Beyond Evolution, by Michael W. Fox

Beyond Evolution

by Michael W. Fox

The Lyons Press (123 West 18th St.,  New York,  NY  10011),  1999.
256 pages,  hardcover.  $24.95.

Reviewed by Merritt Clifton in November 1999.

“Few parents teach their children reverence for all life,  opening their hearts to the wonders and mysteries of wild nature,”    former Humane Society of the U.S. senior vice president Michael W. Fox laments on page 216 of  Beyond Evolution.   “Few children now go out to hunt and trap and fish with their fathers…It can be difficult to empathize with those who have never learned why they must kill a deer swiftly with one arrow,  and not just for sport;  and with those people who still eat other animals without a second thought.  But empathize we must to help restore our collective humanity.”

Collective humanity?

The notion that there is a  collective humanity,   as opposed to acts of individual conscience or lack thereof,  may be cribbed from Karl Marx.  The rest of Fox’s argument might have been taken from hook-and-bullet defenders’ case for introducing ever more children to blood sports––allegedly  for meat ––at an ever earlier age.

Fox boasts on the previous page of having “stood beside an Eskimo whale hunter in communion with the Arctic summer night,”  as if this somehow opened his heart to “the wonders and mysteries of wild nature” in a manner that watching pigeons on a window ledge might not have,  had he focused on animal behavior instead of exotic experience.

On the following page,  Fox writes that  “It is not mere nostalgia for the cry of the loon” which leads him into seemingly contending that cruelties of the past are less reprehensible than those of the present and future.

Green Revolution

But Fox evinces only a murky sense of history.  One bizarre Fox claim,  involving history that he supposedly witnessed,  is that the so-called Green Revolution overtaking agriculture over the past 50 years has failed,  especially in Asia.  Yet farmers worldwide now feed twice as many people as in 1960,  on a third less arable land per capita.  India has gone from perennial regional famine to becoming a net food exporter,  even as her human population tripled.

North Korea,  however,  largely shunned the Green Revolution  and has suffered seven decades of recurring famine.

Fox predicates his case against the Green Revolution largely by alleging that India has failed to lift her whole population out of poverty.  Yet the number of Indians now at or above the world standard of living is greater than the total Indian population at independence from Britain in 1949.  More than two-thirds of Indians now live above the world standard of 1949;  80% then lived below it.

Quasi-Gandhians

Progress might have come faster had not quasi-Gandhians battled innovation at every turn, using many of the arguments Fox cites as his philosophical framework.

Gandhi-ji himself,  however,  prescribed policies not opposing technological innovation per se,  but rather favoring decentralized technology,  toward enabling and encouraging individual enterprise.  Had personal computers been invented,  he would have wanted every home and shop to have one.

Gandhian emphasis on respect for labor has unfortunately been warped into a canon cited by some of the relatively well-to-do to rationalize employing themselves in make-work bureaucracy,  while many of the poorest Indians remain shackled to inefficient,  inhumane ways of work that they would cheerfully abandon,  given any chance.

A reincarnated Gandhi-ji might devote his life to undoing the damage done by “Gandhian”  cant which tends to miss his most important points.

Enlightenment

“My thesis,”  Fox argues on page 30,  “is that since the Enlightenment [the dawn of modern science],  a belief and knowledge system has evolved” which “cuts off empathy,  feeling, and therefore respect and concern for other sentient beings.  How else could the biomedical priesthood condone incarcerating our simian tree-swinging monkey cousins from the forests and jungles in cages three feet wide by four feet long and three feet to five feet high?”

This would suggest that cruel confinement of both human and animal prisoners,   slave-trading,  and torture only began with the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment did bring the readaptation of some torture devices to serve vivisectors,  and the extension by philosopher/vivisector Rene Descartes of the medieval belief that animals have no souls to a claim that also they feel no pain.

But the Enlightenment also brought the first scientific awareness that humans are animals, and the orgins of the  humane movement.  No Americans were more influenced by the Enlightenment than Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin,  who set a global precedent by writing into the U.S. Constitution a ban on “cruel and unusual punishment. ”

Articulated opposition to slavery and vivisection also began with leading Enlightenment thinkers,  such as Voltaire.

