Oct 20 Kass - Ch 3 (Meaning of Life—in the Laboratory)

Kass raises very important issues within this short chapter. I find his question of respecting life particularly interesting. If in respecting life we feel that human beings, or fetuses or blastocysts depending on their stage of development, should not be destroyed yet we also believe that using extra blastocysts for experimentation disrespects life, does it not stand to reason that either all blastocysts formed through in vitro fertilization processes must either be raised to fruition or not fertilized at all? In this regard, I believe I agree with Kass and morally go even further to discard in vitro fertilization altogether on the basis of not technologically orchestrating the glorious blessing of joining together an egg and sperm cell to form new life. Kass’ statements as to the moral questions arising from keeping all fertilized cells alive further drive me to this conclusion, especially those concerning women selling their bodies to grow the fetuses. As to supporting government funding of this controversial research, I again agree with Kass’ arguments about not using taxpayers money to fund something which they deem morally unethical. Of course, if this were the case, we should also significantly reduce military spending, etc. If a political leader or party has a clear platform on funding this type of research and they are voted into office, then according to our political ideology they have authority granted by their constituents to approve government funding for things many people may deem morally unethical. This brings us to minority rights though, because in the case of a majority, how are you to uphold the basic rights of those in the minority; if a majority of the population deems slavery acceptable, how are you to grant the minority opposing slavery their basic human rights to life and liberty? Clearly the system thus has some flaws which we must overcome. Kass tries to bring to light the inherent rights of in vitro blastocysts such that we might recognize some form of regulation to override majority rule and protect a minority which has absolutely no way to speak for itself. I agree that this is indeed a crucial issue and deserves the attention of our legislators.

Oct 8, 13, 15 Huxley - Brave New World

Oct 8 Huxley – Brave New World (Ch 1 - 6)
Oct 13 Huxley – Brave New World (Ch 7 - 11)
Oct 15 Huxley – Brave New World (Ch 12 - end)

In writing this blog, I fully intend to address issues, raise questions, and analyze concepts covered throughout all of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. As such, I am a day late for the October 8th blog posting and well ahead of schedule for the two following posts. I apologize for any inconvenience, but in beginning writing, I felt it best to just finish the novel as I had already passed the required portion for the first assignment. This should hopefully provide a more congruous approach to the work and will hopefully not lose aspects I would have addressed in breaking apart the blog into sections based on the assigned chapters.

First, a word on the notion behind this novel – The idea of creating an entire ‘civilization’ which reproduces based primarily upon cloning instead of sexual reproduction seems quite odd at first glance. However, after reading Ridley’s chapter on death, I realize that Huxley drew many comparisons between civil society and a human body. Just as cells must sacrifice for the good of the body and each play a designated role based on some environmental conditioning from surrounding cells, so too must Huxley’s citizens sacrifice certain freedoms for the good of society and accept their conditioning into roles as alphas, betas, deltas, etc. A liver cell has just as much potential to become a kidney cell based on DNA, but signals from the surrounding cells trigger it to carry out its role as a liver cell. Similarly, individuals of Huxley’s novel are all fertilized with the potential to become any normal human being, but through chemical injections and conditioning, the embryos and children develop according to environmental pressures to fill predetermined rolls as deltas or epsilons or gammas or what-have-you. Such may be the reason this fictional account challenges our ethics so strongly, because Huxley’s societal model is so readily seen in any multi-cellular living organism such as ourselves.

Is not the analogy often applied relating a community or civil society to a body; or perhaps this concept is just from my Catholic upbringing and references to the church community as the Body of Christ? What is it then that sets society apart from a human body? What makes people different than individual cells aside from sheer magnitude? Ridley tried to explain the difference in terms of ‘free will’ which he defined in describing how a person may choose when to eat based on their hunger or food availability, etc. but is constrained by a necessity to eat as a fundamental basis of sustaining life. Ridley states, “this interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behavior unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom.” (Ridley 2006, p.312) This is just the sort of ‘freedom’ that Huxley tries to create in his fictional civilization. People can choose with whom they sexually interact, how they socially entertain themselves outside of work, what clothes to wear (provided they follow the color coordination of their caste), but none of these decisions really affect their overall roles in society so long as they continue to do their jobs.

