NHS Budget, Books - Hannah Critchlow

                                                  NHS

British health spending, at present 9.9% of G.D.P., should rise to match the G7 average of 11.3%. This would mean an increase of £20.8 billion in annual government spending on top of the £120 billion a year NHS Budget.

(The Times, 2017)

If you want a top-quality Health Service you have to pay for it. Why not put taxes up on those who can afford to pay more? 

                                                Books

The Science of Fate: Why Your Future Is More Predictable Than You Think –
Hannah Critchlow.

A Reader

Albert Joseph Moore (1841-1893)

Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery
[CC BY-NC-ND]

Our positive-thinking, self-willing, dream-dreaming society has apparently got it all wrong. We are “sold the concept of unlimited agency and capability”, says the neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow, told we can be whoever we want to be, if we just try hard enough. The reality, she believes, is cruelly different. Far from this “vision of free will on steroids”, we are “closer to pre-programmed machines running on deep drives”.

We are the victims, in other words, of fate…Our fate is “buried within our physical selves”. The threads of human destiny for her, are the strands of our DNA and the hard-wiring of our brains.

…Biology and neuroscience are certainly coming up with ever more evidence for the role of genes in driving behaviour. Half the variation in individual intelligence is thought to be down to genetic effects. Our taste for novelty and sensation-seeking is about 60% driven by genes.

…Even personality traits are now thought to be strongly influenced by genetic effects, and fairly stable over a lifetime. Critchlow thinks embryos might one day be screened for traits such as extroversion, agreeableness and openness to experience.

The most convincing evidence for biological determinism comes from the science of obesity. One gene variant, found in half the world’s population, makes you 25% more likely to be obese.

…Gene editing of embryos may be unthinkable but that won’t stop scientists trying it. Some already are. Because there is one thing about fate that we do know, albeit from human history and experience, not neuroscience: even if our destiny is written in our brains and in our genes, people will try to defy it.

(James McConnachie, The Sunday Times, 2019)

“Half the variation in individual intelligence is thought to be down to genetic effects.” Haven’t we known this for a long time?