Florida facades

...Yet despite the coming and going of various ideological fads, claims Wiarda, Latin America remains unable to shake free of its original political culture...

...And he largely disregards unsavory U.S...

...The centerpiece of his argument is "knockout" experiments...

...genetic manipulation of the life span...

...Mired as he is in dusty historical treatises, Wiarda would do well to visit his local twenty-first-century video store and pick up Traffic or Amores Perms to learn how most movie-going gringos perceive Latin America these days...

...After laying out history, Morange moves to a series of chapters in which he presents the case against the notion of genes "for" diseases, cancer, development, aging, longevity, death, behavior, sexuality, personality, intelligence, and morality...

...Four hundred thousand dollars may get you a unit, but not one with a good Gulf prospect...

...Asking what genes do simply means trying to find out how proteins—the structures of which are transmitted from generation to generation—enable the organism to carry out complex functions...

...Deep down," the author tells us, "the oligarchies of Latin America do not believe that Indians and people of African descent are fully equal...

...This confounds...

...Morange's primary agenda is to debunk genetic determinism, especially the notion that there is a "gene for...

...Even Thomas Aquinas was a stowaway, as the Spaniards smuggled his scholasticism and rigid conceptions of social hierarchy into the Americas...

...Wiarda frequently reminds readers of the valuable service his book provides by disabusing them of Latin American stereotypes they've picked up in New Yorker cartoons or in movies like Bananas and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid...

...Look at their clothes, their customs, their beliefs—in a word, their culture...

...Some of the stones protrude in a nondescript pattern that looks as if waiting to be carved into a figure...

...But was it...

...With a protein modified, researchers can study the role it plays in the development and functioning of an organism...

...His probe of the Latin mind goes deeper: "I am not convinced that those rich, white Latin American aristocrats—although they cannot say so publicly—are even now entirely convinced that Indians, blacks, and lower-class persons really have souls...

...He glosses over inequities at home, simply arguing that "a society that is inegalitarian is one thing, but one that is unabashedly so is quite another...

...To understand Latin America today, Wiarda contends, we must first consider the cultural and intellectual traditions that Spanish conquerors brought to the New World in 1492...

...This contribution alone makes the book worth reading...

...Knockout experiments proceed by modifying a specific gene, which results in either an abnormal protein product or none at all...

...Apparently, in addition to their swords, horses, and diseases, the Spaniards also lugged some heavy cultural baggage across the Atlantic: ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, and medieval Christianity...

...But beyond traditional biological reductionism and determinism, Wade has an unwarranted confidence in the ability of genomic technicians to turn the straw of the sequence into gold...

...Growth in upscale housing is also causing gridlock on the roads and threatens to jeopardize both the quantity and quality of drinking-water supplies...

...25 MERE GENES M. Therese Lysaught n June 2000, all eyes were on the East Room of the White House...

...Other times, an array of effects is discovered which could not have been predicted from what was previously known...

...Spain's principal cultural influences (Greece, Rome, the Bible, Saint Thomas, Saint Augustine) and its key historical experiences (the seven-hundred-year occupation by the Moors and the gradual reconquest of Spain) produced a unique political culture, markedly different from that of the rest of Western Europe...

...Even today in Latin America," he argues, "society seems to be made up of stock types: the oligarch, the priest, the military officer, the bureaucrat, the labor leader, the student, the peasant, and so on...

...It was more medieval, top-down and authoritarian, statist, and exploitative...

...Life Script proceeds in two sections, each of which could stand alone...

...cures for cancer...

...Hubbard, the Harvard biochemist now emerita, is one of the authors of Exploding the Gene Myth (Beacon Press), which explores how the findings of genetic science are used to serve social and political ends...

...Yet his presentation of the United States is stunningly benign...

...The clear virtue in Wade's tale is brash egoism...

...Sometimes, if you knock out a gene, it leads to an expected effect...

...the hero is competitive capitalism in its new biotech garb...

