With Human Genome Project's recent announcement about the virtually complete mapping of our DNA, we have entered the realm of evolutionary time. The announcement of the intervention into the biological time of evolution also puts us into something that is better grasped as a post-evolutionary era.
Back in Darwin's time and even today in some areas, the controversy was about whether creatures were created directly by God. A traditional religious viewpoint was that natural variation is a deliberate selection by a powerful Creator. But as new varieties and even species appeared, scientists began to wonder whether the world worked through some more obscure and difficult birth toward the forms of life we know today. Never far removed from this concern was a worry that humanity itself was not specially created by God and thus might go the way of all creatures.
Darwin confirmed that "Man" too is a product of a long evolution -- a vision of ineffable time working toward a sublime end, he hoped. With classic subtlety, Darwin suggested slyly that we humans were not the end product, but that the universe of time would still evolve a more adapted species in a future beyond us.
A question for the 21st century is whether we will choose our own changes or rather some kind of static plateau. Does our new genetic technology allow us to exit from the difficult and obscure birth of evolutionary time?
Against Darwinian evolution is the "Creationist" argument, derived from a literal interpretation of the Bible. The Creationists believe that humans were created by God in a one-time act, that we have a special dispensation amid the creation, higher than all other creatures, indeed that we were created in the very image of God, and thus certainly not related to other species by so-called evolution. Some even believe that Adam and Eve started history a mere 5000 years ago.
We have just left behind the world depicted by Darwin, the world of natural selection. Neither are we trusting our future to a benevolent Creator-god. We are taking the first steps into the brave new world where we are the new Creators, so to speak, the new conscious element that will make the selection. Natural selection has itself just evolved into unnatural selection. We will choose what is "abnormal" or "pathological" or "diseased," and in so doing, we will be selecting to preserve what is "normal."
Of course, the sequencing of our DNA code is not the single, giant step toward a post-evolutionary era. Artificial selection has been the common practice of farmers the world over for at least the past millennium. And medicine has been acting upon an increasingly practical grasp of human genes, especially over the past 10 years.
It would be too simplistic and too pessimistic to argue that a technical map of our DNA will lead to the kind of advanced nightmare found in Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World.
In 1932, Huxley predicted the kind of technical control over our genetic blueprint that we have recently accomplished. What's more, he supplied a vivid warning about how such power might be abused by a totalitarian government's absolute control over the very nature of a population.
In Huxley's future world, this kind of genetic control leads to a civilization of castes, each predetermined genetically to a specific task level, the highest benefitting from the menial labor of the lowest, yet none of them actually free.
Like every other technology we have developed, the map of the human genome sequence will surely bring good to some and evil to others. Certain painful and tragic hereditary diseases such as cystic fibrosis might be cured and even eliminated.
Yet as always with technology, history tells us that before long, probably in your lifetime, someone will put this technology to appalling uses. The global prevalence of racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism and homophobia will have access to a technology of eugenics based upon the principle of unnatural selection.
The race issue will be an interesting surprise for many however, as it turns out that there is no single genetic trigger for so-called "race." What we see as race is simply a pool of wide variations in secondary characteristics, collected together in cultural and linguistic categories.
Taiwanese students have learned from dubious local textbooks that the Chinese "race" evolved separately from Beijing Man (Peking Man). They will be surprised to learn that Beijing Man was the species homo erectus, now found extinct in sites all over the world. They may also be surprised to learn that modern people, homo sapiens, are a species much more recent in origin, a genetic population of variant "races" with far more in common than with the species of homo erectus. DNA evidence today suggests that Chinese people should trace their ancestors back to an African mother, just as every other people on Earth.
They might be surprised to learn that no two Chinese have identical "racial" genes. To be Chinese is to belong to a family history, to speak the language, to identify with a cultural heredity. China includes not simply many ethnicities, but also an astounding variety of so-called "racial" qualities.
Sex will also be a surprise, though not so obvious as the race assumption. A baby's sex can be selected, boy or girl, but its gender attitude turns out to be a complicated matter of experience and culture. In other words, the potentially evil technology of eugenics can run into some fortunate difficulties: the genetic markers are not singular, simple and available. When they are, the person's identity turns out to depend more upon experience and culture. This is why Huxley's totalitarian dystopia also relied on propaganda and training, not just on genetic programming.
More disturbing is that potent new forms of genetic prejudice are on the horizon. Rather than the tired old forms of bigotry based upon ideas of race and gender, we are facing a newly empowered surge of prejudices against "ugliness," against the fat, the skinny, against those who daydream too much, those prone to acne or baldness, those below average on entrance exams, etc. Nations will legislate against such abuses. But it takes little imagination to foresee that one nation's prohibition will be another nation's "health" policy.
As we step into this brave new world of post-evolutionary time, we ought to say a prayer to the forces that have pushed us this far: accidental variations and co-adaptation. Even in our little span of human history it has been those who were capable of error, those who differed, those who went astray and found a new path, who have helped us to "evolve" and survive changes. Diversity rather than normality is our only hope for survival.
Erick Heroux is an assistant professor of English at National Chengchi University.
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