Blame the Genes

...for ADHD:

A research team led by Professor Johannes Hebebrand of the University of Duisburg-Essen in western Germany studied 329 families in which one child had attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder syndrome.

They found that a great majority -- around 70 percent -- had a combination of three mutations in the gene for the so-called dopamine transporter linked to hyperactivity.

It figures that the Germans would be behind this. I'm not doubting the validity of his assertion, though I'm more than skeptical about the diagnosis, not to say the very existence of ADHD. But I do wonder whether we need to prevent the hyperactive from breeding--good luck--or whether we ought to welcome them, if not as Supermen, then certainly as the predecessors thereof.

On a more serious note, this should again suggest that science, divorced from a system of ethics, is merely the satisfaction of an intellectual itching. As such, it should neither be feared, nor especially reverenced. Unless of course it's accompanied by a--correct--moral code, whereon it regains the high status we reserve for it today.