THE MODERN EINSTEIN?

Keith Hudson [Editorial]

There being a lull in many important strategic circumstances of the world (American policy in Iraq and Middle East, World Trade talks, European Union Budget, China poised to overtake the world in production of Informattion Technology goods) I want to write about someone who might be regarded as the modern Einstein. But if he is not considered so in the coming years, then there will be other candidates because his field is fast attracting the most brilliant minds in modern science.

I write of Bruce Lahn, a Chinese evolutionary biologist who leads large research teams at both Chicago University in America and Sun Yat Sen University in China. At Chicago, his research team is discovering and putting a date to important mutations in human brain development; at Sun Yat Sen, his research is devoted to stem cells.

The latter will probably have more economic effects in the fairly immediate future (as people wish to have their body parts replenished) but the former is going to have even more important effects in future social and political thought and governance.

The important brain mutations of recent date (evolutionarily speaking!) are those to Microcephalin and ASPM genes and occurred approximately 50,000 years ago and 6,000 years ago respectively. They must have had strong effects because both spread rapidly throughout most of the world's populations. The first occurred during the Upper Palaeolithic era when there was an explosion of imaginative flint tool production which quickly led on to many other innovations and the fast growth of early Neolithic civilisations (for example, the building of Stonehenge and the like elsewhere). The second occurred almost simultaneously with the rise of the primary civilisations of city-dwelling man at around 3,500BP -- the Sumerian in present-day Iraq, the Harappan in northern India and the Han in northern China. All these built cities of great sophistication, began scientific enquiry and also forged the first great trade routes between themselves.

The notion of egalitarianism has already failed dramatically in the Soviet Union and is now bankrupting Western Europe. The jury is still out in the case of the half-and-half egalitarianism of America and Japan. The facts of evolution are now impinging on the very species which until recently was considered to have a unique place in the planet's lifeforms and thought to be exempt from evolution. Bruce Lahn and many others of our best minds are now showing that our present dysgenic ideologies and practices are failing and genes are being shown to be predominant in the development of our cultural creations, both in the arts and the sciences.