ALGENY

by Jeremy with Nicanor Perlas Rifkin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1983

Rifkin (Entropy, Who Should Play God?) is distressed again--now, with what he calls the new ""cosmology"": a biotechnology of programmable gene machines. (""Algeny,"" a coinage of Joshua Lederberg's, means transforming genes--as alchemy means transforming metals.) Others have shared this concern--but reasonably, realistically. For Rifkin, mankind will begin by correcting individuals, then the race, then all of nature. For Rifkin, too, Darwinian evolution (formerly and presently) is a static, space-bound genetic determinism: you are what your genes specify at conception, to be spun out in some sort of predetermined fate. He trots out the common errors of anti-evolutionists: natural selection as tautology, lack of intermediate forms, arguments by probability, even the non-Darwinian notion that evolution means progress toward perfection and selfsufficiency. He ends up tarring Darwin with a Social Darwinist brush, saying that Darwin unconsciously voiced the upper-class Englishman's justifications of Malthusian measures. You will get the idea that Darwin has been buried by everyone from creationist Duane Gish to exponent Stephen Jay Gould (above). These arguments lead Rifkin to his concept of the new cosmology and its issue: an information-processing evolution in which ""fields"" and biological clocks weld together to create the driving force for a universal mind guiding future waves of evolution. It's yet another simplistic dichotomy, which grants mankind omnipotence and ignores what biologists have been learning about the behavior of genes all these years.

Pub Date: May 1, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION