, I stand with William James in basing the entire moral universe on the nature of human beings. And I am in good company here. I would like to quote first before James, a quote from Whitehead, in which he talks about the fact that people talk about how beautiful the sun set. And as I have pointed out to students, the sun doesn't even set, except in the perception of man. And he says, it's trouble having new ideas that if you read long enough, they become a cribs from somebody else. Thus nature gets credit which should, this is from Whitehead. Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves, the rose for its scent, the nightingale for a song and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. I want to close with this one quotation, which seems to me to sum up my anthropocentrism and my faith in the moral, the nature of human relationships. And this is from William James. And he says, we have learned what the words good, bad, and obligation severally mean. They mean no absolute nature is independent of personal support. They are objects of feeling and desire which have no foothold or anchors in being apart from the existence of actually living minds. Wherever such minds exists with judgments of good and ill and demands upon one another, there is an ethical world in its essential features. Were all other things, gods and men and starry heavens blotted out from the universe and were there left but one rock with two loving souls upon it, that rock would have as thoroughly moral a constitution as any possible world which the eternities and immensities could harbor. It would be a tragic constitution because the rock's inhabitants would die, but while they lived there would be real good things and real bad things in the universe. There would be obligations, claims and expectations, obediances, refusals and disappointments, compunctions and longings for harmony to come again and inward peace of conscience when it was restored. There would in short be a moral life whose active energy would have no limit but the intensity of interest in each other with which the hero and the heroine might be endowed. Thank you. Yes, we'll need all of that. I have, while we make the transition, a comment and a parable. A certain man from Minnesota went to Las Vegas for a two day visit. On the first day he won the jackpot and the slot machine and he went to bed happy. On the second day he played another slot machine and won the jackpot and went to bed happy in the next day home. And his wife asked him which was the largest jackpot and he answered, you decide, oh dear. We had two jackpots anyway. The other comment is that when we make choices about titles we include oral myth. We chose manipulating and it has two possible meanings. It can be an adjective and it can be a verb. The way the title reads manipulating life assumes that there is someone manipulating something else. Our original title was manipulating man. And it assumes, I think, a little more that the human is a manipulator and that is a moral affair and not just technical. I invite the other persons on the panel to come forward and we'll continue our conversations and would you bring your questions to the ushers please? I will give you 30 seconds more of your interesting dialogues and then we'll begin the conversation up here. Comments? No, okay. Does anyone want to lead off? Do you have comments? They are not hearing me down there. Find out if any of them want to comment, will you? I'll go ahead. It's early in the day too. Ladies and gentlemen, we will begin the conversation up here first. I already have several interesting questions which we will put to the panel. Karen Labax. Yes. You have the freedom to say no. I have a comment and a question. My comment has to do with going to scripture as a resource for our thinking. One does need to be careful to do that not with preconceived notions which will be supported by the scriptural text but with a genuine openness to what the text itself has to say. And I would only point out that in Genesis at the point where the description is given of Adam which means humankind, not a man. Being created in God's own image. My understanding is that the Hebrew term used there for God is the word Elohim which is a plural word. So it is again possible that God here is imaged as both male and female and that the creation of Adam, humanity in the image of God is a reference to sexuality not to our creative abilities, our ability to change our own nature and all sorts of other things. Now my question has to do with where we locate what is distinctive to human beings or what might be considered to be our dignity or our worth. I am delighted in general will with almost everything that you have said and I don't disagree with most of it but I do wonder whether in your locating of what is distinctive to humans do you have not left out something that we might learn from the text itself taken in its entirety not only those two or so verses from Genesis that seem to serve your purposes. And if we take the text in its entirety we find both in the prophets and particularly in the New Testament a different understanding of what might constitute the nature or the dignity of humankind which has to do with how we use power and with our choice not to use power and not to let force be the determining factor for human beings. So because it seems to me that I could derive a different understanding of what is really central to humans I really want to ask you what standard should we use for making decisions about what is crucial or central to the dignity of human beings. You've drawn on biology which is understandable you've drawn on psychology which is also understandable but what are the standards for choosing where we go for our