Playing God–Synthetic Biology

Adam Rutherford wrote about synthetic biology in the Guardian (7.27) http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/27/synthetic-biology-playing-god-vital-future about scientific breakthroughs in genetic modification (GM) and the particularly strident criticisms that have come from many quarters concerning this innovative and far-reaching technology.  For years critics and lay people alike have resisted any kind of modification in plant or animal DNA, expressing fears that once the ‘real’ thing disappeared and was replaced by a human-tinkered product, the planet would be doomed. 

Dracula corn, Mephistopheles wheat, and poor Dolly the Sheep would reproduce and spread quickly and completely; and when some glitch in their recombination inevitably showed up, we would have no way to repopulate the land with good, old-fashioned, American plants and animals.  This, of course, with no regard to the benefits realized from GM  such as the rapid production of insulin, insect resistant wheat, fast-growing rice, and a whole host of other improved plants, animals, and medicines.

Environmentalists, religious figures and sections of the media regularly use the phrase as a handy stick with which to beat those in the field. Scientists, they claim, are foolishly meddling in matters that should be left to the gods or nature.

That accusation has been made in attacks against many of the major scientific advances of the modern era, including Watson and Crick's description of the structure of DNA in 1953; the birth of the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, in 1978; the creation of Dolly the sheep in 1997 and the sequencing of the human genome in 2001. In all these scenarios, it's not clear exactly what "playing God" actually means.

It is not hard to imagine the fear and outrage caused by synthetic biology.  Not only are scientists tampering with ‘the real thing’, they are creating a totally artificial ‘thing’, letting loose into the environment even more distorted, deformed, and ghoulish varieties of things we consume.

If there were those who said we were playing God when it came to recombining DNA, substituting a few fragments of one organism for those in the nucleus of e-coli, there are legions more who are convinced that the human race has finally, once-and-for-all, crossed the heretical line dividing God’s prerogatives and ours.  At the same time, they ignore the benefits:

Researchers in California, for example, have created synthetic circuits for yeast cells that produce a chemical called artemisinin, a key anti-malarial drug. This will be cheaper than getting it from the plant Artemisia annua, the current production method.

Nasa is investigating ways to create bacteria that counter the effects of radiation sickness in astronauts. Meanwhile, a US–Swiss group has engineered a genetic circuit designed to detect and destroy cancer cells without inflicting the unintended damage caused by chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

Synthetic biology is but the latest in a series of human attempts to ‘play God’:

Yet there is almost no aspect of human behaviour that isn't some form of manipulation of the environment for our own purposes. Farming, which we've been doing for more than 10,000 years, is quite the opposite of natural. Breeding, known scientifically as "artificial selection", is the process of mixing genes by design to engineer cheap and plentiful food.

Detractors use the phrase "playing God" to provoke emotive opposition without defining what it is about synthetic biology that is qualitatively different to the previous advances that they enjoy and benefit from every day. Should we go back to the time before humans started playing God through their development of sanitation, vaccines and measures to counter widespread child mortality?

This is a very simple and elegant argument in favor of scientific achievement and progress.  Human beings, because of our evolved state of intelligence, curiosity, enterprise, and self-preservation, have always looked for ways to change the environment in which we have lived and always will.  As importantly, there has never been a scientific discovery which offered significant benefits to humanity that has been rejected and buried for moral, ethical, or religious reasons.  Scientific discovery has a life of its own, particularly in a country like America where we value progress and human betterment overall.  Heresy and apostasy are things of the past, and burning people at the stake for antisocial behavior and novel ideas is finished; but the inheritors of 17th Century New England are still alive and well and still want to burn – figuratively, of course – those who want to ‘play God’.  Stem cell research is currently in their cross-hairs; and once they figure out what geneticists are doing, they will add their fundamentalist voices to the liberal ‘progressive’ environmentalists on the Coasts.

Our social and philosophical conservatism is everywhere.  Virtual reality is still seen only within the context of adolescent computer games; but when these same conservative fundamentalists get wind of the eventual brain-computer link which will allow us to live exclusively in a computer-mediated virtual world where any combination of fantasy, reality, and history becomes the coin of the realm, the opposition will be incendiary.

All to no avail, of course, because scientific discoveries are both the result of consumer demand and shapers of it.  Scientists will develop virtuality because we want it; and each new technological advance will stimulate more demand.  The same with synthetic biology.  Eventually we will be able to create totally synthetic human beings modeled and crafted according to our own very human vision.  Will they still be human?  Of course.  The transformation will be progressive and incremental; and at each stage of development, there will be a brief firefight between religion and practicality.  Practicality – satisfying consumer demand – will always win.

