We should not understate or under-think the implications of this technology. Any parent could, for a price, one day insert Einstein genes, or Mozart, or Napoleon, or recreate a child or loved one. The whole thing is creepy.
It's a synthetic world in a lot of ways. Yesterday I also showed students a sample of azurite, which was the source of a blue dye in medieval Europe. If you're a medieval man and you want blue dye, you have to go find blue in nature somewhere. God put the blue there, you're just going to make use of it.
But if you're a modern chemist making blue dye, it's quite possible that none of the chemicals you begin with are blue at all. Sure, "God put the chemicals there", but the end result feels much more like something you did.
I think we're experiencing a similar sort of shift in how we view biology.
I concur. Actually, I mentioned a student who said "God let the animal go extinct, we shouldn't play God and try to resurrect it." In that case, I disagree with her, but she made analogy to trying to resurrect her mother, say, if she had died. In her mind, this was the same thing. God was in charge of when this thing happened, we don't now try to contradict him.
One can even imagine a cultural situation developing where designer genes become almost mandatory. "You aren't sending your child to pre-school? Do you hate them?" becomes "you didn't give your child the Einstein genes? Do you hate them?"
"You speak carefully, nobody cares, no public attention, let’s say maybe you lose your job or your company goes under." I see this dynamic even at serious news sites etc-- ones where I'd like to be able to read without that constantly flashing caution light. But having once or twice been misled, eh.
As is pointed out above in the wooly mammoth sentence, some of the markers for differentiating subspecies (or highly similar species) are habitat, behavior, and breeding. On all three points, these creatures will presumably be gray wolves. And of course we don't know much about how the dire wolf differed from the gray wolf on all three points.
So yes, there's a big gray area here--literally, in a way.
We should not understate or under-think the implications of this technology. Any parent could, for a price, one day insert Einstein genes, or Mozart, or Napoleon, or recreate a child or loved one. The whole thing is creepy.
It's a synthetic world in a lot of ways. Yesterday I also showed students a sample of azurite, which was the source of a blue dye in medieval Europe. If you're a medieval man and you want blue dye, you have to go find blue in nature somewhere. God put the blue there, you're just going to make use of it.
But if you're a modern chemist making blue dye, it's quite possible that none of the chemicals you begin with are blue at all. Sure, "God put the chemicals there", but the end result feels much more like something you did.
I think we're experiencing a similar sort of shift in how we view biology.
I concur. Actually, I mentioned a student who said "God let the animal go extinct, we shouldn't play God and try to resurrect it." In that case, I disagree with her, but she made analogy to trying to resurrect her mother, say, if she had died. In her mind, this was the same thing. God was in charge of when this thing happened, we don't now try to contradict him.
One can even imagine a cultural situation developing where designer genes become almost mandatory. "You aren't sending your child to pre-school? Do you hate them?" becomes "you didn't give your child the Einstein genes? Do you hate them?"
Such was the main theme of the film, Gattaca, a film that has aged very well.
"You speak carefully, nobody cares, no public attention, let’s say maybe you lose your job or your company goes under." I see this dynamic even at serious news sites etc-- ones where I'd like to be able to read without that constantly flashing caution light. But having once or twice been misled, eh.
As is pointed out above in the wooly mammoth sentence, some of the markers for differentiating subspecies (or highly similar species) are habitat, behavior, and breeding. On all three points, these creatures will presumably be gray wolves. And of course we don't know much about how the dire wolf differed from the gray wolf on all three points.
So yes, there's a big gray area here--literally, in a way.