...Last year, Harvard University luminary Samuel P. Huntington coedited a major volume titled Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, with highprofile contributors ranging from Francis Fukuyama to Jeffrey Sachs...

...The bishop and a few other persons notwithstanding, it would not appear that the Christian community in southwest Florida is concerned about such disparities...

...Think Ayn Rand meets scientific triumphalism...

...The attraction for these inland-dwelling retirees is golf, golf every day of the year at a course built right in the subdivision or at many private ones that dot the area...

...He treats racism in the United States like a statistical aberration, barely meriting parenthetical references, as if America's racial divides were limited to those unfortunate few years during the 1860s...

...Indeed, but for the nearly hidden stations of the cross, an iconoclast could not make improvement on the scene...

...M. Therese Lysaught teaches in the theology department at the University of Dayton...

...The two books under consideration here present different perspectives on these questions...

...Few blacks are to be seen...

...Soon it will be possible to appreciate the old Naples only by looking at photographs...

...Only greed or extraordinary shortsightedness would seem to explain the adhesion of developers, mortgage lenders, and local government officials to the maxim apres moi le deluge...

...indeed, explaining this difference is the very purpose of his book...

...No critique is offered...

...and ethical concerns are mentioned only to be dismissed...

...What did this really mean...

...And the recent terrorist attacks on U.S...

...Wiarda may well be right in his bleak view of the prospects for democracy in Latin America...

...Seen from the road it emits Spanish mission characteristics...

...and genomic engineering...

...Although some of Morange's technical material may be difficult for the general reader, this book will correct a wealth of genetic misunderstandings...

...27 FLORIDA FACADES E.F...

...Even the architecture of the local church has come to accentuate my unease...

...He begins with a history...

...I will mention only three points...

...In their zeal to explain everything, cultural critics risk explaining nothing at all...

...Wiarda frequently contrasts the racism and social hierarchies of Latin America with the equality and social mobility of the United States...

...Howard J. Wiarda's The Soul of Latin America: The Cultural and Political Tradition offers an instance of cultural analysis run amok...

...Yet the only service—or disservice—that Wiarda gives readers is an intellectual rationale for all the old Moon over Paradorstyle stereotypes...

...His book brings to mind the work of Ruth Hubbard, although Morange's rhetoric is more subdued...

...But that is not to say that cultural factors alone explain national development...

...First came liberalism, which served as the impetus for the independence movements of the early 1800s...

...When he cannot marshal the evidence to support his positions, Wiarda simply speculates on how Latin Americans really think...

...Perhaps it is the mission church suggested by the exterior that makes this disparity strike the visitor with such force...

...The first three chapters tell the story of the race to sequence the human genome...

...Any person interested in genetics should read The Misunderstood Gene...

...Not content to absorb one set of institutional and ideological fixtures from abroad, Wiarda's Latin America has cycled through various new foreign political ideologies since the end of Spanish colonialism...

...regenerative medicine (via embryonic and adult stem cells and cloning...

...It was, as far as one could tell, A Big Deal...

...First, the book lacks an interpretive or analytical framework...

...But that precisely is the point, the uncut stone symbolizing things to come, the kingdom still in the process of creation...

...Carlos Lozada is associate editor o/Foreign Policy magazine...

...The underclass might as well exist in El Salvador as in these United States...

...Meanwhile the stations of the cross are tiny metal figures, almost folded-wire creations, set atop stone pillars along the side walls...

...No crucifix faces down worshippers in this church...

...Yet the problem with culture is precisely its allencompassing nature, its nearly tautological explanatory power...

...One might call this "biotech determinism...

...At the same time, transient farm workers inland are paid a pittance and their periodic strikes and hunger marches have proved totally unavailing, this despite the local Catholic bishop saying open-air Masses to draw attention to their plight...

...Such is the market at the moment that units in new buildings are sold out months before construction starts...

...Nations and peoples behave differently simply because they are different...

