Edited: August 11, 2019

Continued from Part 3

Hormones
Charles Galton Darwin writes in the early 1950s about the

“possibility of substantially altering the intellectual and moral natures of individuals by some sort of hormonal injections (76).”

“The artificial use of hormones has already been shown to have profound effects on the behaviour of animals [see this article about effects on aggression and other behaviours], and it seems quite possible that hormones, or perhaps drugs, might have similar effects on man. For example, there might be a drug, which, without other harmful effects, removed the urgency of sexual desire, and so reproduced in humanity the status of workers in a beehive. Or there might be another drug that produced a permanent state of contentment in the recipient – after all alcohol does something like this already, though it has other disadvantages and is only temporary in its effects. A dictator would certainly welcome the compulsory administration of the “contentment drug” to his subjects (183).”

Also:

“Why cannot man set up a community like an ants’ nest? …. Thus the control of the numbers of the two sexes may become possible, and with the knowledge of the various sexual hormones it might also become possible to free the majority of mankind from the urgency of sexual impulse…(124,125).”

Nowadays more and more people have heard about endocrine-disrupting chemicals in food and in our environment generally, including artificial estrogens such as BPA and phthalates (http://www.rodale.com/phthalate-plasticizers?page=0,0&cm_mmc=DailyNewsNL-_-2010_03_16-_-Top5-_-NA).

Why have we been exposed to these chemicals? Is it just a big mistake that corporations and governments are desperately trying to fix? Has our exposure to these chemicals been reduced? Do we respond to this information passively?

Continued Part 5

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