Self-contradiction

Fox continues,   on page 31,   to claim as alleged evidence of the deficient “feeling state and vision of ” establishment  biomedical scientists  “a recent survey which actually showed that academic scientists have essentially the same view of animal intelligence as English department faculty ” and that two-thirds or more of each group believe animals have minds and think.  Stating the findings,  Fox in effect refutes himself.

Self-contradiction strikes again on page 50.   There,  Fox objects that,  “developing new crops like soybeans and canola to produce specialty oils,  and engineering bacteria to produce vanilla in fermentation vats will devastate the export markets of developing nations.”

Just a line later Fox laments that “Many developing nations have not attained sustainable self-sufficiency because colonial agricultural development programs have encouraged them to produce various crops for export.”

Presumably the loss of export markets would encourage a turn toward self-sufficiency,  but Fox makes no note of this.

Genetic modification vs. pesticides

Fox recites the claim originally made against hybrid grains more than 40 years ago that use of new,  improved crops obliges farmers to engage in costly and potentially harmful repeated applications of chemicals  herbicides,  pesticides,  fungicides,  and now “activators,” meant to maximize the benefit from bio-engineered traits.

Fox follows this with the claim that,  “If a farmer plants a genetically engineered crop of corn or soybeans with herbicide resistance,  he can’t plant any other crops unless they too are resistant.”

But the whole reason for the repeated chemical applications is that agricultural chemicals are now designed to break down into harmless components with ever-increasing rapidity,  to avoid the lingering effects that Rachel Carson made infamous in Silent Spring (1962).

Should a farmer cease using any herbicide now commonly used in the U.S.,  the very plants it killed could grow in the same field within weeks––or days.

Frankenstein

Another nonsequiteur scarcely unique to Fox is the simultaneous suggestion that biotech may unleash a Frankenstein s monster organism which will devastate natural ecologies,  and opposition to “Terminator” seed technology,  developed by the USDA and Delta & Pine Land Inc.,  which prevents a bio-engineered plant from reseeding itself.

“Terminator” seeds,  in simple terms,  prevent bio-engineered plants from becoming runaway invasive species.

Critics dislike “Terminator” technology because it prevents farmers from recycling their seed supply,  allowing them to plant genetically modified crops wherever and whenever they wish.

On this point the critics won a hiattus when Monsanto announced on October 4,  1999 that it would not market the “Terminator” technology even if it succeeded in an almost two-year effort to buy Delta & Pine Land Inc.,  including related patents.  More than 26 years later,  this seems to be where the issue stands.

Monopolism

Throughout Beyond Evolution,  Fox decries the alleged monopolism of competing private industries,  likening them in a two-sentence sequence to “corporate feudalism,  corporate socialism,  and  state capitalism,”  while arguing for greater governmental control,  which would be a monopoly “over biotech research and use.”

Lest anyone believe his opposition to biotech is absolute,  however,  Fox endorses biotechnological development of more effective vaccines and contraceptives.

“The broad range of potentially beneficial applications of genetic engineering biotechnology in agriculture and in veterinary medicine and human medicine are being overshadowed and undermined by an overarching narrowmindedness,”  Fox states,  but identifies that alleged narrowmindedness with the search for the genetic aspects of health,  essential to understand in order to apply genetic technology to any problem.

Disregard of basics

Much of Fox’s polemic seems based on either incomplete understanding of his subject,  or disingenuous disregard for basics.

Fox argues on page 96,  for example,  that plants rather than animals should be used to make a class of bioengineered drugs which are now being made  experimentally  by substituting the digestive,  lactative,  and/or urinary processes of animals (chiefly goats) for costly synthetic bioreactors.  An inherent problem,  however,  is that plants do not have internal bioreactors analagus to the animal digestive tract,  and especially,  to mammary glands.

On page 97,  Fox leaps back and forth from discussion of drugs produced through animal bioreaction to mentions of biohazards associated with cross-species organ transplants.  The infectious contents of goats’ milk,  however,  unlike the liver contents of baboons,  have already been shared with humans for millenia.

Murder

As his arguments fail,  Fox resorts to innuendo.

