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The fervor with which the medical research community embraces the idea of a vaccine for AIDS strikes me as being akin to the way that some people cling to religious icons. I have this mental image of scientists hauling their equivalent of the local statue of the Virgin out to try to halt an oncoming lava flow from the local volcano, with about the same chance of success. There was another comment in this article, near the end, which struck me in an odd way: (Dr. Alan Stone) said that in some parts of Africa, Asia and the Indian sub-continent it was very difficult to get the men to use condoms. This made me think something curious. I want to make clear that I express no moral judgement in the following observation. I am not trying to claim that "they'll deserve it", or anything of the kind. Natural selection doesn't only work on individuals. When a species adopts a pack or group lifestyle, so that closely-related individuals living together substantially enhance the survival of all members, then there comes into being a meta-level of selection where differences between groups will enhance or impede the survival of those groups, with groups collectively being subject to natural selection. Unlike individuals, groups reproduce by fission. Successful groups which become large will eventually split into two. This is well documented in, for instance, wolves and African wild dogs. And individuals in a group will have certain behaviors which will enhance (or not) the chance that the group as a whole survives and prospers. This leads to the curious case that sometimes what is negative for an individual is positive for the group, and since members of the group are usually closely related, the "selfish gene" concept means that this can be selected for, not against. (A young man who dies to protect his tribe still passes on his genes, though he has never bred, through closely related people who survive becaue of his sacrifice.) In humans we have "culture", which I am using as an omnibus term to refer to the collective knowledge a group passes on, until recently through oral tradition, to its children. Different groups have different cultures and they can be radically different, and these cultures can contain characteristics which dramatically alter the chance of survival of a group. "Cultural evolution" (if you will) is unusual in that it is Lamarckian: it is not fixed in our genes, and each generation can change it before passing it on. So it adapts far more rapidly and reacts better to changed circumstances. Indeed, a given generation can completely junk the old culture and can adopt a completely new one, possibly borrowing it from another group. Cultures can also be predatory, seeking out other cultures and deliberately annihilating them and replacing them. So there are two ways that a harmful cultural character can be changed: it can be deliberately changed by learning, or all the people who believe it can die out. Which is a round-about way of saying that one way or another, the people of the world will eventually all be using condoms to protect against HIV, either because those who don't will begin to do so, or because those who don't will die.(discuss) |
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