Walmart Is Good For You

Walmart does what American consumers want – provide quality goods at rock-bottom prices.  This enables people at the lower end of the economic scale to free disposable income for other expenditures such as health, child care, and education.  Despite ill-placed community opposition to Walmart expansion into underserved, poor urban areas, these new stores will be a boon to residents who have always been hostage to overpriced small businesses which, in order to stay in business, operate on the margins – passé food, products near their pull-by dates, and low-nutrition staples with high profit margins.

There is no doubt that these small enterprises will suffer when Walmart enters a neighborhood, but such has been the way of small business for 100 years. The recent example of Eastern Europe is relevant.  Right after the fall of the Soviet Union, kiosks sprang up on street corners in Bucharest, Sofia, and Tbilisi.  They offered a potpourri of items – a bottle of whisky, hairpins, and a few ballpoints.  As incomes rose and demand grew, these kiosks were replaced by small stores which offered a greater selection at a better price.  Eventually these small stores gave way to mini-marts and super-mini-marts which offered even greater selection at lower prices.  Even France, despite untenable subsidies to support small business, has gone the way of the countries around it and supermarkets are in every neighborhood.

Walmart-bashing has been going on for years, despite the company’s reforms.  While it has been attacked for eliminating health care benefits for part-time workers, it maintains a reasonable plan for full-time workers.  While many businesses have taken this step, it is: a) good and common business practice to reduce costs where possible, especially in a recession; and b) the problem is with the American health care system, or lack of it.  If we had universal health coverage to which all Americans contributed and from which all benefitted, the cost to individual businesses – now staggeringly high – would be reduced.  Employees of all categories would benefit and the companies would be more competitive with European firms which are covered by the state.

Part-time workers, far from the exploited masses as they are often described, fall into the ‘involuntary” (work part-time for economic reasons) and ‘voluntary’ (work for avocation, supplement family income, students, etc.).  According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics Report (http://bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t08.htm) the number of voluntary part-time workers is over twice that of involuntary workers.

Part-time work is beneficial to both employer and employee.  The employer can hire at low-cost and retain the flexibility to staff up or down depending on the economy and the market.  The part-time employee benefits because he/she can get some kind of employment in a down market, gain experience, and work-related credibility.

Walmart has also been criticized for its low wages, often very little above minimum wage; but it is not alone among businesses trying to cut costs, increase sales, and maximize profits.  Why should Walmart pay employees more than the market demands?  It benefits hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers who could not get a job elsewhere.  Moreover, despite the immigration hysteria, Latino immigrants like their European counterparts before them work at low-paying jobs where English and urban-type skills are not required, and within a generation speak English, acquire education, and are more employable.  Is economic mobility as fast as can be hoped.  No, but this has more to do with the deficient public educational system, a broken health care system that forces unfair out-of-pocket expenses, and an insatiable consumer demand for cheap products which forces companies to pay low wages. 

In other words, Walmart will rely more on well-paid workers when illegal immigrants return to Mexico (which they are now doing because of the rapid growth rate of that country and the poor economic performance here), when health care no longer becomes a burden, and when disciplined, efficient, and high-productivity workers are the norm not the exception. 

The Guardian article picks on Walmart for yet another reason – abusive practices in the supply chain.  While the customer sees only huge stores with cheap goods, Walmart management sees the supply chain.  It must scour the market for goods at the lowest price at the highest quality; ship them from manufacturer to the consumer in the fastest and cheapest way possible; manage inventory and cash flow as efficiently as possible; and tune labor and capital to a delicate balance.  Of course truckers and warehouse employees are also paid low wages for long hours, but they are subject to the same laws of the marketplace as Walmart – they have turned their backs on corrupt unions and demanded open shops, thus losing the strong-arm protection that they once had; and they are subject to the same vagaries of the marketplace as anyone else. Juan De Lara writing in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/25/walmart-human-cost-low-price-goods laments:

Reports from warehouse workers and truck drivers in places like Chicago and southern California show how the ruthless pursuit of low-cost goods has also created a downward spiral for workers who distribute consumer goods in the United States.