...DNA," he notes, "is the memory that life invented so that, at each generation, its active agents— proteins—could be efficiently reproduced...

...Latinos are present in the supermarket, stocking shelves and running checkout counters, and they make up the crews employed by the various landscape companies that keep neat and tidy the lawns and shrubs that surround every house and condominium block...

...While Morange wants to give genes their proper credit, his money is with proteins...

...This perplexes...

...The interior walls are stucco but for a high wall behind the altar which is covered with squares of plain gray stone...

...26 Morange seeks to correct common misperceptions or outdated understandings of what genes do...

...Sometimes, no discernible effect can be noted...

...If Wade exemplifies the hype about the implications of genetics, Michel Morange provides the antidote...

...Cultural explanations are intuitive, straightforward, almost comforting...

...Thus, for Morange, knockout experiments powerfully challenge the notion of genetic determinism...

...But the pesky question that Wiarda never answers—indeed, he wastes much ink skirting it—is how 24 much weight cultural traditions carry compared to other factors...

...As a historian of science, Morange also tells the story of the conceptual development of the field of genetics (discussing, for example, the "reification" of genes, their transformation into an object...

...There, Bill Clinton, a gaggle of scientists, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair (present via the wonders of technology) assembled to announce that the Human Genome had been "sequenced" (at least almost...

...Coincidentally, perhaps, no kneelers are provided...

...Latin American democracy today remains "topdown, organic, elitist, centralized, statist, nonparticipatory, patrimonialist, executive-centered, and group—rather than individual—oriented...

...But as the pillars are barely as high as the backs of the pews, these stations are not immediately in evidence...

...Through the discovery and subsequent conquest of the Americas, "these traits were then transferred to Latin America, in which setting they not only persisted for centuries but actually received a new lease on life...

...Perhaps, but defining a position as true doesn't make it so...

...fill in the blank with the disease or trait of your choice...

...The Spanish colonialists were brutal, but they were realists...

...It is not only the story of Mendel, Morgan, Mueller, and Watson/Crick...

...The area is increasingly dominated by hi-rise residential condominiums...

...Having been a regular winter inhabitant of Naples, I find myself increasingly uncomfortable dwelling here...

...Wiarda, a political scientist from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, purports to explain no less than "why and how Latin America differs from the United States, why its politics, society, and economies are at such variance from the American...

...The bold, courageous, maverick outsider (Craig Venter and Celera Genomics), funded well by self-made venture capitalists, takes on the plodding, inept, traditional community of academic scientists...

...Researchers like that...

...On the few occasions in which he qualifies his argument, he does so to the point of rendering it useless, unwittingly proving the limitations of cultural analysis...

...Critique would take far more than my allotted space...

...social implications of proposed new developments are not explored...

...He rejects computing metaphors that liken the genome to a program and linguistic/textual metaphors that compare it to an instruction manual, information, or "the book of life...

...The mission cathedral in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has a life-size crucifix that vividly demonstrates what a really bloody and awful death was inflicted on Jesus...

...Second, Wade's understanding of the genome is reductionist and determinist...

...Wade valiantly tries to make the story interesting...

...Inland from Vanderbilt Beach is a flat area once full of orange groves...

...Instead, the tale is all too familiar...

...Here he rehearses the many fascinating possibilities that are the stuff of newspaper headlines: gene chips enabling genomewide diagnostic scans...

...new protein drugs and pharmacogenomics...

...Hereabouts the game is to purchase one of these arks, tear it down, and build an even more immense but ultramodern house...

...Nicholas Wade, a science writer for the New York Times, believes that this was a turning point in the history of civilization, marking the moment that Western medicine began to emerge from the "dark ages" of surgery and chemical poisons...

...Stylistically, it reads like a cross between a book-length newspaper article and a series of press releases for various biotech companies...

...Wiarda depicts Latin American cultural development in remarkably linear terms...

