I just watched Gregory Stock give a talk about genetic engineering over at TED Talks, and I could help remarking that he seems to be pretty old fashioned for someone in the biotech industry. No presentation slides, just plain old speech and a paper notebook.
He’s a good talker — he kneads the audience nicely and references quotes that don’t even have to be relevant to sound pretty deep (some Shakespeare in this case) — but he doesn’t really make any good points. All he says is “it’s inevitable, therefore we should do it”. Equivalently, “let’s not kid ourselves, we’re going to destroy this planet anyways, so don’t bother trying to stop it”. Well, no, sorry Mr. Stock but nothing is inevitable, nothing is written. No, not even choosing our babies through a Sims 3-like interface. But I suppose as a biotech entrepreneur you’ve got the right to be a little biased about this.
I’m surprised he didn’t mention is what I think is actually an extremely good argument for embracing this technology with open arms: there hasn’t been a major release of the human genome for a good 200,000 years. That makes us the biological equivalent of, I dunno, Internet Explorer 2. And to think that there’s all this fuss about IE 6 nowadays! My point is that we humans weren’t built for this new world, and that’s why I think everything is so royally fucked up. Honestly, imagine trying to browse the modern internet on an ancient browser that may or may not have been a piece of shit to begin with.
The perfect metaphor for the current state of the human race.
Why is everybody so fat? Because we weren’t built with the capability to limit our sugar and fat intakes. While we went through our major stages of evolution, we could barely find enough calories to survive, and anything extra was more than welcome. And nowadays? You can get off your ass, right now, and go to the nearest corner store to buy a three pound bag of white sugar for about $2. Then you can sit there and eat the whole damn thing, there just isn’t anything to stop you from doing it.
What about racism? Unfortunately, interacting with people who look different than you didn’t make it into Human 1.0. Indifference to climate change? We only used to have to deal with things on a very local level. Back then, it made sense for everyone to do what was best for themselves, or their family, or at most their tribe. But now, the actions of powerful individuals can contribute to the destruction of our entire world, something we were never really built to understand. The thought of cavemen worrying about something on such a large scale is positively ridiculous. And, that’s the problem — we’re still cavemen. Cavemen living on a globalized and industrialized earth.
So the way I see it, there’s only so much we can accomplish with these bodies and minds from another age. Maybe we have to change ourselves first, and then we can start work on the world? Here we are, cavemen, trying to be civilized together, when all we were really meant to do was club each other over the head. Sure, there are dangers, but as long as we know what we’re doing, we don’t rush things, we do it right, and for the right reasons, couldn’t changing our genetic makeup be the only answer to human kind’s biggest problems?
