> Arsenic is one of the most toxic elements that can be found. However, regular
> ingestion of small amounts of arsenic can eventually allow the body
> to tolerate quite
> large doses.
Har. Shame on me. Bad example. Prussic acid?
Actually, now that I think of it, the arsenic example isn't so *very* terrible: it just needs qualification, to the effect that if you take arsenic *without having built up a tolerance*, it'll kill you. This fact has a biological, not a social basis, right? The fact that a tolerance *can* be built up -- that our bodies are able to do that -- is no more dependent on the social context than the fact that a large dose, absent the tolerance, will retire you permanently from play.
It's very funny to me to be cast in the role of biological determinist here. Very out of character.
I'm always the loudmouth at cocktail parties arguing against biological determinism and pooh-pooing those headlines -- which recur with the depressing regularity of the monsoon season -- like "Scientists discover gayness gene!" Baloney, I say on these occasions. Genome, schmeenome.
There is indeed a systematic ideological impulse at work in our society to overstate the role of the genome at the expense of everything else, and to assume that whatever patterns we actually see around us must be graven in the granite of our DNA. I don't buy this picture at all, if that needs saying. It's one of the reasons I loathe sociobiology so intensely.
But at the same time we are physical organisms, with certain anatomical and physiological properties, like other critters in the world. Is it really un-Marxist to argue that this concrete material fact sets some limits on what we can do and be? I don't think the Old Man would have claimed that.
(He might have claimed that those limits are less narrow than we sometimes think -- and if so, I would agree with him.)
Is it un-Marxist to argue that the same logic might apply to the brain? What's the case for demanding an exception for that organ among all the others? Isn't this a weird kind of idealism smuggled back into the materialist picture of the world?
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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org