The ‘reports’, or one article from The American Prospect, has no solutions other than mass protests, community sensitization, government intervention.  The truckers who operate under the same conditions as Walmart employees with low wages and minimal benefits are being exploited; and since everything else has failed and the government has not come running to the rescue, the only way to rectify the situation is to resort to old-style union activism:

For now, however, Change to Win's strategy is to enlist the entire community of warehouse workers, perms and temps both, on the theory that a significant disruption of the retailers' supply chains will compel them to come to terms, whatever the workers' classification. It's an all-or-nothing campaign. "You have to build a campaign like the janitors had, that gets and enforces a communitywide contract. We'd want a $15 hourly minimum with health benefits," says Tom Woodruff, who heads the federation's organizing center in Washington, D.C. "You'd have to organize it all -- the whole industry out there. Of course, you'd have to be half crazy to do it." http://prospect.org/article/shipping-point

This of course will never work.  Even if the truckers could be organized in a way that even approximated by a tenth the organization of Jimmy Hoffa, today’s consuming public would never stand for ‘significant disruption of the retailers’ supply chains’. 

What is amazing to me is that with the level of imports flowing into this country, swelling our trade deficit by the hour, these truckers are still working for low wages.  That is, Walmart and their customers depend on, rely on the movement of freight.  Who is responsible for the current shift in balance of power from labor to management?  Is it the ‘predatory’ practices of businesses alone? Or do labor and the American consumer share in the cast of the phenomenon? 

Walmart, Nike, Apple and other big multinational corporations have been unfairly attacked for what have been called ‘substandard’ labor practices in China and other countries in Asia.  It is the governments of these countries – and, by the way, China is a big boy now – who set these standards and must balance workers rights and benefits against the rigors of international competition.  If China doesn’t offer Nike a good deal, the company will go to Indonesia.  If the standards are lower there, whose fault is that?

The third force in this calculus is the American consumer.  Successful marketing campaigns have been developed to shame Nike, Apple, and others into assuring ‘fair, just, sustainable’ products, and they have renegotiated contracts with their suppliers and subcontractors to accommodate this concern. Walmart has been somewhat immune from this lobbying because of two factors – first, it subcontracts with tens of thousands of suppliers all over the globe.  Even the best-meaning social activist cannot possibly track labor conditions in all of these.  Second, brands like Apple and Nike are high-end product manufacturers.  If I am paying $200 for a sneaker, then I want to be sure it is produced properly and I don’t mind paying a few cents more.  Walmart is just the opposite – it offers thousands of low-cost products and makes its profit through volume.  In other words a moving target on two fronts.  So it continues to negotiate legal contracts in countries who alone are responsible for the welfare of their workers.

The Guardian article argues against itself in the following passage but inadvertently raises an important point:

Consuming mountains of cheap goods has also produced huge environmental costs, particularly for poor communities located close to distribution hubs. According to the California Air Resources Board, an estimated 3,700 Californians die every year because of medical issues related to the diesel ships, trucks and trains that deliver the goods we consume.

Which way do you want it? Truckers working at higher wages because of increased volume of traffic, belching tons of pollutants into the air? Or depressed demand, lower wages, cleaner environment?

The inadvertent point is that the American consumer, often thought of as the innocent receiver/purchaser of goods, is in fact the prime culprit in environmental pollution and low wages.  We want a kaleidoscopic array of products; and we want continual upgrades, novelty, and change.  We want all this as cheaply as possible, so we support the federal subsidies which keep water cheap, roads and gasoline cheap, energy cheap.  We don’t really care about low-wage workers – at least those of us in Washington or other corridors of power – and want what the consumer wants…And, of course, the shareholder.

The Guardian writer concludes with the most idealistic, pie-in-the-sky, faded ‘Progressive’ litany of idle hopes I have seen in an otherwise serious newspaper:

All of this proves that our seemingly individual and private decisions to buy cheap products can generate huge social costs. But history tells us that blue-collar warehouse work doesn't have to mean poverty wages and bad working conditions. In fact, workers have often turned blue-collar jobs into decent employment by organizing for safe conditions and fair pay. As consumers, we can help these efforts by demanding that Walmart and other retailers adopt ethical labor and environmental standards, for both foreign suppliers and domestic distribution workers. Walmart certainly isn't the only company to employ poor hiring practices, but its massive global reach and sophisticated distribution innovations have made it a powerful force in the global goods movement industry.

American Pragmatism And The Enlightenment

Michael Roth has written http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinion/america-the-philosophical-by-carlin-romano/2012/07/21/gJQAMANR0W_story.html  a review of America The Philosophical by Carlin Romano, a book which focuses on American pragmatism.

