Modern Mind

taken out. In Rawls’s original position there are by definition no hawks or doves and no relatives. Rawls’s system is all too well aware of Dawkins-type arguments and seeks to circumvent them. Daniel Bell had drawn attention to the cultural contradictions of capitalism; Rawls’s ideas threw up some contradictions of Darwinism. Dawkins’s ideas also show certain similarities to the market system. This arises partly from the way he attaches values to the outcomes of behavior, but though simplifications, these outcomes – gains and losses – are real enough. The situation of hawks and doves, for example, is mirrored to an extent in price-fixing agreements in humans. It is in the best interests of garage owners (say) to fix the price of petrol at one (relatively) stable price; in that way all garage owners benefit. However, the temptation always exists for a wayward ‘hawk’ to drop his prices for a very heavy quick profit. Of course, other garage owners would soon follow suit, until the situation again stabilised and, perhaps, price fixing is reestablished. Many democracies have laws against this sort of behavior being carried too far, but that does not cancel out the fact that in some respects evolution shares a lot of features with market economics.
    * Joy was stabbed to death in 1980 by an assistant who claimed he hadn’t been paid. George was shot in an ambush by Somali poacher/farmers in 1989.
    * Sanger won a second Nobel prize for this discovery, which meant that he joined a select band of individuals, double Nobel winners, which includes Marie Curie, John Bardeen and Linus Pauling.

39
‘THE BEST IDEA, EVER’
     
    Narborough is a small village about ten miles south of Leicester, in the British East Midlands. Late on the evening of 21 November 1983 a fifteen-year-old girl, Lynda Mann, was sexually assaulted and strangled, her body left in a field not too far from her home. A manhunt was launched, but the investigation revealed nothing. Interest in the case died down until the summer of 1986, when on 2 August the body of another fifteen-year-old, Dawn Ashworth, was discovered in a thicket of blackthorn bushes, also near Narborough. She too had been strangled, after being sexually assaulted.
    The manhunt this time soon produced a suspect, Richard Buckland, a porter in a nearby hospital. 1 He was arrested exactly one week after Dawn’s body was found, following his confession. The similarities in the victims’ ages, the method of killing, and the proximity to Narborough naturally made the police wonder whether Richard Buckland might also be responsible for the death of Lynda Mann, and with this in mind they called upon the services of a scientist who had just developed a new technique, which had become known to police and public alike as ‘genetic fingerprinring.’ 2 This advance was the brainchild of Professor Alec Jeffreys of Leicester University. Like so many scientific discoveries, Jeffreys’s breakthrough came in the course of his investigation of something else – he was looking to identify the myoglobin gene, which governs the tissues that carry oxygen from the blood to the muscles. Jeffreys was in fact using the myoglobin gene to look for ‘markers,’ characteristic formations of DNA that would identify, say, certain families and would help scientists see how populations varied genetically from village to village, and country to country. What Jeffreys found was that on this gene one section of DNA was repeated over and over again. He soon found that the same observation – repeated sections – was being made in other experiments, investigating other chromosomes. What he realised, and no one else did, was that there seemed to be a widespread weakness in DNA that caused this pointless duplication to take place. As Walter Bodmer and Robin McKie describe it, the process is analogous to a stutterer who repeatedly stammers over the same letter. Moreover, this weakness
differed from person to person.
The crucial repeated segment was about fifteen base pairs long, and Jeffreys set about identifying it in such a way that it could be seen by eye with the aid of just a microscope. He first frozethe DNA, then thawed it, which broke down the membranes of the red blood cells, but not those of the white cells that contain DNA. With the remains of the red blood cells washed away, an enzyme called proteinase K was added, exploding the white cells and freeing the DNA coils. These were then treated with