Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Scientists have recently proclaimed that they have genetically engineered the return of an Ice Age super-predator which has been extinct for nearly thirteen thousand years, the Dire Wolf. This sort of hubris, reversing evolution as an ego trip, demands nemesis.
If our civilization falls, if our species extinguishes itself, it will be because of people like these reckless and prideful scientists. They have taken all the opportunities that contemporary civilization has to offer and have choose to play god.
They took the genetic codes of contemporary species and rewrote them as they saw fit. Why not go further? Some geneticists are already planning to revive the Wooly Mammoth in some vain hope to retard man-made climate change.
Even without advanced genetics, we prideful humans have bred dogs and cats who can’t exercise because their muzzles are so short that they can’t breathe properly. Some are now purpose-breeding cats with such short legs that they can’t jump as cats are naturally intended to do. Genetic science could make these forays in selective breeding seem tame by comparison.
Why stop with animals? Why not bestow wings and hollow bones on people so we can fly, or gills and fins so we can inhabit the oceans? Why not rewrite the menu of what foods we can digest to expand our diet?
Why not redesign our very minds, both biologically and cybernetically? We could rewrite our basic human nature, giving birth to the elusive “New Soviet Man” a person capable of living in utopia. The mind boggles at such possibilities.
Parents, or doctors, or the government could one day design babies, determining everything from eye, hair, and skin color to racial traits, physical ability, and even mental acuity. “Wetware” implants could be built-in to cybernetically augment the biological brain, directly linking it to others.
Genetic engineering, much like cybernetic virtual intelligence, takes us out of our actual role. We human creatures are intelligent mortals who live in a world that we did not create and which we really cannot control. Genetics and cybernetics offer the illusion that we can place ourselves above natural law and beyond the struggle to survive, as if we had transcended our limited mentality and our physical mortality.
In their arrogance, these scientists imagine that we humans can possibly understand where reality itself has gone wrong. They presume to correct evolution’s mistakes. When we Homo Sapiens ape the creative, omniscient, and omnipotent characteristics of God, we play god without possessing any of the qualifications to do so.
Maybe a new Dark Age is the only antidote to such hubris. I earnestly hope not! But, our scientific and technological capabilities have peaked at precisely the moment where our shared moral sensibilities are at their nadir.
Our society’s fundamental Judeo-Christian assumptions used to define the Western mind. Now, we have few shared guiding assumptions, few definitive cultural values.
What precisely is a human life? At what age or stage of development does a human being deserve society’s protection? What precisely is a human mind? To retain its status as human, does such a mind need to remain functional while unplugged? What is a woman? What is the innocence of childhood, and how should it be defended? What is a nation, and how should it act to preserve its linguistic and cultural distinctiveness? Should nations have borders? Who is
God, and who is Man? Are there natural laws and inalienable rights that we transgress at our peril?
Precisely when we are experiencing this societal identity crisis, we unlock the keys to sculpting life as if it were moist clay on a potter’s wheel. Like in any decent Greek tragedy or Old Testament tale, our defining characteristics of insatiable curiosity and untrammeled creativity are also what will most likely bring humanity to our doom.
Indeed, genetic science is interesting. It could lead to some conceptual and practical breakthroughs in biology and medicine. But, studying disembodied genes in a lab is essentially different from growing entire animals for additional studies. Rebirthing extinct creatures contravenes any humility before an evolutionary process that might have a fundamental integrity. Just as we each are mortal, so it is with every genus and species.
We have developed the attitude that any time a species goes extinct, it is our fault and we must prevent it. This prevents ongoing evolution. The polar bears aren’t exactly vanishing. They are crossbreeding with grizzly bears to create a new fusion which will be able to survive in a changing environment. This is natural and good. This is what happened in the past when an ice age arrived. Maybe the snail darter and the spotted owl have had their day.
Were humans to colonize the Solar system and then somehow go interstellar, we would change. Homo Sapiens Sapiens would adapt to other worlds as well as to whatever life in deep space would require. Our minds, and maybe our bodies would adapt to differing levels of light and darkness, shifted diurnal cycles, novel proportions of oxygen and inert gasses, unprecedented
biological threats and opportunities (native viruses and foodstuffs), altered gravity, and so forth. Under those circumstances, manipulating genomes might be justifiable.
Under current circumstances, it is self-evidently wrong to re-write DNA to produce extinct or never-previously-existing “Island of Dr. Moreau” organisms. It invites the accidental creation of a super-germ to which we have no resistances. Gain-of-function research provokes similar objections.
We are finite beings, both individually and collectively. That is a truth of our existence. To develop designer life forms is objectively wicked. So is growing clones or having babies in order to harvest needed organs. Making purpose built life without inalienable rights is evil.
I hate the Stephen King story Pet Semitary, but the moral of that story is undeniable. Sometimes dead is better. If our older pets did not die, we would never know our newer pets. So it is with human life, with all life. We arrive in a crowded world, live out our time either well or badly, then pass beyond this mortal coil. That’s the way it is, was, and ever should be.
