Please note: This is very much a work in progress! Please read, enjoy, and then write me some feedback to BG2006 @ whiteworld. com. I'm particularly interested in which parts you find interesting and which parts you find confusing. Both are things I want to know to make this better. Thanks --Roger
The future of mankind's genes is mostly a mystery. But there are some changes we can speculate on based what I've been talking about in the previous chapters of this book.
Mankind's Gene Pool is about to be edited. Thanks to the numerous advances in understanding about genes and the new tools we are developing to manipulate DNA, evolution is going to have a partner in changing the genes of humans and the species humans care about: that partner is the genetic editing tool.
How much difference will genetic editing make to the Living Library? To get a feel for what kinds of changes genetic editing will bring to mankind, lets consider a previous human dream that has been realized: the dream of flying. Flying was inspired by birds. Seagulls were long the symbol of great fliers, and the humans who did the most to turn human flying from a dream into reality were inspired by watching seagulls soar through the air.
Seagulls inspired jet airplanes. But... do jet airplanes look like or perform like seagulls? Not much! Jets are different in size, airframe construction, power source and performance. About all that seagulls and jets have in common are that they both fly, and that seagulls were the inspiration for jets.
We can expect this same kind of relation between the changes that human gene editing produces and the changes that evolution produces: both are changing DNA, but that's where the similarity ends. What humans produce with their changes to DNA is going to be wildly different from what evolution produces. It's going to be different in goals, techniques and results. The results are going to be so different that the current ethics questions concerning genetic engineering are essentially nonsense questions... but they are very important questions because how we answer them will strongly affect genetic engineering progress.
Gene manipulation has become a subject of science fiction and popular speculation. Lets consider another technology that was long the subject of science fiction and popular speculation: robot technology. What people have long expected robot technology to produce was a "robot butler" -- something like an Isaac Asimov, humanoid-looking, positronic-brained, "I, Robot" robot. That robot butler has long been an expected result of robot technology, but it has never appeared, and is increasing unlikely to do so. What has appeared in real life is a sophisticated painting machine which has very little in common with the I, Robot concept. Butlering... now called personal training... is still a very human activity. In the same way, the changes that gene editing will bring to human civilization will be very important, but will have little to do with the creating of clones that so worries contemporary science fiction.
The questions that people ask about genetic engineering ethics are important because mankind can "walk away" from a technology and choose not to use it. Technology advance and civilization advance are not inevitable. As I stated earlier in this book, the choice of embracing agriculture was not quick or inevitable -- mankind could have remained a successful hunter-gatherer for many more generations. Likewise, in the first half of the twentyfirst century that are still many, many communities where large sections of the community are unknowingly disputing the value of industrializing their communities.
My example of a contemporary failed technology is nuclear power.
"What?" you say, "Failed? We have lots of nuclear power in power plants."
"Yes." I say, "Failed, because that's all we have: big-power-plant nuclear power... and even those power plants are viewed with great fear."
Nuclear power should have spread far and wide. It should be helping us in big energy situations, such as power plants, and in tiny energy situations, such as medical implants. It should be all over the place.
Why isn't it? What happened? I will give an example from my experience.
In the 1970's the University of Utah was doing research on artificial hearts. My future wife was working there at the time, working with the animals that carried the experimental hearts and heart valves that the researchers were producing. I was in love with her at the time, and I liked science, so we hung around the labs and listened to the scientists talk.
One of the common discussion topics was powering the artificial heart. It turns out that the natural heart is a surprisingly efficient pump: it puts out a lot of pumping power, it doesn't damage blood while it's doing it's pumping, and it does this pumping in a small amount of space.
One of the energy sources considered for the artificial heart was nuclear power. But, it was considered only briefly. As one researcher told me, "We would have had to file about ten linear feet of paperwork just to get an OK to bring nuclear materials here to the lab. We wanted to solve a heart problem, not a paperwork problem." Because of the massive paperwork and procedures, nuclear power was not seriously considered for the artificial heart, and this is a fine example of a technology being rejected.
This kind of thing happens most often to a technology that captures community attention and becomes important in the general community's eyes long before applications from the technology actually appear. Such a technology has, what I call, The Curse of Being Important. It means that the early stage of the technology -- the stage when the first hot applications must appear if the technology is to be accepted -- is saddled with lots of overlooking worrywarts. The worrywarts cause two things to happen: first, the overall growth of the technology is stunted because of added expense and idea squelching that massive reporting and safeguarding causes, and second, only big projects -- projects that can sustain lots of paperwork -- are considered feasible.
Compare the lack of flowering of the nuclear industry to the fantastic flowering of the personal computer industry. The early personal computers -- those developed in the late seventies and early eighties -- were considered toys by industry veterans and on-lookers. As a result the early PC developers could design very simple systems and worry little about safeguards. The result of this high simplicity and low worry was a huge flowering of applications: word processors, spreadsheets and dozens of styles of computer games, to name just a few. As personal computers became networked and business-oriented, the "golden era" ended -- drowned by security and complexity issues.
Genetic Engineering suffers from The Curse of Being Important. This means that it's growth is going to be stunted, and many smaller projects that could produce very interesting results are going to wither and not even be considered because of paperwork and safeguarding expenses. But, even with that terrible curse, things will come of it. And what comes from it will bear as much relation to evolution as a seagull does to an airplane. The fruits of genetic engineering will be full of surprises, and look nothing like the fruits of evolution. Don't expect an X-Man to come from genetic engineering, expect a new plastic.
That said, what I will now talk about are the problems evolution will continue to work on -- how is our gene pool being pushed by human selection of human mates?
Humanity is pushing the human gene pool harder than ever. Some things are being weeded out, and some things are being added. The weeding out process is easier to see and easier to understand. Here are some ways that I see mankind is pushing the human gene pool.
Perhaps the strongest push on the gene pool is the push on thinking. Almost all parents who have children want their children to marry a doctor... or be one. This kind of thinking will continue to push the gene pool towards smarter and more successful humans. Because we are a boom species, more successful means "more successful in the civilized environment."
People have always cared a lot about how other people look. But, when killers such as disease, domestic violence and war are common, how people look doesn't matter as much as surviving disease, poverty and war. As those problems become a smaller part of daily life, appearance can matter more and more. As mankind becomes prosperous and civilized, appearance matters more in selection, so bad appearance is being selected out.
The things that are being strengthened in the gene pool are not as obvious as those that are being weeded out. Adding is always a surprising activity. That said, here are some things that I see are being added.