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Manning Clark House Symposium
Science and Ethics: Can Homo sapiens Survive?
Canberra, 17-18 May 2005
Playing with Superfire - Misapplication of Technology to Complex
Natural Systems
Physicists lost their innocence in 1945. Now it's the turn of biologists.
Reductionist science has been brilliantly successful at understanding
the inanimate world, but it is misleading and dangerous when applied
to living systems. To deal with living systems we need a different,
more holistic kind of science. Such a science has emerged over the past
few decades, based on self-organising
systems
The detailed behaviour of living systems is
not predictable because living systems are complex
self-organising systems, which are relatives of chaotic systems. Their
behaviour swings between the order of linear systems and the chaos of
highly nonlinear systems. The linear A-causes-B-causes-C thinking of
reductionist science is not appropriate to them. We keep getting nasty
surprises because in nonlinear complex systems the sequence is more
like A triggers B which feeds back on C which bites you on the backside.
It is therefore not possible to claim, as advocates of genetic modification
have claimed, that the risks involved are calculable and managable.
Nor can mappers of the human genome claim with
any veracity they will be able to identify "disease genes" and thereby
cure diseases. The path from genes to developed organism is also a complex
self-organising process involving a cascade of switches and triggers,
so the effect of changing a gene cannot be reliably predicted.
Cloning, machine-augmented humans and biologically-oriented
nanotechnology are venturing into equally dangerous territory. Mary
Shelley gave us fair warning on this too - the so-called monster created
by her Dr. Frankenstein is rather a pathetic social misfit, feared and
persecuted for his difference and pining for acceptance and love. We
are not just fancy machines, we have deep social and spiritual dimensions.
Genetic engineering is not just an extension
of traditional breeding methods, it is superfire - a supertool with
unprecedented power to meddle with the fundamentals of the living world.
Multicelled organisms have been developing for hundreds of millions
of years, and the way they are is no accident. Life, aging, death and
birth is the fundamental cycle of renewal and transcendence. Barriers
to cross breeding keep species and ecosystems viable. The complex relationships
of ecosystems support every component species and individual.
Technology cannot solve world hunger, terrorism,
pollution and destruction of the biosphere because these problems arise
from an archaic and pathological economic system, and from our neglect
of social health and individual maturity and wisdom.
We don't need most of this super technology.
Much of the drive to create it comes from giant corporations whose frank
objective is the control of humanity's supply of food and necessities,
and of our own pining for love. What we need instead is common sense
and ancient wisdom. We don't need more material riches, we need life
more richly lived.
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