newsroom

TODAY Friday 26 September 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Darwin and Bug Spray

While it is true that the main attractant of The New York Review of Books is its personals page (from the current issue: "Tall, Vibrant Woman, 45; favorites: jazz/opera, bicycling/yoga, wide reading; empathic, humorous; seeks complex, upright man;" "Fat, Bald Woman in her thirties with no sense of humor looking to meet the perfect man"), there are usually some excellent articles on literature, politics, and major developments in science and the history of science.

In that last category, New York Review readers have been treated to a heated feud between Stephen Jay Gould and those whom he calls "Darwinian fundamentalists." Fundamentalism here denotes an intellectual reaction against those (like Gould) who seek to explain evolutionary changes through the operation of forces other than direct adaptations to changes in the environment. Nature is not so linear, argues Gould. Sometimes a change in an organism can arise and take hold before its employment as a function of natural selection. Gould insists on a "crucial distinction" between "nonadaptive origin and possible later utility." "Reasons for origins must not be confused with alterations for later use," he writes.

He receives unexpected assistance in the Letters column from two retired professors of pharmacology at the University of Toronto. Werner Kalow and Harold Kalant introduce us to the world of "pharmacogenetics," and say that recent studies offer support for Gould's "extremely important argument that many variants are carried forward in the progeny despite conferring no survival advantage."

Specifically, they refer to insects, insecticides, and immunities.

Many insect populations, they say, contain individuals with mutations that are "more or less neutral with respect to reproductive advantage, or perhaps cause slightly reduced fitness." The mutants survive, they say, as a kind of a "biological insurance policy" for the species:

"For example, a particular pharmacogenic variation in an insect species may make certain individuals in a given insect population extremely resistant to a new insecticide. However, such variations arise long before the insecticide appears on the scene, and in many instances are somewhat maladaptive in the absence of a poison, so that the frequency of the variant gene remains low in the population. When the new chemical appears, however, the variant individuals have a much better chance of surviving, and thus enable the species as a whole to survive... Only if the chemical stress is maintained over generations does the mutant type become the most prevalent one, through the death of the previously dominant type that was not resistant to the new insecticide."

Unless I've got this wrong, the two professors are telling us that bugs are developing resistances to bug sprays even before the sprays are applied. The same holds true for bacteria and antibiotics. If so, then humanity has even less breathing space than we thought we had to stay one step ahead of the critters, and ultimately, one presumes, to develop food-growing systems that are much less dependent on pesticides for their success. Modern agriculture -- a success of production masking a failure of ecology -- may be more fragile than we knew.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

The great bulk of the world's insecticides are deployed by farmers. For recommendations on agriculture Websites -- including exhaustive treatments of current pesticides -- check out the features by Hal Hamilton and Chuck Hassebrook in our High Fives section.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

9/25: The Cooling of Los Angeles
9/24: The Boy Who Stalks California
9/23: Fire!
9/22: More Logging and Fishing
9/19: "Here, Sir, the People Rule"
9/18: Dr. Pangloss and the Land Mine Treaty
9/17: Outsourcing Pollution
9/16: In the Preservation of the Funky
9/15: The Problem With Health
9/12: The Automobile Crisis of 2020

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.