I watched some more of the "DNA" series, "Pandora's Box" with my son.

[NNadir]

He's eleven, and have been interested in DNA and most interestingly, DNA ethics.

The series featured James Watson, who recommends genetic engineering of people. He is of course one of the world's most famous scientists, but I found his view of reductionist genetics highly disturbing. I really think he is missing something, big time.

However it was overall, a fascinating discussion, and really enabled me to discuss ethics and science with my son. We got to discuss a lot of issues besides science, including art.

This was a day well spent.

My son has certain "defects," among them dyslexia, and before he was born, we had reason to screen him for Edward's Syndrome, a kind of trisomy that is aways fatal. It was the first time I told him about that fear we had during our pregnancy. It was fascinating.

[Olney Blue]

1. I hope your son is interested in becoming a scientist.

Some of the best scientists I know have dyslexia!

[Kutjara]

2. I think Watson,...

like many scientists, pay too little attention to the political dimensions of their work. While this is good in many ways, it also leads to mistaken thinking of the kind he demonstrates here.

In an open and egalitarian society, free of religious and bigotry, racial and sexual intolerance and nationalistic hubris, there might (just might) be a case for genetic engineering of people. This would, of course, presuppose that it is within any given human being's capabilities to know what would make a human 'better.' The law of unintended consequences virtually guarantees that this will never be the case, however.

But that's beside the point. The cold fact is that the human race is so blinded by its parochial concerns and so adamant that whatever it happens to believe at a particular moment is Absolute Truth, that any reengineered humans would, inevitably, be engineered to a political agenda.

Does homosexuality have a genetic component? Edit it out. Are some people genetically predisposed to be slackers? Let's make everyone a worker bee. Is there a genetic basis for religious faith? Switch that gene on in everyone.

We are not mature enough as a species to even contemplate genetic engineering on that scale. So we'll no doubt end up doing it within a decade.

[NNadir]

3. I think he is missing another point, which is, given his stature...

surprising.

He is assuming that genes operate independently of one another. He may trace a gene for a particular "desirable" trait only to find that in the presence of a certain series of other genes (which remain unindentified) they do not behave as expected.

I would suspect that this sort of thing is very much the case and that it is essentially impossible to obtain enough information to address this problem, given the number of variables.

In any case, the last thing humanity would desire is to narrow its gene pool to address some culturally determined values. Further I note that the measurement of certain features, say intelligence, may itself be suspect or may overlook subtle manifestations or effects. I have long felt that IQ tests, for instance, don't measure very much at all.

Basically I believe he is involved in a terrible kind of hubris. He hardly knows as much as he thinks he does, is my guess.

One might argue, of course, that I am engaged in hubris myself, since I am not an expert by any stretch in genetics, but I feel very much that he is really missing the big picture.

[Kutjara]

4. You make a very important point.

Our understanding of the interdependency of genes is in its early infancy. In his book 'Lucky Man', the actor Michael J. Fox wrote that Parkinson's Disease is certainly caused by errors on four chromosomes, probably by errors on three more, possibly by another two, with uncertain effects from one more (I may have the actual numbers wrong, but you get my point). How the holy hell do we tease out the manifest interactions of 10 genes?

And that's only the DNA we recognise as genes. I suffer from a form of muscular dystrophy that is caused by a missing section of supposedly 'junk' DNA. Well, let me assure you, I am reminded of how not junk those base pairs are whenever I get up out of a chair.

We have a long way to go scientifically and a much longer way to go culturally before we start engineering 'supermen.'

[Occulus]

6. That's sort of the point I tried to make below

I want everyone to know, I'm not advocating eugenics with that post.

(Personally, I don't know that we'll ever be good enough with manipulating our own genetics for there to be any sort of short-term benefit. Any attempt to do so should, by all rights, be a project lasting hundreds of years.)

[Occulus]

5. If it happened in a closed system,

OFF this planet, the research could be performed, but actually learning anything useful would take several generations.

I think actually engineering our own genetics intelligently is well beyond our capacity at present- and by that, I mean, we are NOT mature enough as a species to do it in an intelligent fashion. Humans need to further evolve before we can even seriously consider engineering our bodies (and, dare I say it, minds).

edit: despite that, I also believe we ARE unintentionally altering our own evolution. Let's examine a very basic question here:

Evolution takes a great deal of time usually (which is why evolution is the perfect tool for an eternal Deity if that Deity wants life to be able to adapt to long term or short term changes in its environment over time :) ), but it's believed that, at times, it makes jumps forward.

Is the process of learning the mind's equivalent? Furthermore, as we use our fingers more and more and more, our eyes more and more and more (computer screens and typing and looking at monitors- these appear to be permanent fixtures in our modern, developed, Western society at this point).... aren't we altering our own evolution, by the rules within which the process of biological evolution works?

Do we truly understand how our own natural selection works? Do we know what traits are 'better' in a man to attract a woman? Do we know what 'type' of woman gets the most men? Or does that even apply, given we have free will?

(I'm asking those question in a clinical manner. I honestly don't mean to offend. I just don't know how else to put that concept...)

I think the creationist crowd is missing out on the possibility of founding a sound, modern, relevant philosophical debate here- one that transcends religion and philosophy because, if we are altering our own evolution, such concepts regarding what, genetically, makes the human race 'better' (and by whose interpretation that 'better' is defined, biologically) are going to become very important to the mid to long term survival of our own species. That, of course, assumes we don't destroy ourselves first, but it's still a very true 'problem', especially as we learn more and more about human genetics, in a 'hard science' sense.

The RAMA series should be required reading in our schools. Well- some of it. But I digress.

If we are altering our own evolution, I think we need to be either of the following:

a) Intentionally, extremely careful, a single gene a generation at a time at the maximum, starting many, many decades from now, and wait looooooong periods in between. Making humanity genetically immune to cancer would be an extremely good thing for our species from a propagation (or, as you may, a 'go forth and multiply') standpoint, but we already know that the wrong mutations can cause unexpected, horrifying, and ultimately fatal consequences to the organisms resulting from those genes if the mutation is somehow harmful. Think extra, useless limbs and so forth.

Could be a bad idea.

b) Completely ignorant and totally subconscious. That is, in fact, the route we may be taking right now, if our sudden, massive use of (for example) fingers for typing in the long run results in stronger finger joints (an example). Nature selects, but I doubt we fully understand the selection mechanism right now, if we ever will: even animal brains (other, smaller mammals) operate on the same principles ours do. It's wetware, operating in real time. If there's an algorithm that describes that behavior, I wouldn't want to be the one who needs to fully understand it.

However, if our evolution is already happening (and remember, it's a constant process in other species; there's no reason to assume that's untrue for humans), our own behavior will eventually cause the species to evolve in that behavior's direction. There isn't any reason at all to assume that homo sapiens will not naturally divide into something like homo sapiens and homo deductious (the latter being those descendants of people who spent a great deal of time on computers, over hundreds of generations), and that's only one subspecies that could develop. Maybe.

The upshot of this whole long ramble is this: if God exists, why isn't evolution that Deity's perfect tool for guaranteeing the continuance of life, including humans? It's built in, a self-altering biological system that, in the end, is almost impossible to extinguish short of the complete destruction of its environment once it starts.

Cockroaches. Yeah.

This is why I love the concept of evolution: nobody can deny that it happens as long as life happens. It's a perfect mechanism, which is why I don't understand the creationist objections.

Why don't these people see it as simply Godly, and leave it at that?