Nature - autonomous learning

6 strange naturesin September 2001. So thin and fragmented had the Arctic ice packs becomethat the St Roch could cut through from the Bering Sea to Greenland viaBanks Island. Finally, in many countries worldwide there’s a growingrealisation that plants formerly classed as ‘weeds’ or else as valueless foliagemight, in fact, be enormously useful. Precisely because they’ve been seenas ‘useless’ in the past they are often close to extinction today. Bogbean,yellow gentian and panax ginseng are just a few of the wild plant speciesnow thought to have medicinal properties hitherto unappreciated.Consequently, some are making frantic attempts to conserve them beforeit’s too late.What do these four cases have in common? The answer is thatthey’re all about the destruction of nature. For some environmentalists oursis an era of ‘environmental crisis’, one where we’re witnessing ‘the end ofnature’ (McKibben 1990). In fact, it’s become a commonplace to hear theword ‘crisis’ uttered in relation to humanity’s current usage of naturalresources. But not everyone agrees that we’re in the grip of a crisis. In 2001,for instance, a Danish statistician called Bjorn Lomborg published acontroversial book entitled The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg produceda mass of evidence to show that humanity’s treatment of the environmentis, in his view, improving.What’s more, he criticised environmentalists forscaremongering and for exaggerating the scale of environmental problems.Not surprisingly, green activists have attacked him mercilessly and he waseven accused of manufacturing and falsifying much the evidence used inthis book.Having fewer genes is good for you 7The Human Genome Project – an internationally funded attempt to describehumans’ genetic make-up – has revealed that Homo sapiens have fewer genesthan expected. In 2001, an initial analysis of the human genome revealedthat we are comprised of some 30,000–40,000 genes – only two-thirdsmore than a fruit fly.This raises the question of how humans can be so farin advance of other living species with so few extra genes. The answer,according to those who believe that genes do not explain much aboutpeople’s physical and mental abilities, is the social and cultural milieux inwhich genetic capacities are expressed.Those who favour ‘nurture’ as anexplanation of human behaviour over ‘nature’ insist that humans’ biologicalcapacities are highly conditioned by societal factors.This view challenges‘genetic determinists’ like the right-wing American writer John Entine. His