Alex Budak

My weekly blog for my “Networked Technology and Society” course.  We were asked to read this brilliant New Yorker article “A Life of its Own” by Michael Specter about Synthetic Biology.  Below is my reflection on human agency with regards to manipulation of genetic code, technology, and evolution.

“If our moral and political language for evaluating technology includes only categories having to do with tools and uses, if it does not include attention to the meaning of the designs and arrangements of our artifacts, then we will be blinded to much that is intellectually and practically crucial.”
–Langdon Winner, “The Whale and the Reactor,” page 25.

What if synthetic biology is exactly the evolution that God intended, and the natural extension of Darwin’s work aboard the S.S. Beagle?

In analyzing the forward trajectory of technologies, I continue to think back to the symbol of the westward train as technological progress — inevitably marching forward.  Lost in the debate of whether or not we have any agency in the progress of biological engineering is the fact that it is still humans, ourselves, leading the progress through utilizing technology.  Though the article, in some places, seeks to show the possibility of a doomsday, loss-of-human-control scenario, every scientist interviewed, working in this cutting edge field was moving deliberately, and carefully.

The article traces back our history to four-billion years back when “life on earth was shaped entirely by nature,” (Page 3), and to 10,000 years back when our ancestors began to “gather in villages, grow crops and domesticate animals.”  It speaks wistfully of selection and chance resulting in our current human species.  It questions how dramatically things could change if people like Drew Endy have their way and continue this dramatic forward march of progress.  But lost in the debate — and something I think WInner would bring up — is of the implications beyond the technological tools and know-how to “re-engineer” society.

An underlying assumption in the article is that synthetic biology is fundamentally altering the fabric of our society.  In many ways, it could be.  But, so too, do other processes humans have embarked upon in the last 10,000 years — urbanization, modern-warfare, destruction of the natural environment, and the shift away from agrarian-based societies, to name a few.  All of these have fundamentally altered the world as we know it, and, I would argue, each of them has impacted how we think of evolution and even natural selection.

Do we have agency in stopping these forces?  In some ways we do, in some ways we don’t.  Some people, certainly, complain about them, but it seems to me that for the most part it has become accepted as the inevitable march forward of our society.

Where does synthetic biology fit in to all of this?  Human beings are now capable of things impossible not just 10,000 years ago, but even decades ago.  We have seen that our utilization of technology has grown exponentially — like Moores’ Law — resulting in progress unthinkable in centuries past.  Is this human nature?  It seems to me, like the train marching on, that it is.

There’s no question that we now have (or at least in the near future will have) the technological know-how and tools to fundamentally alter both human — and non-human — societies.  But it seems that many think of this as being a completely artificial process.  But, couldn’t it be that this is simply the next step — the natural extension — of human evolution?  We have evolved from primates to critical thinking beings creating and utilizing tools along the way.  Traits such as intelligence and technological know-how have clearly evolved through natural selection.  So, what if this is simply the next logical step — evolution through utilizing the very means that allowed our species to evolve and survive.  Using our tools, and our technology to take our own evolution into our own hands.

Maybe all of us are now our own Darwins — thanks to technology — just as it was planned all along.