understanding of human nature? Good question. I think there are three sections to it. Let me deal with the first two. I'm more than happy to accept the androgyny of God whom I never quite visualize in any image so if you choose to have it a woman or a man or a Hydra or anything I'm not stuck on the images of God. So the quotations that use man a lot are quotations from people of a different time and I stick to the quotations rather than modifying them and I apologize if that offends some people. The second thing about the quotations from the Bible working in interdiscipline I learned never to quote from a law without checking a lawyer. I took that text from Genesis having been an adjunct professor at Union Theological Seminary to my colleagues at Union Theological Seminary and to my friends at Jewish Theological Seminary and while we all know that the Old Testament encompasses all prejudices, all biases and you can find everything I found a rather unanimity of opinion in both sources and that may be modern that that meant dominion and it meant a command to utilize the species and that it meant the specials and I also asked about the distinction between sex and reason and I got the answer that the transcendent view was that the current view of the Adam and Eve story was that it dealt with rationality, reason and autonomy. I recognize that at one time that was seen sex but we all know that sex is duller than logic so I prefer to go on in a second. The third on where I root is the most interesting part of your question. I have enough faith in the dignity and specialness of our species that I would predict from whatever bias or from whatever professional expertise you start you would find lists of things that make us different. So of course as a biologist, as someone trained in biology and someone trained in psychology I draw on biological and psychological roots. If I were a geneticist as Dubjansky was I would draw on genetic distinctions if I were a poet I would draw on that but I have enough confidence in the specialty of our species that I think from whatever standpoint theological or wherever you would start you would end up having a Hosanna for Homo sapiens. I think that we are indeed special and I think that we could all, it would be a wonderful, wonderful volume if you chose to edit it I will contribute to it to have contributions on what I had as my alternatives title of this What's So Special About Human Beings? I will tell you about the title of my speech which Karen was a little upset because it said what was the title of it, it had man in it. Oh, the man made animal. That is a quotation from Josh Letterberg who in an article and I couldn't find the citation I will have to get it from him but I remember it very distinctly where he was talking about worried about other things he said man is the only man made animal and so that is a quotation from him. Karen wants to, who's mine? Karen? Just to say that while one should always use quotes as they originally appear unless you can make it clear that you've changed the language for some specific reason that does not excuse us from trying to be more inclusive in the remainder of our language and not to assume that the term man includes all of humankind, women as well as men. Are there, isn't there a quotation in Genesis in his image he made them, male and female he made them? The Bible, Genesis passage as I remember it says male and female he created them. So there is an androgynous base right in the original. A June Goodfield. I'm in a most extraordinary situation right now because my overpowering desire can be summed up in one phrase, I want to go home. The reason why I think I want to go home is because I'm beginning to wonder, you know why we're here at this moment. We clearly have a community in Gustafus in the surrounding Minnesota of people who care very deeply about the problems which have coalesced into the question of this conference. We clearly have on this panel a group of remarkable professional people, highly ethical, who care also very deeply about the questions at issue and who would never dream, I'm sure, of doing any of the things which have from time to time brought their professional institutions into any kind of disrepute. After hearing the lecture so far, why I feel I want to go home is because I begin to feel if I ask the question where did we go wrong, the answer is well we haven't gone wrong and if I ask the question what is the problem, well the answer is there isn't any problem. So I feel reduced to the poor person who on the death bed of Gertrude Stein was saying to her, Gertrude, Gertrude what is the answer only to receive this phrase but what's the question. Now now, I could partly have wished that the organizers had chosen to have represented on this panel one good old S of the B of a scientist who has regularly and I'm sure a few of them exist who have regularly let's say defiled the ethic of his profession. I'd love to have had one of those doctors whose actions precipitated what I find was an extremely good BBC television program and a very honest one several years ago with the title, am I doing this for you doctor or are you doing this for me? And I have heard and it's wonderful that I do have I have heard such optimistic assessments of everything as to as I say generate this feeling of sort of utter futility in our presence on the platform today. And the only thing I can do at moment is to say to Will with all the optimism, yes with all the things I agree there, you know Gertrude, Gertrude is there a problem? Or Will Will is there a problem? Indeed I do think there is a problem. I thought that I was the house optimist and that was partly my role. And I do feel that there are limits to our nature and that stretching