The madcap race to tinker with Frankenstein. Delusions of Darwinian times.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/152/focus/Better_babies_+.shtml Better babies? Why genetic enhancement is too unlikely to worry about By Steven Pinker, 6/1/2003 THIS YEAR, THE 50th ANNIVERSARY of the discovery of the structure of DNA has kindled many debates about the implications of that knowledge for the human condition. Arguably the most emotionally charged is the debate over the prospect of human genetic enhancement, or ''designer babies.'' It's only a matter of time, many say, before parents will improve their children's intelligence and personality by having suitable genes inserted into them shortly after conception.
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It is hard to see how current genetic biology could even manage a project of human genetic enhancement in the current confusion of biological theory. Such a hope, in the context of positivist reductionism, is simply delusional about man, and his evolution. The worst fallacy is the one-sidedness of the narrow meritocratic world of contemporary technological civilization and its smart-stupid propensity, dominated by the whiz syndrome. This group cannot apparently by any means grasp its own history of theory, see the limits of Darwinian theory, critique the same in a context of media domination by Big Science, or escape the implications of human history whose inherited lore of man is simply eliminated from consideration.
The problem is that the self of man is not a tangible entity open to scientific examination. The last of the breed to point it out was Schopenhauer. Then the Ice Age started, frozen minds trying to do science on anything that moves into couch potato range.
Since genetics is the one thing that looks like it might succeed amidst these failures it is especially confusing.
To presume to tinker with the genetics in any general sense is surely misguided thinking, which does not preempt reasonable enquiry into, say, genetic medicine and the like. But man, who is man? And from whence did the man discovered by such as the Buddhists millennia ago, and before, come, with respect to evolution?
We keep getting told Wallace was some kind of nut. But he is coresponsible for this theory, and he blew the whistle because he saw the danger. One need not endorse his views to wish to insist on some plain thinking about what's what here.
The obsessive scientism of current biological and Darwinian evolutionary theory is unrepentantly obstinate in its thinking. How do you get through to this mindset? And yet as Wallace suspected, something is awry in the whole history of the Darwinian account of man. Are these people just lemmings?
One fallacy is the belief in the one-to-one correlation of genetics and achievement, speaking historically.
Yet it is not hard to show that a great deal of human creative advance is correlated with a macrohistorical factor. Witness my eonic effect. Current science and culture is too stuck in the Nobel Prize and Next Einstein syndrome to see the limits of its thinking.
This issue is outlined in the eonic model where the temporal sequence of creative breakthroughs is correlated very strongly with an elusive high level process. Thus the greatest breakthroughs are bound up in a form of historical evolution that current theory simple refuses to consider or allow. And yet the evidence is overwhelming.
For a short version of this argument, cf. http://eonix.8m.com/intro_6.htm. The Greek Miracle so-called in the period after Archaic Greece is one of the most brilliant in history. Is this genetic genius at work, exclusively?
This period, which actually misled Darwin, is easy to show as correlated with a large scale historical effect, rather than solely to the abilities of individuals.
The point here is that Darwinian genetics is out in left field, and apparently happy to stay there.
In general, current Darwin-dominated culture is so far off the mark as to theory that it is unnerving to contemplate the whole idea of genetic enhancement.
The most unnerving thing is that no matter how many times you point to the problem with current biology the more obstinate scientists seem to get.
They need a severe awakening, and a good spell in something like a Zen monatery, and some study of history, and the greater heritage of evolutionary psychology, before the current bogus theory junk of the sociobiologists came to the fore. Was E.O. Wilson a hopeless idiot or what?
Man is in a poor position to 'know himself', in the noumenal mystery of his total organism, and the delusion over genetic issues current and at such a primitive level of scientism has become a danger to the whole of general culture. I wouldn't rule out a contribution of genetics to that. But unless you figure out where you are going wrong you can't advance anywhere near that.