Retorts

The End is Nigh?

Our system of chronology was invented by the obscure monk Dionysius Exiguus in the year 525. He suggested that we should change from the Roman system then popular, to one dating from the birth of Christ. He put Christ's birth year as 753 in the year of Rome. The idea of Christ's birth as the origin of our calendar was popularised by the Venerable Bede in the eighth century, and was eventually adopted by most Western countries, with a few minor glitches such as the French revolutionary calendar, which began when the Bastille was breached in 1797.

But Exiguus got it all wrong. Christ as a baby survived the "massacre of the innocents" carried out by Herod the Great, the then ruler of Judaea, and Herod died in 4BC. So Christ must have been born before that date. There was never a year zero, and the "Christian era" is not based on Christ's birthdate.

Yet people are placing a magical significance on the year 2000. The Chatham Islands are about to endure their first and last venture into mass tourism. We are suffering a surfeit of milleniarists, those who wish to believe that the world as we know it is about to come to an end. Incidents such as the mass suicide by the "Heaven's Gate" cult, accompanied by a supposed abduction by aliens, is encouraged by our mass media which constantly present melodramas involving extra-planetary organisms, Unidentified Flying Objects and occult fantasies. We even have to dust off old and dubious evidence for fossils in a Martian meteorite before finance can be found for further planetary exploration.

This madness has afflicted science for some years. We are long used to the population explosion, our plundered planet, the coming depletion of resources, global disasters caused by carbon dioxide and CFCs, and the effort to stop evolution in its tracks by the worship of the great goddess sustainability.

A recent BBC Horizon programme called "Dodging Doomsday" featured the guru of gloom, Paul Ehrlich whose pronouncements on the forthcoming catastrophes were demolished, one by one, by actual facts. There is no population explosion. On the contrary, world population figures are approaching a steady value. The UN estimates of between 8-12 billion are currently being revised downwards. Deserts are not increasing; they oscillate back and forth with climate variations. Agricultural technology is in advance of demand. Resources are, if anything increasing; even oil reserves.

A participant in the programme, Professor Julian Simon, had bet Ehrlich in 1980, for $200 per item, that he could not find five world commodities that would increase in price (and thus scarcity) in ten years. Simon won $1,000 in 1990 as all five (tin, nickel, chromium, copper and tungsten) had decreased in price. The programme featured the island of Mauritius, which in the 1960s was regarded as a classic case of a community that had exhausted its finite resources. Yet today, despite a doubling of population, it is prosperous because of the development of new industries and a programme of education, land reform and family planning. Famine, poverty and disease are caused by political failures and civil unrest, not by genuine scarcity.

The total number of biological species in the world is unknown. It is therefore not possible to say whether they are increasing or decreasing.

Creatures on the verge of extinction are probably irredeemable if left to their own devices, as their gene pool is fatally depleted. Giant pandas could not possibly survive if we did not yearn for them as pets. So they will eventually eat eggs and bacon instead of bamboo, as captive animals do already.

We are even breeding a dependency on artificial devices amongst humans. We are preserving genetic defects which would previously have proved incapable of survival. Caesarean births are increasing at a rate that raises doubts as to whether future generations will be capable of natural birth.

Every scientific discovery is considered to be a potential for disaster. Contraceptive pills lead to promiscuity. Automobiles cause congested cities and pollution. Atomic energy provided bombs and radioactivity, with cheap power forgotten. And now we have clones.

Cloning and genetic engineering merely provide greater opportunities to solve the problems of a possible decline in biodiversity and provide new hope for those suffering from genetic defect disorders, cancer, heart disease and Alzheimers'.

Vincent Gray