Real Intelligent Design

[Touring Mars]

No, this isn't a duplicate thread of the Creation v Evolution debate... but a discussion of an issue raised in that thread last month by Sage. Our species stands on the brink of achieving what could be called 'Real Intelligent Design' - or the ability to create novel life forms from scratch.

So this isn't a thread about the origin (or purpose of) the human race - arguably the crux of the Creation v Evolution debate - but a discussion of what 'real' intelligent design might involve...

Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms

Oh, what great semantics irony – creationists will be defending natural selection (i.e., God’s natural way), while many atheists will be going for intelligent design (i.e., let man make synthetic living things).

Anyway, I’m surprised that nobody has posted this article yet. Finally, somebody makes a whole damn chromosome! The potential in biotechnology is so exciting it makes me giddy.

The irony is brilliant and certainly worth exploring in a bit more detail. A few obvious questions are: Given the ability, should we create new life forms? Could we create life forms that were either super-evolving or even 'evolution-proof'? Given that intelligent life is an incredibly rare phenomenon and (in our case) has been hard-fought for and hard-won (over billions of years of incremental change and brutal competition), what could the consequences be for us if we chose to make a form of life superior to us in almost every way?? How long will it be before we (as intelligent designers) are able to marry the potential of super-intelligent computers (Artilects) with synthetic life forms? On an ethical front, how much potential does this subject have for becoming a divisive issue? Will synthetic life forms and their uses/benefits be limited or become widespread? What would it mean to us to have "intellectual superiors" (either as a life form or not) and to know that we created it?! Would we (as a species) deliberately incorporate limits/controls/flaws/weaknesses into our creations to ensure that they remained subordinate to their creators?

 

[Alfaholic]

Very interesting, but as for building weaknesses in to super intelligent life forms and so on, I tend to think that once the kind of technology that allows this moves from the experimental environment into the production environment, it would be designed in such away that it enhances the abilities of humans themselves rather than creating a separate and possibly competitive new species. That is, I'd expect to see these improvements expressed as human upgrades to existing or new people. So children might be human but with a genetic advantage of some sort, or adults might purchase a plug-in device which improves memory or brain processing speed or something. So instead of creating an entirely new species which we then have to keep control of, I expect that humans will continue to evolve, but take control of our own evolution.

 

[Danoff]

Baby steps TM,

I don't see us creating a superior organism for a while. First we need to design a pretty crappy organism. Then we can design a somewhat-ok organism. Then maybe we can tackle out-doing ourselves.

There are so many ethical issues with this subject it's absurd. So many that I'm actually writing a fictional book about it because I think it's absolutely fascinating. This subject raises the kind of tricky ethical questions that even somebody like me - who has a really thorough of understanding of their own ethics - can get really confused.

To help explore the possibilities, I highly recommend the book "Oryx and Crake" by Margarette Atwood. She goes through a lot of the issues, but doesn't really try to tackle the questions, she simply poses many situations designed to get you thinking.

Like Alfa, I don't see us making a superior organism. I see us tweaking our own design so that we can become the superior organism. But if you did create an intelligent organism, one of the first questions you have to ask yourself is why human beings have rights. Do we have them because we're human, because we have souls, or because we're intelligent? If the latter, then you have to wonder whether we have the right to dictate the biological makeup of any organism that has rights.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

 

[Venari]

Okay, the gestalt entity that is GTplanet.net is going to have to help out here.

I like stories and films about this: Gattaca is a fabulous film, and the film in which Uma Thurman looks the most incredibly beautiful (especially in one scene for about two seconds) it's worth watching just for her.

I digress.

You see, I remember reading an excellent short story in a a book called *dunno* by the author *dunno*. Some of the following is embellished, because it's been 15 years since I read it, but you'll spot it I'm sure if you've read it too. I'd love to find the book again. If you can fill in the blanks above you win a prize. (Obviously, Famine will know, so he might not get a prize, it depends how generous I'm feeling.)

The introduction was simple, soon after the introduction of genetic manipulation, set in a school where both natural births and 'modified' children were mixed, obviously the modified children were at advantage. They were both physically stronger and mentally more agile, they were handsome/pretty, and suffered from little disease. The story centres on the friendship and mutual trials of two teenagers, a natural girl and a modified girl. The needing to fit in for the natural girl, awkward, less pretty, sickly and having to work hard to keep up, and the nice-natured modified girl feeling ever so slightly guilty about her advantages.

Then, the unthinkable. A genetically modified child in their class dies. And then another. And another. And more, all over the country. Soon, the link is traced to a specific genetic modification for something mundane (and hence, a must have on the tick box list of the 'genetic improvements for your child' order sheet) and it is revealed that the modified girl is going to die from the fatal side-affect of this splice.

Is it worth messing? Interesting debate.

I bet Oppenheimer thought the same early on, but then obviously regretted his input into the project: "I am (become) death." Arguably too late? Or would we inevitably have developed such a power?

 

[niky]

It's worth doing... IMHO.

We already do a zillion things that are "not-good-for-us"... why not do something else that might be good for us?

But, yes, baby steps first. Learn how to do the little things, then the big things will follow.

Creating a synthetic organism is fraught with problems. How do we do it? From the ground up? Do we design our own system that'll work on specific proteins not commonly used in existing organisms... in order to ensure that such organisms cannot escape the laboratory, and prove a threat to our own survival?

Or do we take shortcuts... use common cellular strucctures or design based off of current living things... or an even greater shortcut, and just dabble in genetic engineering of existing organisms (which we already do...)

