Brent Lofgren

Fri, Feb 12, 2010 : 1:29 p.m.

I think that group solidarity and individualism are sort of yin and yang, and each has its place. In my professional life, I try to push back the boundaries of science. This requires doing my own thinking, and undertaking a lot of actions for myself. But at the same time, it requires assimilating the knowledge built by people who came before me, understanding where the new knowledge that I am trying to create fits into the existing body and the climate science community, and working within bureaucratic mechanisms to fund scientific work. In the context of choral singing, the goal is to make pitches and rhythms match with everyone else, and make your tone and the precise sound of your vowels blend with the group. This is partially accomplished by following the director, but also depends on individual skill. The best leaders take into account the abilities and personalities of the people they are leading, and use their individual attributes to the best advantage of the larger effort. Thus individuality can be harnessed to make the collective better. I think what this priest meant by 'excessive individualism' was individualism that occurs to the detriment of the common good. The kind of science I do is not evolution, so I'll be speaking through my hat a little bit. But the basic agent of evolution is the individual. In the case of asexually reproducing species, the usually expected thing is that a new individual is an exact genetic copy of its parent. In a few cases, there is a mutation and the DNA is altered in one individual. Most of the time, this is either something that makes that individual less fit, so that it dies, or it makes no difference, and the individual may survive but with no advantage over its peers. On the rarer occasions, it will make the individual better fit to survive. Bacteria reproduce asexually and many have become resistant to various antibiotics through this very process on very observable time scales. In sexually reproducing species, the details of the genetics are more complicated, but the same principles apply--individuals carry the genetic mutations that have the potential to beget a new strain or species that might replace the old genetics or carve out a new ecological niche. Greater genetic diversity gives increased chance of survival of the group by increasing the number of potential genetic combinations, even in the absence of mutation, increasing the chances that at least some will survive adverse conditions that come along. Then, on the larger level, each species can become a piece of an interconnected ecosystem. Summary: individuality and community live in harmony with each other.