For example,   Fox writes on page 45,   “the chemical and biotechnology multinational DuPont Nemours is one of the biggest U.S. distributors of pesticides and other cancer-causing chemicals.  This same company put up the money to develop [oncomouse]…sold to testing labs to screen harmful chemicals and test for new cancer cures.  DuPont also sells a high-resolution x-ray film for screening women for breast cancer,  thus profiting further from the consequences of people,  women especially,  being exposed to an increasingly toxic environment.”

Taking a similarly cynical view,  one might point out that because the Humane Society of the U.S. during Fox’s tenure there profited by raising funds from people opposed to cruelty,  and paid Fox more than $100,000 a year,  Fox benefited by perpetuating many forms of cruelty through incessantly and unabashedly promoting organic agriculture.

Winston Churchill

For instance,  organic growers,  instead of using chemical fertilizers,  tend to fertilize their fields with bone ash and blood meal,  each a byproduct of animal slaughter;  often raise animals for slaughter,  as a source of non-chemically contaminated dung;   and tend to tolerate insects,  yet  to protect their relatively meager crop yields often trap and shoot birds and mammals even more aggressively than chemical-dependent farmers.

ANIMALS 24-7 is not so cynical,  however,  as to believe Fox really means to clandestinely encourage cruelty by way of keeping himself employed.  As Winston Churchill advised,  one should never ascribe to malice what may be ascribed to either stupidity or ignorance.

Say what?!

“Medical and scientific experts have been fired by the legalized-mafia of their governments and corporations for raising questions about pesticides,  dioxins,  and various genetically engineered products,”  Fox adds on page 214.   “A veterinarian in Japan,  who voiced concern about the Yakuzas’ [Japanese mafia’s] refusal to allow their fighting dogs to be given a local anesthetic before their wounds were sown up,   was recently killed.  A Belgian veterinarian investigating illegal use of drugs by the veal industry was killed in 1996 by the European drug mafia.  Chico Mendez,  leader of sustainable forest gatherers,  was killed by cattle ranchers less than a decade ago.”

A government or corporation firing a whistleblower may be an abuse of power,  but is scarcely the same thing as murder committed by dogfighters,  drug lords,  and frontier beef barons.

Neither did any of those murders have anything to do with  pesticides,  dioxins,  and various genetically engineered products.

Corruption

“I feel a growing sense of urgency,”  Fox writes on page 212,   “over the closely linked spiritual,  social,  and environmental crises of these times because,”  he says,   “I see corruption being…rationalized as the means of doing business to achieve justifiable ends.  Having worked in one developing country (India) and also being involved in animal and environmental protection in the U.S.,  where––on both hemispheres––corruption is either denied or fatalistically accepted as normal,  I am more aware than ever of the consequences of confronting and exposing corruption in whatever form it may take.”

Corruption at HSUS

During the 15 years or so that Fox was a vice president of the Humane Society of the U.S.,  the Washington Post syndicated five separate exposes of dubious land deals and financial transactions involving his immediate superiors.

U.S. News & World Report published another.

The Humane Society of the U.S. ran into legal trouble in Canada and The Netherlands for alleged misrepresentation.

A member of the Humane Society of the U.S. board executive committee was convicted of bilking investors of more than $21 million.

A fellow Humane Society of the U.S. vice president,  David Wills,  was convicted of embezzling, and was accused of raping at least 13 women in a civil suit eventually settled out of court.  Wills is now serving a life sentence in prison for sex trafficking of a minor female.

(See David Wills, ex-Humane Society of the U.S. vice president, gets life in prison.)

Loki the elephant

Fox may well have been  aware of the consequences of confronting and exposing corruption all this while,  but ANIMALS 24-7,  having had a leading role in helping to expose all of the above,  has no record of Fox ever actually  confronting and exposing any aspect of it.

Fox did,  however,  amplify claims of corruption issued by his late wife Deanna Krantz against the management of the Nilgiris Animal Sanctuary in southern India,  which did not stand up either in court or in the view of independent investigators.

Fox also amplified Krantz’s  allegations of corruption against the handlers of a rogue elephant named Loki,  also known as Murthy,  and against their superiors,  and then against a series of independent investigators,  none of whom ever found that any of her central claims were substantiated.

“We do not now have…more competent guidance than that of Michael Fox in this book,”   stated theologian and biotechnology critic Thomas Berry in a Beyond Evolution jacket blurb.  Biotech investors must have hoped Berry was right.

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