Carlin Romano has a story to tell about philosophy and about America. Romano, a critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Chronicle of Higher Education, relates how philosophy long ago took the wrong path by seeking ultimate Truth, and how this quest has led academic philosophers to become increasingly detached from the concerns of just about everybody else. While philosophy pursued purity, American culture in the last century became ever messier — more heterogeneous, dynamic and difficult to categorize. Then, as the white, Protestant, elite culture broke down and diverse groups found their ways into universities and media networks, some philosophers and most of the culture abandoned the quest for Truth and focused on expanding the circles of inquiry and discussion.

What interests me most in this pragmatist take on American philosophy is how far we have come from Jefferson and The Age of Enlightenment

The Enlightenment began then, from the belief in a rational, orderly and comprehensible universe—then proceeded, in stages, to form a rational and orderly organization of knowledge and the state… This began from the assertion that law governed both heavenly and human affairs, and that law invested the king with his power, rather than the king's power giving force to law. The conception of law as a relationship between individuals, rather than families, came to the fore, and with it the increasing focus on individual liberty as a fundamental right of man, given by "Nature and Nature's God," which, in the ideal state, would encompass as many people as possible. Thus The Enlightenment extolled the ideals of liberty, property and rationality which are still recognizable as the basis for most political philosophies even in the present era; that is, of a free individual being mostly free within the dominion of the state whose role is to provide stability to those natural laws (University of Alabama, CIS, Birmingham)

Richard Rorty, reviewer Roth’s hero, is the most recent exponent of pragmatism, which is no more than an apologia for post-modernism:

[Postmodernism] affirms that whatever we accept as truth and even the way we envision truth are dependent on the community in which we participate . . . There is no absolute truth: rather truth is relative to the community in which we participate (Stanley Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism)

Richard Rorty insists that there is no "skyhook" which takes us out of our subjective conditions to reveal a reality existing independently of our own minds or of other human minds…There is no "God’s eye standpoint" that reveals reality in itself.  Each person interprets reality in accordance with his own subjective condition… He emphasizes the social influence upon the individual and his beliefs. Truth… is an inter-subjective agreement among the members of a community… The end of inquiry, for Rorty, is not the discovery or even the approximation of absolute truth but the formulation of beliefs that further the solidarity of the community, or "to reduce objectivity to solidarity. (Dean Geuras, SW Texas State University)

In other words, we have gone from a country that believed in the rational discovery of truth and the laws that govern the world and the societies which comprise it to one in which there are no truths but those defined by society.  Society becomes the all-important element in life, the arbiter of all.  No longer any truths that are self-evident, derived from universal laws and ultimately from God, but from a randomly aggregated collection of individuals. Indeed. 

Yorty, however, is the most extreme of the American pragmatists – as post-modernism is the most extreme perspective on modern life.  Others in the movement, such as William James respect much more the practical and understandable and very recognizable elements of American thought.

Pragmatism is an American philosophy from the early 20th century. According to Pragmatism, the truth or meaning of an idea or a proposition lies in its observable practical consequences rather than anything metaphysical. It can be summarized by the phrase “whatever works, is likely true.” Because reality changes, “whatever works” will also change — thus, truth must also be changeable and no one can claim to possess any final or ultimate truth (About.com)

In his lecture, "What Pragmatism Means," William James explains pragmatism as a method to make sense of everyday experiences, facts, and data. Pragmatism is not an end in itself, but an attitude or way of thinking. There is no end point in pragmatism, since pragmatism is only a method of understanding. Truths are constantly being discarded or modified as they are attempted to be applied to practice. Pragmatism seeks to steer philosophy away from its traditional method of seeking solutions to arguments, to using philosophy as a way to gain a clearer understanding of nature. Since pragmatism is based on practical consequences, all ideas are accepted. Pragmatism utilizes metaphysics, rationalism, empiricism, and religion in order to provide better tools for clearer understanding.(Helium.com)

[James said that] beliefs are considered to be true if and only if they are
useful and can be practically applied. At one point in his works, James
states, “. . . the ultimate test for us of what a truth means is the conduct it
dictates or inspires.” (Reading for Philosophical Inquiry, Introduction)

This is more sensible and very American.  “If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it must be a duck”.  No funny business, no metaphysics or getting back to first principles or truth; just good old common sense. 

John Dewey was perhaps the most accessible American philosopher because he applied his theories to the ‘real world’, especially education:

[Dewey claimed that] since problems are constantly changing, the instruments for dealing with them must also change. Truth, evolutionary in nature, partakes of no transcendental or eternal reality and is based on experience that can be tested and shared by all who investigate. Dewey conceived of democracy as a primary ethical value, and he did much to formulate working principles for a democratic and industrial society.

