brought to England and David Livingstone was buried among the other great in Westminster Abbey, Apr. 18, 1874. Livingstone's life and death have been analysed over the last 100 years. As a missionary it seems that his influence was not great and he was early at odds with his sponsor, the London Missionary Society. At his great speech in the Senate House of Cambridge University Dec. 4, 1857, which led to the formation of the Universities Mission to Central Africa, he said: "I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity." The order is important and it is precisely that that he did. But the openness was also to publicize the horrors of the slave trade, to which he was implacably opposed, though he was on occasion wholly dependent on the traders for his survival. However, as doctor, he was an observer of nature. He tried experiments on the effect of
the tsetse fly on animals, and he learned much about the fevers of Africa through his own sufferings. He wrote a paper "On Fever in the Zambesi" in the Lancet of Aug. 24 1861. There are abundant references to his own medicaton; his mixture of quinine and a purgative (the "Livingstone pill") became famous. The mixture consisted of calomel, jalap, quinine, resin and rhubarb, and it probably was largely responsible for his survival on his travels, though he (and Stanley) sometimes overdid the dose. As for himself, he was an individualist, convinced that what he did everyone else should be able to do; and what he thought ought to be instinctively accepted by others as, at least, good sense. It is said he was vindictive and sometimes condemned on little, or even the wrong, evidence. He was intolerant of other peoples' authority and, if kindly intentioned toward the Africans, he was not so pleasant to fellow-Euro-
peans. He was dour and a fighting man, a very sword of the God of Bethel by whose hand he was led. It has been said that "he was a bad man to cross and a worse one to get on with: and as a hero he was easiest at long range... He has been gone now for over a century, but his name lives on. His medicine case and his peaked and goldbraided cap are still in the offices of the Royal Geographical Society in London. His epitaph in Westminster says "Missionary, Traveller, Philanthropist". We remember him also as Doctor Livingstone. Bibliography CAMPBELL RJ: Livingstone, London, penn, 1929 GELFAND M: Livingsione, the Doctor, Oxford, Blackwell, 1957 SEAVER G: David Livingsione, His Life end Letters, London, Lutterworth Pr, 1957 Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 1960 reprint SEVERIN T: The African Adventure, New York, Dutton, 1973 HUXLEY E: Livingstone and his African Journeys, New York, Sat Review Pr, 1974
Where do we go from here? HARRY E. EMSON, FRCP[C]
There is a good argument to be made for Homo sapiens as a failed evolutionary experiment. He has existed on earth for but an eye-blink of geological time, but already has come close to wrecking the planet for himself and for many other species; indeed, when one regards the exponential curves of his various activities - breeding, consumption of nonrenewable resources, pollution it is hard to see how such catastrophe may be avoided. It is fascinating, particularly for members of the species involved, to speculate on when, how and where the crisis will come, the form it will take and the mechanisms by which we shall severally or collectively achieve the bloody office of our timeless end. The end itself appears all but inevitable. Man has achieved this unique and unenviable position in the biological hierarchy by a variety of escapes; each of these, in its short-term evolutionary advantage, carries the seed of its own destruction. The prime distinguishing feature of man as a species is that he is a manipulator; he does not accept his environment; he alters it, radically and permanently. The difference between a beaver dam and a strip mine is a qualitative, not merely a quantitative one. The analogy with rape - the rape of the fair country - is not a bad one: Reprint requests to: Dr. H.E. Emson, Department of pathology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7N OWO
