“The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress.”
– Issac Asimov
Been there; done that. With agriculture and the directed breeding of numerous species of animals and plants, we’ve had a long history of genetic engineering, giving us distinct survival advantage. Science came to our consciousness giving us understanding of the physical and microbial world, allowing us to cure many of the great diseases in human history. Life spans were extended and so to our ability to circumvent hereditary ailments as well as improve our resistances to disease. All along, our social orders have exercised war, eugenics, slavery, and poverty upon various races and populations.
And now, with technologies on the horizon including man-machine “wet-wire” interfaces, bio-computers, nanotechnology, advancement of stem cell therapies, and artificial tissue generation, among others, being employed to fight disease or enhance human abilities. With the growth of genetic understanding and the ability to sequence genes, would we somehow integrate such technologies into the human genome as a delivery mechanism for some cure? A genetic cure might be introduced at an embryonic level with the ability to be passed to your children. Or, we may engineer people to work more effectively in space or on Mars.
I would like to have the genetic modification to grow dark chocolate finger nails with candy coating. YES! Then my kids will have finger nails to harvest.
We invite you to weigh in on this subject as well as any of the following questions. Please leave your comments below.
- What can be said about the future of human evolution with these in mind?
- How can we distinguish natural selection from human directed selection?
- Has evolution fundamentally changed given human applied technologies and manipulations?
- What are the moral implications of life-saving genetic alteration that would impact heredity?
Don’t miss Wonderfest 2009 in November, where panel of scientist will debate “Is Evolution Still Darwinian?”
“A disquieting era of genetic manipulation is coming, one that may revolutionize human capacities…”
~ George F. Will
For further study:
- The Future of Man – How Will Evolution Change Humans
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-future-of-man- Book: Future Evolution
http://www.amazon.com/Future-Evolution-Peter-Ward/dp/0716734966- Human Evolution At the Crossroads
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7103668- The Third Chimpanzee – The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal
http://www.amazon.com/Third-Chimpanzee-Evolution-Future-Animal/dp/0060845503/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251822162&sr=8-1- Future Human Evolution Website
http://www.humansfuture.org
September 28th, 2009 - 10:02 pm
I can remember (it is my oldest memory) sitting in my highchair looking down at my mothers beaming face and I was a god in the nascent universe. I have long put away that childish dream. Now I am a part of the real world and I act in the real world. That means my acts are part of the evolutionary process. The things we do are part of that process. Not somehow outside of the world we inhabit. So we find a tuber growing in the wild and it is a source of starchy food for our family. So for generations our family grow this tuber and mostly eat the largest tubers, but some one plants his largest tuber hoping to get more of this larger type. and so the tubers we grow become larger, and as we repeat the process larger. This I put to you is evolution. The fittest, that is , largest have survived, and we were part of the process not outside of it.
March 8th, 2010 - 5:42 pm
The Scientific Method consists of observation and repeatable experimentation. Creation, by definition, was not observable by anyone within the bounds of this universe. And it is beyond our power to repeat the experiment. Therefore, the whole debate about origins is a philosophical, not scientific, debate. A basic philosophical axiom is that if your foundational assumptions are wrong, then the conclusions drawn from those assumptions are also wrong. Let’s examine the unprovable, foundational assumptions about each philosophy: Evolution states that in the beginning there was nothing, that became something, got itself organized, gave itself life, and then made itself better. Christianity states that in the beginning there was God, who created the world and everything in it in perfect harmony. Then Adam and Eve rebelled, and sin and death entered the world. But, “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” John 3:16 If you bbelieve in evolution based on faith, because the beginning is not verifiable. I believe in the God of the Bible based on faith, because the beginning is not verifiable. Which belief system requires the greater faith? I only know of One who there at the beginning. I choose to believe His first hand, written account, instead of placing my faith in the assumptions made by those who were not there at the beginning.