Scientific Principles, Scientific Ethics and the Dangers for Survival of Homo sapiens

Keynote address by Frank Fenner

Presented at the Manning Clark Symposium Science and Ethics: Can Homo sapiens Survive? Canberra, 17-18 May 2005

First, I must thank the organizers of this Manning Clark House Conference for associating me with it. It is an honour and a responsibility. I feel somewhat uncomfortable about the title which was suggested for my keynote address, because I haven't ever read or thought seriously about the philosophy of science and I am not an ethicist. However, when asked I could not think of another title. Barring a nuclear winter, which is a real possibility, an asteroid strike, or the eruption of a super-volcano, I do not think that the human species is likely to become extinct very soon, but I am increasingly worried about the prospects of a fulfilling life for a large proportion of humankind.

Coming to the first item in my title, scientific principles, I don't see these as very different from the principles that I expect and hope to see in all us, namely honesty and integrity. Also, I believe that, uncomfortable as it may be for the scientist who considers he has made a revolutionary discovery, such paradigm shifts must be subject to criticism and must be independently confirmed by other scientists before they can be accepted.

As far as scientific ethics are concerned, perhaps the best overview of these is provided by a recent publication by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, entitled Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals.

This discusses three components, authorship credit, peer review and conflict of interest.

Authorship credit should be based on:

1. Substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data,
2. drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual contents, and
3. final approval of the version to be published.

They suggest that acquisition of funding or general supervision of the research group, alone, does not justify authorship.

The second is peer review, defined as the critical assessment of manuscripts submitted to journals by experts who are not members of the editorial staff, and are not closely associated with the authors of the manuscript under review. There is also an obligation that reviewers must not use knowledge of the work, before its publication, to further their own interests. However, reviewer's comments should be sent to other reviewers of the same manuscript, which helps reviewers learn from the review process.

The third is conflict of interest, which may occur if an author, or author's institution, reviewer or editor has financial or personal relationships that may bias his/her actions.

To come now to the real topic of this symposium, will the unintended products of the science-technology revolution of the last two hundred years, greatly intensified during the last sixty years, lead to the extinction of the human species? Certainly some people believe this. Perhaps the most numerous, but least credible, are those Christian evangelists who look forward to the 'Second Coming'. But some quite interesting books suggesting that this may happen have been written recently. For example, Reg Morrison, in The Spirit in the Gene. Humanity's Proud Illusion and the Laws of Nature, paints a sobering but to my mind convincing argument. How did humans, in the last hundred years, multiply from some 1.7 billion to over 6 billion now and if there are not awful disasters, will reach 9 billion within the next fifty years? The answer, I fear, is that the fantastic advances in science and technology in general, and medical science in particular, reinforced by religious beliefs, are responsible for the idea that the human species is unique, not only in being different in kind from all other animals, because of its acquisition of culture, but in being excluded from Darwinian natural selection. As a person whose life work has been to advance medical science, and thus driven the population explosion and the continuing increase in life expectancy, this is not a comfortable thought. Three local authors, Stephen Boyden, with his The Biology of Civilizaton, understanding human culture as a force in nature, Duncan Brown, with his Feed or Feedback. Agriculture, Population Dynamics and the State of the Planet and Doug Cocks, in Deep Futures. Our Prospects for Survival, have made major contributions, each, in contrast to Morrison's, with a focus on Australia but valid for humans world wide.

Why has the use of the earth's resources by humans continued to increase even faster than the population explosion. It seems to me that this is because most people in the First World countries suffer from what Clive Hamilton calls 'the growth fetish'. Economic growth is the main concern of our political masters, it must go on forever, they say. Driven by the capitalist ethos, manufacturers produce more and more products, and more sophisticated products, and then spend as much in advertising them as they did for their production, so that the public that they address will be respond by thinking 'We want' more, rather than 'We need' less and less. And the growth fetish is a communicable disease. The two largest of what were the Third World countries, China and India, are now graduating as Second World countries and look forward to a future similar to that of the First World countries. Because each has a population of over one billion, their move into the global economy will produce even greater pressures on natural resources than that the people of either USA, Europe or Australia.

If we think back a little, as long ago as 1972, when the global population was a mere 3.6 billion, the world community held the Stockholm conference because of concern with environmental degradation. That marked the beginning of world wide realization that the human beings were destroying the natural environment, and there has been a tremendous increase in the understanding of the importance of preservation of the environment in recent years.