the dynamic equilibrium with the environment effortlessly and unconsciously achieved in other species by sweet seduction, so that neither partner is overcome, is by man achieved by force, fraud or fear, consent never having been sought. To say that the planet has finite resources is a tedious truism, but we persist in the manifested belief that human ingenuity can extract more and more from less and less, because so far it is comfortable for us to persist in our delusions. We reward our rapists much more highly than we do our policemen. Target of his own aggression Man the manipulator - Homo the meddler - has escaped from one set of controls. His major means of doing this has been tools, and there is a good argument for maintaining that the first tool was the first weapon. Man is amongst the most aggressive of animal species, and his aggression is intra- as well as extra-specifically directed: indeed in modern society his own species is the prime target. He does not ritualize his aggressiveness very successfully, as other species do: despite the football and hockey leagues, involvement as a passive spectator proves not enough, and explosive outbursts of intraspecific violence are still one of the hallmarks of the human species. We have escaped from the ritual chest-pounding of the gorilla, the
1440 CMA JOURNAL/DECEMBER 17, 1977/VOL. 117
stylized dominant! submissive postures of the baboon. Not for nothing was the pocket pistol termed the "equalizer"; when aggression's arm becomes so long, all men are truly equal and their escape becomes their downfall. But the most patent escape is that from breeding control: Homo sapiens has lost the restraints that govern the reproduction of most major species and has achieved the potentiality of the boom and bust cycle of the lemming. Busily engaged in screwing himself off the fair face of the planet, his only restraint appears to be acquired affluence, but there are many population groups in which it seems impossible that this control will become effective; the exponential rise in population growth is too well established and will always outstrip, unless means are found to stop it, the lower curve of effectively exploited resources. Malthus, after all, seems to have been right. The processes appear inexorable and the end inevitable. Life does truly, in the words of the old hymn, present a dismal picture. The problem is that of escape from restraints: a determinedly aggressive, intensely manipulative, obsessively sexy animal has lost the curbs that unconsciously bind and control other species. Without such curbs, this species appears doomed, and much of the world with it. Where, apart from down the slippery slope to perdition, jostling and starving in an icy world, do we go?
The evolution of man from the originating species (and this is to presume nothing as to where, when, and how it happened) seems to have been primarily a behavioural step. Presumably it rested upon some anatomical change, but we know so little of the linkages between anatomy, physiology and behaviour in the central nervous system that this can only be a presumption. Neither microscopic changes in the brain nor behavioural alterations leave fossil evidence, at least not directly, and it is only by their manifestations that they are known. But this fundamental, unique leap of escape from control is an evolutionary phenomenon that does not seem to have occurred in any other species. If one were to adopt a classification based on behaviour, it would be easy to place Homo sapiens in the zoological hierarchy on behavioural characteristics alone - much easier than for other animals, for while their behaviour shows limited variation on a theme, his is unique. Accepting this evolutionary stride as a behavioural one, it seems legitimate to postulate that the next one, if it occurs, will also be behavioural and *that its anatomic basis will be a neural change not definable with our present methods. As Homo has already shown the capacity for such an evolutionary step, it is reasonable to assume that the next step also may be his. Must such a step await the random chance of mutation or could it be directed? Lacking the sustained poetry of prophet Jeremiah, the scientist, opti-
mistic to the last, looks around for solutions. Can man by taking thought add a cubit to his stature? Is it possible for a species voluntarily to assume restraints it has joyously cast off? Can an essentially exploitative creature assume a volitional balance with its fellows and its environment? There is no precedent that we know for this, but it seems that it is our only hope or the only sensible one, setting aside the renaissance of Homo sapiens from a few seedling societies remaining after an inevitable mighty crash. And indeed, if this were to happen, what hope that he might have learned something from the experience? Indecent topic All respectable biologists have long since set aside the possibility of volitionally directed evolution as an indecent topic tolerable only in sci-fi disguise, but as we near our extremis it seems worth deeper consideration. The desired end should not be in dispute: it is that man should voluntarily reassume those restraints discarded by evolution. His prime concern must be the conservation of finite resources and, short of the fundamental irreversibility of entropy, his attitude that of an optimistic conservationist, that nothing may be used more than it can be restored. The ultimate sin should be that matter becomes nonrecyclable. To do this he has to curb, or to redirect his passionate zeal for manipulation, his random aggression, his exuberant fertility. If he does not he will, as a