If this were the extent of his thoughts, I would have a bone to pick with Huxley, but he develops his ‘argument’ further in presenting characters such as Lenina, abnormally content with having only one man for months, Bernard, who abnormally enjoys being alone and thinking about philosophical matters, Helmholtz, who also abnormally seeks solitude and searches deeper emotions than basic sensory feelings. These characters are somehow not content with the social constraints of ‘civilization’ and as such, Huxley is suggesting there could be innately something more to human existence than ‘happiness’ and working for the good of society. The fact that they turn to soma whenever they feel the slightest form of discontent or unease and have their merry little drug trips to cope with unhappiness suggests happiness is merely the product of a false state of reality rather than being truly pleased with your conditions and Huxley uses the idea of retreat through soma to directly challenge contemporary society’s tendency to retreat from their unhappiness to drugs or alcohol or other means of escape from reality. If we continue using such vices, are we not risking falling into a trap similar to that of Brave New World?

Even beyond the suggestions of soma, Huxley challenges us to rise above conformity. John ‘Savage’ played a key part in this challenge. In his upbringing as a societal outcast on the reservation, he longed for conformity and membership in society, but when he reached ‘civilization’ he was disenchanted by its constant communal aspects and conformist upbringings. John’s argument with Mustapha Mond brought religion and emotion and history and passion to the table as one by one Mustapha Mond thrust these aside for the sake of society. If society is to have peace and happiness, his argument was to eliminate reasons for tension and sorrow. These are exactly what Lenina and Bernard and Helmholtz and John all intrinsically sought, even if they did not realize what they were seeking. In the end though, Bernard and Helmholtz head off to an island and Lenina is chased back into the crowd and John hangs himself. How is it then that we cannot equate Huxley’s society with a body – where it flushes out poisons to the liver and embeds abnormal cells amongst so many normal cells that you can barely find them and cancerous cells trying to be selfish turn on a self-destruct mechanism committing suicide just as John did? Herein lies Huxley’s challenge to his readers. It is precisely because of this factor that we must not let such strivings for conformity dictate our lives. We cannot remove ourselves to an island or retreat to the crowd or kill ourselves when we feel individuality, when we feel pain or sorrow, unhappiness; these are the very factors which separate us from cells of a body. Is it better to live in happiness and achieve peace through ultimate conformity or to suffer sorrow and pain and the ills of discontent but live to know the triumphs of joy and cooperation? I would argue for the latter, and I think Huxley’s Brave New World urges us to do likewise.

Oct 6 Ridley Ch 21, 22 (Eugenics, Free Will)

As my webpage for the class addresses the topic of our first chapter for today, I will leave only a link: http://sites.google.com/site/lb355wilson/. As for the chapter on free will, I find the philosophical discussion in this chapter quite stimulating. Hume’s Fork is particularly interesting in that it fails to recognize any third alternative aside from chaos and determinism. I think Ridley argues that the world in fact functions through a combination of the two. If we reflect back a few chapters on those concerning stress and personality, we will recall that Ridley had suggested a sort of inseparable connection between nature’s genetic ‘determinism’ and nurture’s environmental ‘chaos’ which only worked in conjunction with one another. In the chapter on free will, Ridley seems to just extend this same argument onto a broader spectrum, but I think it still applies. I would even suggest that he adequately addresses infusing a religious appeal with this concept of entwined chaos and determinism, nature and nurture, genes and environment. At this point I deem Ridley’s point well argued and have little to counter against it.

Oct 1 Ridley Ch 18, 19, 20 (Cures, Prevention, Politics)

At the very end of his chapter on using genetic testing to develop and administer cures, Ridley states, “Genetic diagnosis followed by conventional cure is probably the genome’s greatest boon to medicine.” (257) I think I have to agree with him here. At this time I cannot wholeheartedly say that I support using genetic engineering to modify humans so they are resistant to particular afflictions. The effects of genetically modified crops demonstrate why we should proceed with caution. As Ridley declares, “Roundup-resistant rape may be eco-unfriendly to the extent that it encourages herbicide use or spreads its resistance to weeds.” (253) I think most genetic engineering is just a short-term solution to one or two specific problems rather than looking at long-term alternatives. The effects of genetic engineering are still largely unknown, and even if you can make an organism resistant to one particular malady, that just exerts pressure for co-evolution of the parasite or virus or what-have-you such that you will only have another problem down the line. Ridley urges against conservative stances such as my own saying, “I believe we are in danger of being too squeamish and too cautious in using knowledge about the genes that influence both [coronary heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease], and we therefore stand at risk of committing the moral error of denying people access to life-saving research.” (259) To combat this front though, I again question Ridley – at what point do we draw the line? People are not meant to live forever. I think these are difficult questions indeed because on the one hand, we are ethically driven to care for one another and save lives, etc. At the same time though, we must acknowledge that all things eventually die. It is the natural order of life. Given reproduction, the world’s resources cannot sustain unlimited population growth if every organism suddenly has the ability to sustain life forever. Thus I return to my original claim in this post – we should use genetic diagnosis to adopt conventional cures, or treat the symptoms I might add. We should use extreme caution though, in adopting genetic engineering to modify organisms to make them resistant to a particular pathogen.