In education his influence has been a leading factor in the abandonment of authoritarian methods and in the growing emphasis upon learning through experimentation and practice. In revolt against abstract learning, Dewey considered education as a tool that would enable the citizen to integrate culture and vocation effectively and usefully. Dewey actively participated in movements to forward social welfare and woman’s suffrage, protect academic freedom, and effect political reform. (Roebuckclasses.com)

Dewey reflected the thoughts of co-pragmatist C.S. Peirce:

Peirce regards pragmaticism (his invented word) as a method of clarifying conceptions. His basic principle is that the meaning of ideas is best discovered by putting them to an experimental test and then observing the consequences. He was especially interested in methodological procedure as evidenced in laboratory sciences. He maintained that the testing of hypotheses by the laboratory experimentation will produced a definite type of experience. Hence the complete definition of any concept is the totality of the experimental occurrences implied in that concept by logical meaning (chrisne.wordpress.com)

The problem with all four – James, Dewey, Peirce, and especially Yorty – is that they miss what Jefferson and his peers understood:  there are such things as universal moral and ethical principles which have served as guides to human behavior for millennia.  While the interpretation of these principles varies by historical era, the principles themselves have not changed.  Jefferson perhaps best expressed his interpretation of these universal principles when he enunciated his thoughts on “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.  The pursuit of happiness was not some selfish, individualistic enterprise, but a higher goal – one that aimed at the happiness of the larger society of which the individual was a part.  Locke insisted that there was a responsibility of individuals to supersede their venal desires and look to the common weal.   In other words, Locke understood the importance of the individual operating within a moral and ethical framework – one that had not varied since the beginning of history.  In fact, philosophers of the Enlightenment in accordance with their rational study of facts to reveal universal laws looked to history for insights.  They were not very happy at what they saw, of course – depredation, pillage, naked power and expansionism, and the trampling of individual rights at ever turn – and therefore the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights expressed ways to oppose tyranny and despotism

Dewey’s educational approach and Peirce’s scientific inquiry method seem harmless enough.  Who could be opposed to experimentation, trial and error, no a priori judgments, and objectivity?  Yet, both espouse a form of relativism which is troubling.  What schools – and communities at large – need is not more relativism but less.  As in all societies, there need to be certain fundamental anchors or fulcra around which social and individual enterprise is undertaken.  To claim, as many post-modernists do, that there is no such thing as universal truths or one consensual reality, misses the point.  One does not have to believe in God, as the men of the 18th Century did, as the originator of natural and human law, to believe in truths.  Certain principles of moral and ethical behavior – fairness, honor, justice, equality, respect, and many others – do not have to be God-given to be valid.  And valid they have been as regulators/motivators of human enterprise since forever.

It is weird to even put ‘America The Philosophical’ in a sentence.  We are as far from a philosophical people as can be.  Imagine Joe the Plumber sitting down with Pete the Carpenter at a café discussing Kant.  I am not sure the men in working bleus do either, but the program Apostrophes, a shamelessly talking-heads intellectual feast of ideas, was one of the most popular on French television for a long time.  OK, this all was before privatization, but viewers could have turned the set off if they didn’t like what was on.

This doesn’t mean that we Americans do not act according to philosophical principles.  We do, but just don’t know it.  The cultural relativists who promote diversity and the inclusion of all gender-race-ethnicity-religion points of view as equals do not think of themselves as American Pragmatists, just ‘doing the right thing’.  They have been motivated by the still-influential post-modernist academic establishment, but school administrators have themselves bought into the very practical approach to an increasingly heterogeneous society.  Such relativist inclusivity is not the only way, as I have argued, but one way.

Talk about old-fashioned! Wanting to return to the 18th Century tops them all; but I am in good company.  The Romans, like Dewey, reformed education; but unlike him, they understood the basic principles of proper behavior and trained their young leaders-to-be in the theories of Cato the Elder – justice, honor, discipline, fairness, equality were important to the ruled and should be important to the ruling.  Sound familiar?  Western Civilization is one relatively unbroken series of applications of and improvement on the democracy of the Greeks and the administration of the Romans.  Anglo-Saxon law and the English and Scottish Enlightenments were perhaps the apogee of this trajectory.

So, it is fine to be pragmatic; but it is also important to be constantly aware of those principles which guide individual behavior within society.