...Almost without exception, a hole is dug within a development's interior, the high water table fills it with water, and, presto, it acquires some quaint name and is dubbed a lake...

...Further south one gets into parts of the city where large homes dot the shoreline, relics of the old days...

...Too often to count, Wade promises that "over the next decade," "in a few years," "in two years," one biotech company or another will have created an application that will change the face of medicine as we know it...

...Meanwhile, what is worth real worry is the immense disparity in wealth seen here, a disparity almost beyond belief in that the usual social pyramid has been stood on its head, the rich and the well-to-do far outnumbering the lower orders...

...Indeed, some ambitious Latinos have set up their own house-cleaning operations and can be seen dashing about in spanking-clean pickup trucks...

...To me and to most readers," explains Wiarda, "the continuing importance of cultural differences is so obvious as to be almost irrefutable...

...In their place, he proposes a new metaphor that is rich with possibility: that of memory...

...By the mid-nineteenth century, the region's intellectual and political leaders had embraced positivism, which derived from the writings of French philosopher Auguste Comte and emphasized order, group rights over individual liberties, and a society in which all members knew their correct place or "station...

...Nationalism and Marxism soon followed as the region's ideological trends du jour, enduring in moderate form to this day...

...31...

...But those who can afford to live and pray in Naples today come from a different time and place...

...What with the awesome development apace, real estate taxes are effectively clearing the remaining prime land of any inhabitants of modest means...

...Roberts Vanderbilt Beach abuts the Gulf of Mexico along the northern rim of Naples, Florida...

...Morange analyzes the assumptions behind deterministic claims, offering a scientifically more nuanced and balanced account of how genes actually contribute to these outcomes...

...Today the crop is houses, dozens and dozens of them being planted in large subdivisions...

...Wiarda is quick to note, however, that these were "conservative revolutions": The elites clamoring for independence simply wanted freedom from Spain, not true freedom for Latin America's lower classes...

...In other words, the culture Latin America inherited from Spain proved to be a curse from which there is no escape...

...Economic, class, institutional, and dependency elements need to be factored into any explanatory paradigm...

...So do chance, accidents, geography, and perhaps, sociobiology...

...This shift in focus allows Morange to critique the dominant metaphors used to talk about genes...

...Most of the people who dwell in these environments are white...

...But once inside, visitors find themselves in an amphitheatershaped structure...

...Ultimately, The Soul of Latin America may reveal as much about cultural self-perception in this country as it does about the cultural traditions of our neighbors to the south...

...Some live in the city's few undeveloped backwaters but most have been forced to retreat a big jump inland...

...Newspapers and media outlets proclaimed and parsed the news for weeks...

...policies toward Latin America during the cold war, which did much to retard democracy in the region...

...Interestingly, gene therapy receives little space in this book...

...For Morange, a professor of biology and the director of the Center for the Study of the History of Science at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, sequence data give us important information about the genome but cannot provide the most useful or interesting information, namely, how genes and organisms function...

...Too many times, he refers to the body as "human clay" and the genome as the human "parts list," "the program," the "human instruction manual" which will enable scientists to "fix the human machine and in time to correct most—perhaps all—of its defects...

...Moreover, since the end of the cold war, intellectuals around the world have decried the spread of American movies, music, and food as an insidious force that destroys local customs and warps the hearts and minds of global youth...

...Light bulbs flashed...

...soil only revived the notion that a conflict between Western and Islamic culture—a "clash of civilizations" as Huntington might call it—will be the defining struggle of the twenty-first century...

...Closer attention to the history of that field over the past decade should cool any premature prognostication...

...Indeed, he endorses the stereotypes...

...This ear for the conceptual allows him to mount a convincing critique of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory as well as other questionable extrapolations from genetic findings...

...As he notes, "If molecular biologists had to designate one category of macromolecules as being essential for life, it would be proteins and their multiple functions, not DNA and genes...

...With the tale told, Wade devotes the remaining four chapters to medical applications of genetic technology...