Much of the concern currently expressed about the future prospects of Homo sapiens is driven by the increasing evidence of global warming. However, this is only the latest but very worrying sign that we humans are destroying the prospects of a healthy and fulfilling life for most of the inhabitants of what used to be called 'the Third World", as well as wiping out thousands of plants and other animals in the process. I say 'the Third World' because we have the evidence from the behaviour of the current Bush government, and I think that in an emergency other First World countries would behave in a similar way, that the maintenance of the economic prosperity of their own electorate is their most important duty and they will try to ensure this isolation from the fate of the rest of the world by military force.

What are the critical global trends? In his very useful book, The Little Green Handbook. A guide to critical global trends, published earlier this year, Ron Nielsen suggest the following list

1. The population explosion
2. Diminishing land resources
3. Diminishing water resources
4. The destruction of the atmosphere
5. The approaching energy crisis
6. Social decline
7. Conflicts and increased killing power.

If we are going to do anything to deal with these problems, several of which later speakers in this Symposium will discuss in detail, we in the wealthy countries need to attack item 6, what Nielsen calls 'social decline'. This means that we, by which I mean the general public and especially the politicians, must radically change our behaviour. We must all follow René Dubos's concept, and think globally, and act locally. But this must happen all over the world. We must think on a decadal scale rather than an election-driven scale, and not just as current Government does, terms of the pressure of old people on our health systems. We must all seek a fulfilling life, rather than a life of material wealth. We must overcome the growth fetish and somehow use our current affluence to attack the poverty of the Third World countries. And we do not have much time to do this, because in so many of the items that make up the detail of Nielsen's other six global trends, we are approaching or have already exceeded the limits.

There are some encouraging developments among the NGOs. As well as such organizations as the Nature and Society Forum, Sustainable Population Australia and Australia 21, during the last week two interesting emails have appeared on my computer. The first announces a conference to be held in Sydney on 23 July, called "Downshifting Downunder", for which Clive Hamilton is the keynote speaker. The second is the Wellbeing Manifesto, which I am sure many of you will have signed. It is also primarily a product of the Australia Institute, prepared by Clive Hamilton, Richard Eckersley and Richard Dennis. All of these represent moves to convert the Australian population away from the domination of the "market knows best" philosophy to the support of a truly sustainable future.

We all hope for the best future we can imagine, one based, to use the terminology of the UN Environment Program term, on 'Sustainabilty First' principles. The alternative is what UNEP calls a 'Security First' development; others call it a Fortress World. Let me elaborate on the latter. In a Fortress World the rich and strong will rule the world, as indeed they do now, but with a TOTAL neglect of the poor. Some suggest that it may be a twenty/twenty club, consisting of the rich countries, which account for about 20% of all countries, and the rich 20% of people in the poor countries. I believe it is more likely to consist of some, but probably not all, of the 20% of rich countries. The congruence of a minority of rich and a great majority of poor is more likely to result in bitter civil wars. Fortress World will happen only if the world has not achieved sustainability, and it will be a time of global decay and therefore have untoward consequences even for those within the Fortress. For example, even there, as well as in the rest of the world, climate change will move inexorably ahead.

Omitting civil wars, which are especially common in Africa, the number of international conflicts since the end of the Second World War has risen from 93 in 1945, to 130 in 1975, and to 167 in 2003. With increasing scarcity of especially of water, there will be an increasing numbers of international conflicts, especially in the developing countries. The structure of the Fortress World can be seen now, in the global distribution of military budgets. Military strength is concentrated in a small number of rich countries or alliances, the United States, the European Union and the G-12 Group of industrialized countries. We in Australia will probably be left out of Fortress World because we are too far away and too small.

Let me conclude with an extract from Nielsen's book, a better world. "We are now facing hugely complex environmental problems which are difficult to solve. However, we are also facing complex social problems and problems of mind and culture. Without solving them our future will remain insecure. If by magic we could all be transported to a new, pristine world, would we not soon transform it into the kind of world we left behind? We live on a rich and beautiful planet. It is a miracle of nature, as small oasis of life in the vast expanse of space; the only such planet in our solar system or the near galactic neighbourhood. This is a priceless and irreplaceable jewel we should guard and protect with the utmost care."