Enough Already

A leading environmentalist makes a foolish case against technological innovation.

Ronald Bailey from the October 2003 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

McKibben is obviously right when he declares, "genes do matter" (emphasis his). But they don't matter as much as McKibben thinks they do. Take the case of monozygotic twins who share exactly the same genes and were formed in the same womb at the same time. They are certainly not identical people. In fact, traits such as intelligence, personality, and even weight correlate only 60 percent to 70 percent between identical twins. That's much closer than with nonidentical siblings, but the variance is still quite a lot. Biology increasingly reveals that human individuality doesn't depend just on having different genes; it is the result of the interplay between genes and environment.

Genes order the production of different proteins in response to environmental influences such as schooling, physical training, infections, and nutrition. Human genes are the necessary recipes for making human brains and bodies, but brains and bodies are manifestly shaped by their experiences. It might be possible someday, using genetic engineering, to give a child a brain smart enough to understand why Heidegger is wrong, but there is no getting around the fact that he will have to undergo the experience of learning about Heidegger first. There are no genes for Heidegger debunking.

McKibben worries that gene-enhanced people will not be challenged. This is nonsense. Genetic engineering may ease some of life's burdens, much as electricity and indoor plumbing have, but it will by no means remove the bulk of the individual and social challenges humanity faces.

McKibben fears that our gene-enhanced progeny will know too much about themselves to stretch themselves to their limits and experience what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "flow." "Just refer to your design specs," he quips. Flow is that peak experience in which people lose themselves as they practice their hard-won skills in challenging activities such as chess, bond trading, or rock climbing.

Take the example of rock climbing. Would McKibben require that people free-climb Half Dome in Yosemite? Is their experience diminished because they are encumbered with technologies such as ropes, pitons, and freeze-dried foods? Similarly, a gene-enhanced climber would still find challenges that test her boosted physical capacities to their limits. Flow arises from internal challenges, being the best that you can be. This experience, along with the experiences of joy, hope, and love, will not cease because a person is genetically enhanced. However enhanced our descendants may become, there will remain no end of physical and mental challenges in the world against which they can test and measure themselves.

Human freedom cannot and does not rely on ignorance and randomness. Human freedom -- the capacity to make choices based on reason -- expands with knowledge. If you don't believe it, think about how humanity's greater knowledge of such things as the germ theory of disease and the atomic theory of matter have radically increased humankind's choices and freedom during the last two centuries. Most of us would agree that there has certainly been an improvement over our ancestors' world. That was a world filled with friendly and hostile animistic spirits, and one in which half of all children died before their first birthdays.

Similarly, knowledge about how our genes affect our behavior and how our brains are wired increases rather than limits our freedom. Prozac, for example, does not limit our choices; it gives depressed people the freedom to adjust their emotional state. Ignorance is not freedom. Knowledge is freedom; ignorance is slavery.

The alleged loss of meaning and the robotization of humanity are not McKibben's only concerns. He fears that genetic engineering will exacerbate inequality, even as he worries about homogenization.

In his first scenario, the rich will get access to safe genetic enhancements first, dramatically widening the gap between the rich and the poor. "The political equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence can't withstand the destruction of the idea that humans are in fact equal," writes McKibben.

But hold on. Are people "in fact equal"? There is nothing at all self-evident about physical human equality or equality of status. Some people are short, some tall; some fat, others thin; some strong, others weak; some poor, others rich; some brilliant, others dim. In other words, what we see is not self-evident equality, but human particularity and human individuality.

In what relevant respect are people equal? The modern ideals of democracy and political equality are sustained chiefly by the insight, developed by Enlightenment thinkers, that people are responsible moral agents who can distinguish right from wrong and therefore deserve equal consideration before the law and a respected place in our political community. The broad ability to distinguish right from wrong does not depend on the genetics of IQ, skin color, or gender. With respect to political equality, genetic differences are already differences that make no difference. Having some citizens who take advantage of genetic technologies and others who do not will not alter that principle.

When he's not propounding dystopian visions of genetically enhanced Übermenschen lording over poor naturals, McKibben is worried that genetic technologies will be adopted rapidly because they will become cheap and widely available. Given the rapid pace of technological change, the latter is more probable. Therefore, safe genetic engineering is much more likely to reduce inequality than exacerbate it. Parents will have the option of giving their children the same genes for good health and smarter brains that some children get randomly now. Is this homogenization? Perhaps in some sense it is, but a world in which more people are smarter and healthier could hardly be an ethical or social disaster.

But something worse than mere genetic engineering fills McKibben "with blackest foreboding": the prospect of physical immortality. "It would represent, finally, the ultimate and irrevocable divorce between ourselves and everything else," he asserts. "The divorce, first of all, between us and the rest of creation."

McKibben would do better to ask why we would want to stay married to Nature anyway. She has certainly been an inconstant wife, liberally afflicting us with nasty surprises such as birth defects, diseases, earthquakes, hurricanes, and famines. An amicable separation might be good for both Nature and humanity. The less we depend on Nature for our sustenance, the less harm we do her.

Setting that aside, why does McKibben believe that death is good for us? "Without mortality, no time," writes McKibben. "All moments would be equal; the deep, sad, human wisdom of Ecclesiastes would vanish. If for everything there is an endless season, then there is also no right season. The future stretches before you endlessly flat."