A lot of people are scared of genetic engineering, for mostly emotional reasons... fears of franken-foods, or genetic disasters as outlined above... but seriously... natural law suggests that any genetic tampering that will cause instability in the organism will kill off the modified subpopulation, anyway... and very often, our own non-genetic tampering and breeding of organisms causes some of the same problems, anyway... note that there are organisms (both plant and animal) that have been bred to the point that they cannot survive in the "wild".

If, in some way, we can give rise to a new kind of life... I think that's immortality right there... a way of affecting the history of the world, or even the Universe, long after our race has turned to ashes and dust.

 

[Perfect Balance]

Does anyone else think that this could go horribly wrong in the far future when they can actually create a intelligent organism? I think it's going to up end somewhat of an intelligence race, who can create the smarter organism.

 

[V1P3R]

Serenity.

 

[Stevisiov]

There are so many possibilites, and so many questions to ask. Ethics morality may play into effect far more than simply someone saying its wrong to artifically create life.

Scenario time. All hyperthetical perhaps not even possible but one worth considering regardless I think. Suppose self improvement can only take us so far, suppose we are capable of creating a entirely new superior speicies. I would advise you to take superior in any context you like but I mean superior it in the sense of it being capable becoming the dominant species on earth be it stronger, more intelligent etc...

We realise that such a species is superior to us, but what would you do about it.

Here are a few things to think about. People often don't like the idea of a new species taking over, loosing control/freedom, lack of security perhaps even extinction. Would we refrain from creating such a species? would we create the species but handicap the species to maintain control. Would we give the species rights, or would we enslave it to work towards the improvements of the human race?

Here are a few questions from an evolutionary point of veiw. Suvival of the fittest, if we want to survive then perhaps we shouldn't create a speicies that could infact wipe us out. On another note, if the reason we evolve is to improve, then perhaps allowing a superior species to take over would be doing the human races bit in evolution. So what should we do look after number one, or let the superior species take over.

It seems that humans would choose self preservation over all, its instilled in human nature to survive. What makes another species better than us anyway, just because they are stronger and better adapted. Likewise what makes us better than a dog or a pigeon or a fly. Humans naturally place humankind above all other species, is it really arrogant to do so? Would we be selfish by preventing a superior species to take over the title of dominating species?

Part of me thinks we would be advancing life itself, and its likelyhood of survival. The other part of me thinks we have evolved to beat off all competition by any means possible, why should we now allow another species to take over when we can ensure our own survival.

The biggest question of all for me, is how much you value the Human race.

 

[niky]

Well, if we were actually smart enough to create a superior race... wouldn't we be smart enough to make that race us?

To learn how to create an "intelligent" species, we'd have to see what makes an "Intelligent" species tick... and what more "intelligent" species do we have for study than ourselves?

Genetic engineering... curing our hereditary weaknesses... making us live longer, move faster and think better... of course, the ramifications (as seen in multudinous sci-fi horror stories) and social unrest caused by having a group of supermen in our society is of some concern... but by then, we'd be able to improve regular humanity, too.

What if you could create a supervirus that would rewrite our genetic codes this way, and release it into the air? It would either be the eschaton or doomsday... or both, depending on how in love you are with your humanity.

 

[Touring Mars]

What we'd be talking about here is something that is theoretically outside the realm of life as we know it. Life on Earth in all its forms came to be through the process of evolution, but a human-created life form would not have had such an origin, and hence the developmental constraints experienced by all life need not apply. This is one reason why we needn't bother about making a 'super-human' and probably wouldn't. Humans are a product of the evolutionary process, but an all-new specially created lifeform needn't be.

Richard Dawkins made the analogy that creating a life form from scratch is like climbing an almost impossibly steep cliff face (and in a single bound, according to 'special creation'), whereas the process of evolution is analogous to walking comfortably up the steady incline on the other side. The result is the same. We end up at the top of the impossibly high cliff - yet one route is impossibly hard, the other is amazingly simple. Yet, to extend that analogy a bit - now that we are here, atop the highest 'cliff-face' of intelligence on Earth (having arrived there ourselves by the long, gradual (easy) route), we can do a bit of 'reverse-engineering' on ourselves and study the processes required to achieve this, analogous to abseiling down the cliff face and learning the 'quick way up', circumnavigating the whole evolutionary process and building life forms from scratch, with all or any properties we desire them to have. More importantly, our own 'cliff-face' may be the highest in the evolutionary world, but it is limited by the constraints on our development, and more significantly, there is no reason or design behind the current height of our intellectual 'cliff face'... but there would be no theoretical (only practical) limits to how intelligent you could create a new lifeform, since the same constraints that we have faced in our development could be intentionally side-stepped.

I don't doubt it will be possible in the future - and not the distant future at that. The question is, though, why would we build pet dogs when we could build pet gods? I do doubt that we could ever build a biological replica of a human being (what would be the point of that?), but something far simpler could do the job just as well... Although evolution is capable of infinite variety, our example of the entire evolutionary process (life on Earth) is just one example of a journey through evolutionary design-space, constrained by its own trajectories (themselves continually defined by the state of the planet itself). It is entirely conceivable that a far less complex life form could be engineered to possess an intellect far in excess of what a human body/brain is capable of. As the creators, we would have to cast off our preconceived ideas of what intelligent life 'required' and perhaps take life into a whole new, uncharted area of design space.

As for why we'd want to do it, that's a very difficult question - and whether or not we have any real control over whether it would happen or not is another. Who are we to limit the products of our own intelligence??

 

[ceiling_fan]

As for why we'd want to do it, that's a very difficult question - and whether or not we have any real control over whether it would happen or not is another. Who are we to limit the products of our own intelligence??

People will research it as long as we have the means to do so.