those limits. I wrote a whole book on that called Caring in which I was concerned that we were stretching the limits of our nature. I use the example of the elks of the horn that you're allowed to change yourself. I mean the horns of the elk. The certain species of dare I say it I think a Norwegian elk since that seems to be a sub theme of this conference Norwegians. A Norwegian elk that developed a bigger and bigger antlers which provided it with a step up in adaptation because they could intimidate the other elks and they could monopolize the breeding ground. So they indeed then began to develop these elaborate sets of horns until they got caught in the trees and they destroyed themselves. And in an essay, yes Irish, that's right. Same thing. In this essay I questioned about whether modern civilization might not be the horns of the elk. So I'm aware of that. When you say what is the question, I guess I'm drawing on those ghosts on the wall in which as I understood Caring when she did it she gradually eliminated all those ghosts. Then I'm not clear on the purpose of telling ghost stories when you eliminate the ghosts. I do think there are questions and I am distressed when the anxiety which is an authentic anxiety in which Dr. Skinnerfeld about an atomic holocaust is displaced into the more manageable, the more convenient and the more spook story meaning that we have the reassurance at hand the more spooky story of recombinant DNA and genetic engineering and long armed apes who are gonna do this, that and the other. I do think there are questions. I think there is an importance to this conference to dispel the concept that there is anxiety about creating demi-life that's gonna empty our garbage for us. That's the kind of spook story kids tell so that they don't have to face the real world. And I think that what's happened is we're on a high. We get a kick out of being scared about something we know isn't a real danger. I do not see genetic engineering a danger. I see atomic holocaust a danger. And I want all that energy and all that displaced stuff and all those books about the bogeyman taken away and face the real problems which are not of the high technology of the future but the rather mundane low technology of the past. You know, absolutely, you know, this is fine. Well, I absolutely agree with what you said and I thought you were going to say this. You understand why I felt I had to, you know, raise the issue that I did. And in raising this in this form, and if as I think I will try and do tonight is to take a wider view of human morality and human responsibility to this. So I hope the one thing that I'm not going to be accused of then is just downright irrelevancy. Because if you do sweep these questions, you know, for me they are ghosts on the wall too. I'm sorry, in the sense that you mean, I mean, I don't have the widely shared fears about genetic engineering. I stand very closely with you here. But on the other hand, I do have a lot of worries about the present human condition which I think pertain to this conference because I cannot believe that you can separate this one set of questions out and deal with them quite separately. I think that's true. I'm going to box and then I have a question that relates to this last comment. Maybe we will engender more disagreement than we thought we had here. The ghosts are on the wall and they are real and serious problems. Who defines what constitutes a defect and where the line should be drawn between correcting defects and improving or simply trying to change the way we are as human beings? That's not a ghost that can simply be dismissed. It is a ghost in the sense that it is not the monster and I have tried to distinguish what I consider to be the real underlying problem so for me an answer to June's question, is there a problem? Yes, there is a problem and the problem is that we are not free from the presuppositions that we bring with us as we look at these issues and from our tendency to cling to those presuppositions and to assume that we are asking the right questions and that we can use our own paradigms to get the right answers. I would only point out that an answer to my question about the sources for our knowledge about human beings, Will has responded by saying I have faith in human beings, I have confidence in. Part of the issue for me is what should we have faith in? What should we have confidence in? And for those of you who are interested in finding a non-anthropocentric view, you might take a look at James Gustafson's Magnum Opus, the culmination of a life's work in Christian ethics called Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective in which he argues precisely that human beings are not the measure of all things and that all of those wonders of nature are wonderful in themselves and in God's view whether humans exist or not and that when the cockroaches survive after all the rest of us are wiped out by the nuclear holocaust, that will mean that we are gone but it will not mean that God is gone. There are a couple of questions that need to be brought to your attention that come from the audience. The first one, Dr. Galen, why does a desire for human modesty and caution and an awareness of human capacity for evil negate a sense of law and appreciation for human creation the questioner seems to sense that you are uncomfortable with these rather opposing impulses. I'm not clear here. I didn't, against law, you mean? On one hand, human modesty and a sense of caution about our capacity for evil, however you want to make of that term and on the other hand, the sense of awe about and appreciation of human creativity that these coexist in us, are you comfortable with the coexistence? Totally. I'm always uncomfortable