species, die - kicking and screaming, as no doubt the dinosaurs, so long the dim masters of the world, did in their turn. Unlike them he will likely bring the whole edifice down with him. The methods of this piece of arrant science fiction are of course undeveloped and may be permanently out of our reach. If so we deserve to go down with the dinosaurs. But we know already little bits of the puzzle - we are quite good at controlling fertility, but very bad at motivating most of the world's peoples to do so. We are devoting some of our ingenuity to the tapping of renewable resources of energy, but it is a miniscule fragment compared to that hell-bent on further environmental rape. We are starting to toy with our own genes, but it is a little much to hope that we can neatly whittle down a locus for aggression and leave the rest of the organism s capacities intact. What is tragic is that we are not even agreed on the problem, still less on the answer, and not at all on a directed search for methods to achieve it. But I submit that this is the ultimate necessity, the ultimate possibility: that a species cognizant of its impending downfall, very unspecialized physically, uniquely resourceful, can volitionally tailor its own mechanisms of survival. If it can and does, the characteristics acquired must be inherited, either genetically, or in the form of behavioural patterns imprinted in some other way, and the species will not be Homo sapiens: it will need and deserve a better name.E
In how many cycles does one man live? A man's life pattern can show on the surface of a pond. Dropped pebbles or jelly beans make circles, Changed by skipping flat stones; Tangling, criss-crossing, entwining, wreathing, knotting, networking. Altered by cast-offs from overhanging boughs, A passing breeze or stronger shifts everything. Creatures from below shatter the changing texture, To see the streaking befouling airplanes. Enough of this fanciful imagery. Man began with first life and before. He is all that has come since. He is made of many parts; Fused, attached, intertwined, coupled and joined together. A complex, tangled mesh-work is he. Man and all other things are connected to each other. Earth spins, night comes and goes. Seasons change, plants grow and die. The tide ebbs and flows. Man's parts are of the same scheme. They, too are in constant motion and change.
It is known, man's heart-beat is this, his breathing that; Differing from day to night. As does his body heat. Wise men behind their abecedabrian, numerical curtain Have examined some of man's inner parts; Labelled, weight necessarily often noted, Since some parts change from sunrise to moonrise And back again, they say. His blood-sweet by day is not that of the night. When he grows, this too differs with darkness and with light. Other life forces change with sunrise, with sunset. Man's life is with countless rhythms he does not know. He does know some; he made them. One day's work follows another. The end of April has gone and will return. He enjoys the monthly meetings of his club. When did he last change the oil in his car? Soon he will get his hair cut. This month he will try to pay the paper-boy on time. His next migraine is almost due. HARaY BAKER, MD
CMA JOURNAL/DECEMBER 17, 1977/VOL. 117 1441
the tsetse fly on animals, and he learned much about the fevers of Africa through his own sufferings. He wrote a paper "On Fever in the Zambesi" in the Lancet of Aug. 24 1861. There are abundant references to his own medicaton; his mixture of quinine and a purgative (the "Livingstone pill") became famous. The mixture consisted of calomel, jalap, quinine, resin and rhubarb, and it probably was largely responsible for his survival on his travels, though he (and Stanley) sometimes overdid the dose. As for himself, he was an individualist, convinced that what he did everyone else should be able to do; and what he thought ought to be instinctively accepted by others as, at least, good sense. It is said he was vindictive and sometimes condemned on little, or even the wrong, evidence. He was intolerant of other peoples' authority and, if kindly intentioned toward the Africans, he was not so pleasant to fellow-Euro-
