Genetic Futures And Our Search For Wisdom

This inaugural lecture considers the ethical issues that arise from developments in genetic science from the perspective of Christian theology. It offers a critical response to the views of scientists who support using genetic technology to alter human genetics, arguing that the possible control of human evolution through genetics is not a matter for science alone. Instead, it takes the view that scientific developments need to be qualified by an accompanying search for wisdom, and argues that the theology of St Thomas Aquinas offers promising insights that are relevant today.

Public theologians are already thundering like prophets at climate change and racial injustice. But the gale force winds of natural science blow through society as well. The public theologian should be on storm watch.

What should individuals and society do when genetic screening becomes widely available and with its impact on current and future generations still uncertain? How can our education systems around the world respond to these developments? Reproductive and genetic technologies (RGTs) are increasingly controversial and political. We are entering an era where we can design future humans, firstly, by genetic screening of "undesirable" traits or indeed embryos, but perhaps later by more radical genetic engineering. This has a profound effect on what we see as normal, acceptable and responsible. This book argues that these urgent and biopolitical issues should be central to how biology is taught as a subject. Debate about life itself has always been at the forefront of connected molecular, genetic and social/personal identity levels, and each of these levels requires processes of communication and debate, what Anthony Giddens called in passing life politics. In this book Pádraig Murphy opens the term up, with examples from field research in schools, student responses to educational films exploring the future of RGTs, and science studies of strategic biotechnology and the lab practices of genetic screening. Life political debate is thoroughly examined and is identified as a way of connecting mainstream education of biology with future generations. Biotechnology, Education and Life Politics will appeal to post-graduates and academics involved with science education, science communication, communication studies and the sociology of education.

GODS, GENES, CONSCIENCE delves deeply, and portrays succinctly, the nature of our millennia-old "body-soul" and "spirit-mind" paradoxes, including those of our earliest shamanic quests, and material conquests, for survival: From our innate dreams, to religious self-contradictions-corruptions-conflicts-destructions; to arts-linguistics; to socioeconomics-geopolitics; to science-technology; and to reason-sensibility-sanity-faith. Specifically, this pop-science-first-book author, Mong H Tan, PhD, fathoms links among the chaos-orders of the evolutionary interstellar fabrics of Space, Time, Energy, and Matter; or the cosmic STEM matrixes-entities in the Universe that are all around us: From the creations of Life-Genes on Earth, to the ultimate, unique, unbound capacity-capability of our Mind-Gods within, in our brain or "memophorescenicity", a new unified quantum Mind theory pursued from an empiricist electrochemical particle-wave or Yin-Yang propensities of holism-cosmology; a critical reader's Theory of Everything, Biogenesis-Meanings and all. Epistemologically-"memophorescenically", in and by all accounts, intellectual and spiritual; Dr. Tan's critical inquiries, philosophical and psychological; his timely anatomy-synthesis of the STEM origins (particularly those of our genetics-mnemonics; our fast-advancing knowledge, consciousness, freewill, and conscience regarding Gods; and our ultimate wisdom of cherishing Life on Earth) have no doubt been sharpened, enriched, and transcended by the vast, fast advances in science-technology, multiculturalism, and pluralism of the East-West, today and beyond.

The new southern studies has had an uneasy relationship with both American studies and the old southern studies. In Finding Purple America, Jon Smith, one of the founders of the new movement, locates the source of that unease in the fundamentally antimodern fantasies of both older fields. The old southern studies tends to view modernity as a threat to a mystic southern essence—a dangerous outside force taking the form of everything from a "bulldozer revolution" to a "national project of forgetting." Since the rise of the New Americanists, American studies has also imagined itself to be in a permanent crisis mode, seeking to affiliate the field and the national essence with youth countercultures that sixties leftists once imagined to be "the future." Such fantasies, Smith argues, have resulted in an old southern studies that cannot understand places like Birmingham or Atlanta (or cities at all) and an American studies that cannot understand red states. Most Americans live in neither a comforting, premodern Mayberry nor an exciting, postmodern Los Angeles but rather in what postcolonialists call "alternative modernities" and "hybrid cultures" whose relationships to past and future, to stability and change, are complex and ambivalent. Looking at how "the South" has played in global metropolitan pop culture since the nineties and at how southern popular and high culture alike have, in fact, repeatedly embraced urban modernity, Smith masterfully weaves together postcolonial theory, cultural studies, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and, surprisingly, marketing theory to open up the inconveniently in-between purple spaces and places that Americanist and southernist fantasies about "who we are"have so long sought to foreclose.

In the tradition of great seafaring adventures, The Voyage is an intricately plotted, superbly detailed, and gripping story of adventure and courage. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Caputo has written a timeless novel about the dangerous reverberating effects of long held family secrets. On a June morning in 1901, Cyrus Braithwaite orders his three sons to set sail from their Maine home aboard the family's forty-six-foot schooner and not return until September. Though confused and hurt by their father's cold-blooded actions, the three brothers soon rise to the occasion and embark on a breathtakingly perilous journey down the East Coast, headed for the Florida Keys. Almost one hundred years later, Cyrus's great-granddaughter Sybil sets out to uncover the events that transpired on the voyage. Her discoveries about the Braithwaite family and the America they lived in unfolds into a stunning tale of intrigue, murder, lies and deceit.

This highly readable study explains how complexity science provides an evolutionary model for the civil system, with a new world view that out-ranges United Nations reference scenarios to beyond 2150.