blog.bioethics.net

Of biology and society

A few recent items that examine the intersection of the two:

3 Quarks Daily: Is Depression a Medical Condition?
Despite the title, philosopher Justin Smith (himself a sufferer of depression) doesn't deny the biological basis of depression, but he wonders if there's more to it:

Whether we are going to speak about a tortured soul or about a defective brain seems to depend mostly on the rhetorical purpose at hand. Students hoping to be excused from some responsibility or other have learned to talk the medical talk very skillfully: how can a mere Ph.D. in philosophy, they seem to be saying to me, possibly argue with a medical note from a real doctor? We're talking about an illness here, not some fleeting mood. Doctors take on the social role of magicians, able to transfigure any procrastinating or hard-partying adolescent into a special kind of creature --a depressive, a manic-depressive, an obsessive compulsive, a sufferer from attention deficit disorder-- usually with nothing more than the most perfunctory speech act. I am not saying these categories do not exist (at least as far as the first three are concerned). Indeed, I have claimed some of them for myself. But I doubt that their reduction to medical conditions like any other is what best helps us to understand them, or to live with them.

In the past several decades we have witnessed the encroachment of medical talk into nearly all domains of social life. The refusal of some drivers to wear seatbelts is spoken of as a 'public health problem'. Of course, a smashed skull is truly a medical condition, but must that mean that every course of action that could lead to its smashing is also medical? Similarly, is the undeniable existence of a chemical substratum to our conscious experience sufficient reason to conceptualize unpleasant or burdensome mental states as medical?

Salon: Cupid's science
Rebecca Traister interviews Helen Fisher, an anthropologist whose ideas are behind the match-making site Chemistry.com. Evolution, hormones, scent and finger length all come up in the conversation.

A Farewell to Alms
Gregory Clark, an economic historian at UC-Davis, argues in this recently published book that many of the attributes that lead to success in the modern world -- non-violence, literacy, work ethic -- were spread through Europe and East Asia through natural selection. As NYT reported, people are calling the book "a real challenge." Marginal Revolution is running a book forum about Clark's work.

-Greg Dahlmann