Philosophy of Genetics

Eugenics is Evil

G.K. Chesterton once wrote about the "Scientifically Organized State" and the evils of eugenics.  Having the government make decisions about who is fit to live, or what genes you should have, is the ultimate evil. 

However, genetic selection based on individual choice is another matter.  It can bring about greater fairness in society. Eugenics is defined (in my opinion) as State control over genetic selection.  When genetic selection is based on individual choice, it is no longer eugenics. 

Some people (including Jeremy Rifkin) may disagree with this definition.  In a recent Salon article, they describe his viewpoint: "an insidious slide toward a new eugenics [is] consecrated on the altar of consumer choice".  But this is guilt by association.  If someone has a problem with individual choice, they should come up with a different argument.  It's not eugenics.

Evolution, the Grand Designer

As I wrote previously, evolution doesn't have to be a process of random (genetic) change and natural selection.  There's no reason that the process of evolution couldn't have the ability to plan which changes to make, conduct experiments, and retain the best results.  After all, humans have the ability to design things, and we are merely matter, ourselves the product of evolution.

A recent scientific discovery sheds light on how this process might work.  Studies "revealed that during evolution, the chromosomes are rearranged by breaking typically in specific locations, rather than in a random fashion, as had been widely thought." (See also here for more details) 

Social behavior genes

A recent article in the New York Times discusses the 30 or so genes (discovered so far) that seem to regulate social behavior in animals.

Genes have been found to regulate courtship behavior in fruit flies, as well as mating behavior in mice.  Most interesting, though, is how "social behavior genes present a particular puzzle since they involve neural circuits in the brain, often set off by some environmental cue to which the animal responds".  Genes can harness the higher brain to have their effect.

Complex behaviors caused by a drug, or, another nail in the coffin of free will

Most people believe that gambling addiction is a failure of willpower, not an innate behavior designed to be switched on an off by our genes.  However, according to a recent article:

Researchers have identified a strange side effect to a treatment for Parkinson's disease: excessive gambling. Some patients taking medications known as dopamine agonists developed the problem within three months of starting treatment, even though they had previously gambled only occasionally or never at all. "This is a striking effect," remarks J. Eric Ahlskog of the Mayo Clinic, a co-author of the new study. "Pathological gambling induced by a drug is really quite unusual."

If a drug (really just a small molecule) can trigger us to gamble, the implication is that the gambling impulse (and associated behavior) was there all along (part of our DNA), and the drug is simply switching on something we were born with.  It's not a free choice.

Form and Knowledge

In the recent movie War of the Worlds, invading aliens were eventually overcome by Earth-bound diseases for which they had no immunity.  The only possible conclusion is that the aliens must have lived and evolved on Earth for millions of years before returning, since if they hadn't, the diseases would have no knowledge of how to infect them!

This illustrates of the critically important concept of form, which is needed to understand the philosophy of genetics.  In order for one organism (bacteria, virus) to affect another organism (man, alien) in any way, it must have an intimate knowledge of the other.  Knowledge must ultimately be represented as three-dimensional form (e.g. the shape of the organism down to the cell-level and DNA-level, as well as the shape of neuronal connections in higher organisms).

Aliens would not be affected by Earth-bound diseases unless those disease organisms (e.g. bacteria) had co-evolved with the aliens for millions of years.  Evolution is the process of translating experience (of one’s environment, including other organisms) into one’s form (DNA, etc).

As another example, consider the HIV virus.  It’s very simple, essentially just a cartridge with DNA inside.  Yet its very form (the specific sequence of DNA, the docking mechanism that allows it to attach to human cells) is intimately aware of human biology, and how to exploit it for its own purposes.  It’s ironic, then, that we may one day harness a non-virulent form of the the HIV virus itself to inject new DNA (of our own choosing) into our cells, to direct our own evolution.