when there is no ambiguity and no ambivalence. I distrust clear answers. I was taught by some good teachers. I'll tell you a little anecdote, it gives me an excuse for using it as something I cut from my presentation to save time but I had a wonderful course in philosophy as a freshman. I taught by a man with an extraordinarily heavy Greek accent, a Raphael DeMoss, and so I apologize for using the accent but it's part of the charm of the story and he tells the story on himself that he never understood Americans well. He didn't understand, he used to write notes about Americans in his book and one note he wrote is that Americans like bargains, they want the most for their money because he saw things for $4.99 instead of $5 and so when a class was canceled on a Thanksgiving he rescheduled it on Sunday where upon his students hissed him and he wrote in the book, Americans like the most for their money except in education where they like less for their money and that was the way his mind worked and he described this story that at the end of a class a student came up to him and said to Professor DeMoss, you're a nice man and I don't wanna hurt your feelings, he said but I have to tell you your course has been a total failure and Professor DeMoss says, oh my goodness, please tell me why and he said, well, I attended every lecture and I did every reading and I studied it very hard and I want you to know that I know anything more now than when I came in in September and DeMoss put his head in his hand and said, my God, you're right, of course is a failure, you're supposed to know less now than when you came in. There's a cluster of questions responding reactively, I think or protractedly to the exclusive emphasis on human dignity and I'll read one or two of them so you can respond, Dr. Galen and others. One of them says, do you realize that man could not have his world as he sees it without the other animals and trees? That's an ecological perspective, I presume. If man does not care for these things or about these things, he has no worth or he would not exist. Anthropocentrism should not include such arrogance that man forgets his dependence upon the world at large. Is it not by comparison with animals and plants that man gains his sense of dignity? Must they not therefore be present and hence given their own dignity to give man dignity? I agree with all of those statements and I'm glad they were made. It's part of the rush and part of perhaps the inadequacy of an oral presentation that I did not express that adequately. It is essential to an anthropocentric position to respect all of these things. Of course I respect the beauty of nature. Of course I respect the fact that we treat with gentleness and kindness animals that we value our environment. What I tried to make was perhaps the more subtle and sophisticated point that the value of all of these things must not be minimized, but they are in a sense to serve the perceptions. I think I used three words, beginning with a P. I can't remember them now. The perceptions, the pleasures and the purposes of the human species. And I think we would be destroying ourselves when we make ourselves unkind, when we make ourselves proud and arrogant as I was accused of being, when we make ourselves un-gentle and that the way we treat things and animals is a reflection on where we are and a measurement of it and the rewards of those are part of our purposes. I guess I was addressing myself to a kind of violent self-hatred as an analyst that's the greatest danger, not pride, you know, a self-hatred that I saw in a student generation that saw human beings as the corruptors of nature and saw nature as having an existence. To Karen, I would say that Jim Gustafson and I are dear antagonists and I would say that indeed we do stand on opposite ends of this case. Not being a theistic individual is hard for me to have a theocentric base to my philosophy, although I know that most of my friends and all of my betters do have a theistic center and so I acknowledge that it may be a deficiency in me. Nonetheless, I have to build on that which I have. Christian Anthanson, please. Just a comment about the use of a word in your lecture, namely lamarckian. I mean, lamarckianism is the passing of acquired characteristics onto the next generation and I doubt very much if you mean that your person who had been trained as a child to appreciate Dostoevsky, for example, was gonna have kids that sprang out of the crib greeting Dostoevsky in the next generation wouldn't happen. No, this again, when I say I'm a lamarckian, I have to be careful. I'm surrounded by indeed all my betters in biology. I'm using a metaphor that I borrowed from Dubjansky in which he says that even though we don't do it genetically, human beings are in a peculiar way, lamarckian, that culture becomes the substitute for genes. It's just simply an elaborate metaphor that he uses. That's okay, you know, with that evasive interpretation, it's okay. Dr. Thomas. I would like to add a word in support of Dr. Galen's comments about the overarching importance of the nuclear threat. But I wanna be sure that what he intended to say was the nuclear bomb rather than nuclear power. We had the same problem worrying ourselves into fits of anxiety about nuclear power and therefore somehow diminishing the radius to all dangers. I should add also, some question is, I don't wanna attack Dr. Galen's enthusiasm about our species. I tend to share it with, I think, somewhat less than his present satisfaction with this. My view about us, I would say, was expressed in a line from one of the Gilbert and Sullivan plays where someone announces that what he feels is modified rapture, and that's about where I stand. And I have a small quarrel