peans. He was dour and a fighting man, a very sword of the God of Bethel by whose hand he was led. It has been said that "he was a bad man to cross and a worse one to get on with: and as a hero he was easiest at long range... He has been gone now for over a century, but his name lives on. His medicine case and his peaked and goldbraided cap are still in the offices of the Royal Geographical Society in London. His epitaph in Westminster says "Missionary, Traveller, Philanthropist". We remember him also as Doctor Livingstone. Bibliography CAMPBELL RJ: Livingstone, London, penn, 1929 GELFAND M: Livingsione, the Doctor, Oxford, Blackwell, 1957 SEAVER G: David Livingsione, His Life end Letters, London, Lutterworth Pr, 1957 Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 1960 reprint SEVERIN T: The African Adventure, New York, Dutton, 1973 HUXLEY E: Livingstone and his African Journeys, New York, Sat Review Pr, 1974
Where do we go from here? HARRY E. EMSON, FRCP[C]
There is a good argument to be made for Homo sapiens as a failed evolutionary experiment. He has existed on earth for but an eye-blink of geological time, but already has come close to wrecking the planet for himself and for many other species; indeed, when one regards the exponential curves of his various activities - breeding, consumption of nonrenewable resources, pollution it is hard to see how such catastrophe may be avoided. It is fascinating, particularly for members of the species involved, to speculate on when, how and where the crisis will come, the form it will take and the mechanisms by which we shall severally or collectively achieve the bloody office of our timeless end. The end itself appears all but inevitable. Man has achieved this unique and unenviable position in the biological hierarchy by a variety of escapes; each of these, in its short-term evolutionary advantage, carries the seed of its own destruction. The prime distinguishing feature of man as a species is that he is a manipulator; he does not accept his environment; he alters it, radically and permanently. The difference between a beaver dam and a strip mine is a qualitative, not merely a quantitative one. The analogy with rape - the rape of the fair country - is not a bad one: Reprint requests to: Dr. H.E. Emson, Department of pathology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7N OWO
the dynamic equilibrium with the environment effortlessly and unconsciously achieved in other species by sweet seduction, so that neither partner is overcome, is by man achieved by force, fraud or fear, consent never having been sought. To say that the planet has finite resources is a tedious truism, but we persist in the manifested belief that human ingenuity can extract more and more from less and less, because so far it is comfortable for us to persist in our delusions. We reward our rapists much more highly than we do our policemen. Target of his own aggression Man the manipulator - Homo the meddler - has escaped from one set of controls. His major means of doing this has been tools, and there is a good argument for maintaining that the first tool was the first weapon. Man is amongst the most aggressive of animal species, and his aggression is intra- as well as extra-specifically directed: indeed in modern society his own species is the prime target. He does not ritualize his aggressiveness very successfully, as other species do: despite the football and hockey leagues, involvement as a passive spectator proves not enough, and explosive outbursts of intraspecific violence are still one of the hallmarks of the human species. We have escaped from the ritual chest-pounding of the gorilla, the
1440 CMA JOURNAL/DECEMBER 17, 1977/VOL. 117
stylized dominant! submissive postures of the baboon. Not for nothing was the pocket pistol termed the "equalizer"; when aggression's arm becomes so long, all men are truly equal and their escape becomes their downfall. But the most patent escape is that from breeding control: Homo sapiens has lost the restraints that govern the reproduction of most major species and has achieved the potentiality of the boom and bust cycle of the lemming. Busily engaged in screwing himself off the fair face of the planet, his only restraint appears to be acquired affluence, but there are many population groups in which it seems impossible that this control will become effective; the exponential rise in population growth is too well established and will always outstrip, unless means are found to stop it, the lower curve of effectively exploited resources. Malthus, after all, seems to have been right. The processes appear inexorable and the end inevitable. Life does truly, in the words of the old hymn, present a dismal picture. The problem is that of escape from restraints: a determinedly aggressive, intensely manipulative, obsessively sexy animal has lost the curbs that unconsciously bind and control other species. Without such curbs, this species appears doomed, and much of the world with it. Where, apart from down the slippery slope to perdition, jostling and starving in an icy world, do we go?