Sept 29 Ridley Ch 15, 16, 17 (Sex, Memory, Death)

I had no problems with the chapter on sex while it was discussing disease nor even genetic sexual promiscuity in mice. I thought the implications of extending P. polionatus and P. maniculatus to humans might explain a lot about the wide variety of sexual characteristics across populations. For example, Mormon and Muslim religions generally discourage marriage outside the faith and encourage polygamy. Most faiths urge monogamy though. Yet, many people are increasingly flocking to atheism or agnosticism or just falling out of practice in general. Perhaps there is a relationship between ‘moral corruption’ so to speak and the spread of a gene similar to that causing sexual promiscuity in mice. If the spread of this gene were originally quarantined primarily to people of specific religions advocating polygamy and urging to marry within the faith, then the slow spread throughout humanity makes sense. Even as I write this though, I am highly skeptical of the ideas I myself am generating. Likewise, I am highly skeptical of assertions such as those made at the end of the chapter on sex stating that males and females have sexually linked differences in interests such as machines and weapons for males versus clothes and words for females. Too many people have been exceptions to such observations for this sort of claim to resonate well with me. I, for example, am female but could really care less about clothes and find machines far more fascinating. Does this make me a mutant somehow? I think it is more likely that if at one point such interests were once tied to sex chromosomes, they have since experienced widespread mutation, and in any case can not be associated with one particular chromosome as several genotypic segments may result in the aggregate phenotypic expression of interests. This seems especially plausible considering the information presented in the chapter that follows; if you recognize that certain genes code for learning ability, then should you not also recognize that sexual practices such as monogamy or promiscuity are influenced by social learning?

Sept 24 Ridley Ch 12, 13, 14 (Self-Assembly, Pre-History, Immortality)

I had never thought about bugs developing upside down before reading about the Hox genes but now that I read it, it makes perfect sense that their anatomy just flipped over so they walk on the other side of the body from elephants for example. This strikes me as quite funny because I cannot see how one alignment could be more fit than another. Although, the fact that both have prevailed contemporaneously suggests neither was more fit than the other; some species just followed one path and many another.

On a completely different note, I am not sure how I feel about this telomerase issue. Ridley seems to suggest that advances in understanding about telomerase and increased ability to manipulate it could lead to enhanced cell replication, extended longevity, and maybe something just short of immortality. I often hate to throw religious arguments about when so many scientists are around, but as my faith strongly influences my take on ethics, I feel I must bring it up again here. To what extent in science do you reach the point where you are playing God? If life were meant to continue forever on earth, then would our already impressive systems not include code for such properties? I think we all have a natural tendency to yearn for and seek after eternal life; we just look for it in the wrong place. We are not meant to live forever in this world, but the next. While I recognize God’s gifts to us in the knowledge and intelligence of scientists working diligently to unleash the magical world of telomerase or find cures for cancers or undertake any number of life-prolonging activities, I think we must also seek after our vocations and discern whether these advances will truly benefit humanity or if we could better spend our time helping with some other dilemma. If we discover a cure for cancer, we will surely discover a new malady to plague our societies and kill off our populations. People were not meant to live forever any more than a flower is meant to bloom for eternity.

Sept 22 Ridley Ch 9, 10, 11 (Disease, Stress, Personality)

The experiment with men and women choosing which t-shirt smelled best after others had slept in them raises some interesting questions for me. Perhaps this is because I am usually very conscious about odors or perhaps because this is not my first introduction to this particular experiment as I heard about a similar experiment (maybe even the same experiment) when I was in high school. In any case, I find it very intriguing that people preferred t-shirts of those with very different MHC genotypes than themselves. Does this work with other genes as well? If they say that opposites attract, is this because people with different genes smell drastically different? Does it only work with the MHC genotype sequence? Which genes makes us attracted to one another in the first place? One of my questions about choosing a mate based on strength or perceived fitness is how is it that the ‘ugly’ or unfit people still manage to reproduce? This can offer some insight into why people who may appear physically unattractive somehow find mates if they are ‘attractive’ in odor or personality thereby making their genes more ‘attractive.’ Of course, as the two following chapters pointed out, personality is as much a reflection of genetics as it is of external factors because the brain has such a complex reaction network of chemical and electrical signals. If we are attracted to someone based on their personality then, are we really attracted to the environmental characteristics in which they choose to surround themselves? Maybe even these, as the mice with levers example illustrates, are affected by some chemical reactions stimulating positive or negative response to stimuli and therefore also genetically determined.