with him. By the way, you can always tell that when we are going to quarrel, we say, I couldn't agree with you more. Or, but, I'm not so sure it's safe to be quite as dismissive of the world of animals as having no minds at all in the sense that we possess minds. I have in my time known of three almost incapacitatedly guilt-ridden dogs, and I remember a year ago spending some time in British Columbia to Vancouver where they have an excellent zoo where contained therein is one of the very best of displays of aquatic mammals. And several whales accompanied by dolphins are swimming about in a good-sized pool. And it's my conviction that when a new young whale is added to that group, there's a certain conversation that goes on, and it's well known that they are communicating anyway. What is being said to the youngest whale is, look, there are some fairly smart people out there, and if you just swim around three times, we've got that chap trained to hold up a fish, and then if you get out of the water, you could actually get him, if he's quick enough, defeated to you. Very smart animals. May I pose another question? Okay. There is a sense of unrest in maybe more than one place in the audience about what seems to be a cultural bias, and one question has come here. I find disturbing the unquestioned or the exclusive dependence on the Judeo-Christian documents as cultural touchstones. What about the other two thirds of the world? In this time of cultural dialogue and interchange, there are other great traditions. Should they not also be given equal weight, or at least some weight, as implications for the future directions of the human race? Anyone comment on that? Maybe it's a question that we all need to ponder since we're all Western products, or most of us are. I certainly agree that the more open we are, the more educated we are, the more sophisticated our knowledge, the happier we would all be. I would like to have the knowledge of other fields that I don't have. I would like to know biology the way Dr. Grobstein does. I would like to know physics the way some of my friends who are physicists are. I do find that when I turn to other traditions, I'm uncomfortable. I had some quotations from Menchus, whom I attacked vigorously, and from Confucius and Lao Tse. I'm uncomfortable with them because I am such an amateur in those traditions. I have a feeling I'm exploiting it. So what can I say? I can say this. When I speak, I do not speak with the sensitivity of a, I mean, I try to transcend my time by going, I don't see the Judeo-Christian tradition. I've always found that a very silly statement. I feel that there is more conflict between Judaic views of man and Christian views of man than in any other two cultures I know of. One being communitarian, the other being individualistic, one emphasizing justice and law, the other emphasizing love and salvation. I mean, I find all kinds of differences. I do think there's a problem. I don't know how to handle it. When I come, I speak from my tradition, although I'm open-ended. I guess I say to you, it's all your fault, Dr. S. Bjornsson. You invited a Middle-Western, white, Jewish psychiatrist of a certain age, and that's what you got. And I'll accept the condemnation, but it will not allow the guilt to immobilize me. There are a couple of questions. One came in early and one later that I think are interesting because I have often wondered whether we humans are the last word in the creation. The first question was a brief one. What do we fear being a second best to another biological being? And the other one was, look at conventional theology. And I might add, other realms of thought have been upset by past advances in understanding the world is round and not flat, et cetera. What if we become aware of the existence of forms of life superior to the humans in outer space? Or what if we even create our own successors? I might add. Is there a fear among us of something better than we are? Or are we the last word ever? Dr. Thomas. There's a hope? Yes. The hope that when we meet the unisex being, I'd better be very careful. We don't wait for an introduction, Lou. This question was asked at another conference just before and it's something different way. He said, someone said supposing, although there I share the hope, I would be very exciting. I also hope that they're kind to these superior creatures. But someone said at a conference asked me a question, well supposing we made a robot and the robot were capable of thinking and creating and talking and loving and were everywhere like a human being. And what would you think about that? Wouldn't that be just as good as we are? And I thought for a moment, I said, well wait a second, if the robot were indeed capable of all those things I listed here before, imaginative, creative, pro-edit and to use the biological test capable of recreating its own kind, which is the definition of the species, I'd invite him to dinner. So I felt that. I would welcome into the family of the human species such a robot. Thank you. We should bring this session to a close. May I say that we are overwhelmed up here with questions. This afternoon at 3.30 we'll try to call out some that seem to be attractive to us and have a panel about them. Before you leave, just a minute please, I have a very interesting announcement. Maybe some of you already have heard this. The Nobel Peace Prize winner this year is Lek Walenza. I have one announcement. Tonight, those of you who have no banquet tickets and who may wish to hear June Goodfield may do so by convening in the three crowns room which is right off the canteen end of the food service building around 8 p.m. You are welcome to participate in that session without a dinner ticket. See you at 1.30, 1.20.