The evolution of man from the originating species (and this is to presume nothing as to where, when, and how it happened) seems to have been primarily a behavioural step. Presumably it rested upon some anatomical change, but we know so little of the linkages between anatomy, physiology and behaviour in the central nervous system that this can only be a presumption. Neither microscopic changes in the brain nor behavioural alterations leave fossil evidence, at least not directly, and it is only by their manifestations that they are known. But this fundamental, unique leap of escape from control is an evolutionary phenomenon that does not seem to have occurred in any other species. If one were to adopt a classification based on behaviour, it would be easy to place Homo sapiens in the zoological hierarchy on behavioural characteristics alone - much easier than for other animals, for while their behaviour shows limited variation on a theme, his is unique. Accepting this evolutionary stride as a behavioural one, it seems legitimate to postulate that the next one, if it occurs, will also be behavioural and *that its anatomic basis will be a neural change not definable with our present methods. As Homo has already shown the capacity for such an evolutionary step, it is reasonable to assume that the next step also may be his. Must such a step await the random chance of mutation or could it be directed? Lacking the sustained poetry of prophet Jeremiah, the scientist, opti-
mistic to the last, looks around for solutions. Can man by taking thought add a cubit to his stature? Is it possible for a species voluntarily to assume restraints it has joyously cast off? Can an essentially exploitative creature assume a volitional balance with its fellows and its environment? There is no precedent that we know for this, but it seems that it is our only hope or the only sensible one, setting aside the renaissance of Homo sapiens from a few seedling societies remaining after an inevitable mighty crash. And indeed, if this were to happen, what hope that he might have learned something from the experience? Indecent topic All respectable biologists have long since set aside the possibility of volitionally directed evolution as an indecent topic tolerable only in sci-fi disguise, but as we near our extremis it seems worth deeper consideration. The desired end should not be in dispute: it is that man should voluntarily reassume those restraints discarded by evolution. His prime concern must be the conservation of finite resources and, short of the fundamental irreversibility of entropy, his attitude that of an optimistic conservationist, that nothing may be used more than it can be restored. The ultimate sin should be that matter becomes nonrecyclable. To do this he has to curb, or to redirect his passionate zeal for manipulation, his random aggression, his exuberant fertility. If he does not he will, as a
species, die - kicking and screaming, as no doubt the dinosaurs, so long the dim masters of the world, did in their turn. Unlike them he will likely bring the whole edifice down with him. The methods of this piece of arrant science fiction are of course undeveloped and may be permanently out of our reach. If so we deserve to go down with the dinosaurs. But we know already little bits of the puzzle - we are quite good at controlling fertility, but very bad at motivating most of the world's peoples to do so. We are devoting some of our ingenuity to the tapping of renewable resources of energy, but it is a miniscule fragment compared to that hell-bent on further environmental rape. We are starting to toy with our own genes, but it is a little much to hope that we can neatly whittle down a locus for aggression and leave the rest of the organism s capacities intact. What is tragic is that we are not even agreed on the problem, still less on the answer, and not at all on a directed search for methods to achieve it. But I submit that this is the ultimate necessity, the ultimate possibility: that a species cognizant of its impending downfall, very unspecialized physically, uniquely resourceful, can volitionally tailor its own mechanisms of survival. If it can and does, the characteristics acquired must be inherited, either genetically, or in the form of behavioural patterns imprinted in some other way, and the species will not be Homo sapiens: it will need and deserve a better name.E
In how many cycles does one man live? A man's life pattern can show on the surface of a pond. Dropped pebbles or jelly beans make circles, Changed by skipping flat stones; Tangling, criss-crossing, entwining, wreathing, knotting, networking. Altered by cast-offs from overhanging boughs, A passing breeze or stronger shifts everything. Creatures from below shatter the changing texture, To see the streaking befouling airplanes. Enough of this fanciful imagery. Man began with first life and before. He is all that has come since. He is made of many parts; Fused, attached, intertwined, coupled and joined together. A complex, tangled mesh-work is he. Man and all other things are connected to each other. Earth spins, night comes and goes. Seasons change, plants grow and die. The tide ebbs and flows. Man's parts are of the same scheme. They, too are in constant motion and change.
It is known, man's heart-beat is this, his breathing that; Differing from day to night. As does his body heat. Wise men behind their abecedabrian, numerical curtain Have examined some of man's inner parts; Labelled, weight necessarily often noted, Since some parts change from sunrise to moonrise And back again, they say. His blood-sweet by day is not that of the night. When he grows, this too differs with darkness and with light. Other life forces change with sunrise, with sunset. Man's life is with countless rhythms he does not know. He does know some; he made them. One day's work follows another. The end of April has gone and will return. He enjoys the monthly meetings of his club. When did he last change the oil in his car? Soon he will get his hair cut. This month he will try to pay the paper-boy on time. His next migraine is almost due. HARaY BAKER, MD
CMA JOURNAL/DECEMBER 17, 1977/VOL. 117 1441
