7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A post-hermeneutic defense of anti-biotechnology, March 22, 2003
This review is from: Science, Seeds, and Cyborgs: Biotechnology and the Appropriation of Life (Hardcover)
There is at this time a very intense war going on, and this war is not like the one currently taking place in Iraq. It is instead a conflict that has great similarity to one that took place in the early part of the twentieth century: the battle between DC and AC power. This conflict was not a physically violent one, but instead was characterized by an intense verbal smear campaign, with those supporting DC power and those supporting AC exchanging irrational and ridiculous claims and accusations. The tension now is between those who support biotechnology and genetic engineering, and those who do not, and some of the assertions made in each camp border sometimes on absurdity.
This book is definitely against the practice of genetic engineering, but it does not thankfully engage indulge itself in the blatant vituperation that so frequently accompanies groups that are. The author gives what might be characterized as a "post-Marxist", or "post hermeneutic" justification of anti-biotechnology, ala Karl Marx, Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, and Erich Fromm. Even though I disagree profoundly with the author's conclusions, the book still could be of interest to anyone who wants to understand, in a calm and rational manner, some of the current arguments against biotechnology.
There are many places in the book where the author's arguments are weak or unjustified. One of them is in the first paragraph of the book in the preface, where the author asserts that "genetic modification is always an experiment", and that no models exist which can be "innocently tested, corrected and revised." This is certainly false, as there are many indications of what the final results will be when performing genetic modification, and with the assistance of mathematics and physics, highly sophisticated models can be developed that give large amounts of information on what will happen to organisms and the environment after genetic modification has taken place. In addition, the author does not mention that the scope of human intervention using genetic modification is insignificant compared to that which takes place naturally, and at extremely small time scales. Indeed, the phenomenon of horizontal gene transfer, which the author clearly feels threatened by, is one of the these. This is not to say that humankind should have a cavalier attitude about genetic engineering, but concerns about its practice should be done in the context of what is known from a scientific viewpoint, with careful regard also to ethical considerations. Also, the author speaks of the danger of changing genetic sequences that have remained "stable" for hundreds of thousands of years. He does not define though what he means by stability. The evolutionary process though, if viewed from the standpoint of the myriads of species that have appeared and died out in the time frame discussed by the author, would be difficult to label as 'stable'.
Because of the post-Marxist orientation in the book, it is not surprising to read that the author views biotechnology in his words as a "tool of power" which "rarely lends itself to fair, responsible, and democratic control." But market motivations cannot by themselves allow one to characterize the biotech industry as being uniquely this way. After all, the organic food industry is "market-motivated", but it would be wrong to prohibit its products from being put on the market simply because of this. The author also speaks of how science is being "corrupted" by its growing dependence on big business. But due to its need for funding, there are only two ways in which science can survive as a profession: obtaining funding from the government or from private business. One can certainly think of examples where scientists have been dishonest in their attempts to gain funding, but this happens in the context of both of these funding sources.
The book though does not limit itself totally with issues in biotechnology. The author includes a chapter called "The Cyborg Solution" which he views as the move to bring about intelligent machines and to enhance human capabilities using silicon implants. After calling these proposals "infatuations", he claims that they are a "disembodiment of the human will." The "cyborg enthusiasts" follow a "technological imperative" the true purpose of which is to remove the obstacles presented by people to the reproduction of machines. There may be some "cyborg enthusiasts" who feel this way (the author does not give examples), but there are also those in the same group who view machines as purely complimentary to human beings. These machines could act as companions, not slaves; as friends with their own unique capabilities, with these capabilities widely varying between machines. The machines themselves will also have a lot to learn from their human counterparts, with the result being more of a symbiosis, rather than a replacement.
The author ends the book with severe criticism of the scientific enterprise in general. He joins the philosopher Edmund Husserl in the desire to hold on to the "mystery" of experience. Science, he says, is an escape from the "impossibility of illuminating the inexactitude" of experience. Science and the cyborg will remove doubt and wonder, the "incommunicable convictions, that are definitive of the human subject". Quoting Husserl, he describes mathematics as "thoroughly relative science", as one that has forgotten the "working subject". But doubt and wonder are the handmaidens of science and mathematics: doubt helps to resolve issues and fine tune theories, and wonder is a purely subjective feeling of having understood something for the first time, and of participating in the incredible diversity of the natural world.
Science does not take us farther away from who we are, but closer.
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mechanization of the world picture, March 29, 2004
This review is from: Science, Seeds, and Cyborgs: Biotechnology and the Appropriation of Life (Hardcover)
In the wake of Fukuyama and Stock comes this low-key yet quite barbed critique of biotechnology, and, agree or not, it is a useful exploration of the issues in mid controversy. Although the anti-technology attitude of much biotechnology criticism is often beset by a peculiar lack of realism, in fact the issues remain controversial not so much because of the hallucinations of potential dangers, although these are likely to be all too real, but because of the false methodology and flawed foundation of contemporary science. Sorry, but it's that simple, or complex. We live in a strange civilization where the breakthroughs of physics made the smartest people stupid about man, and incapable of a viable anthropology. With this as a given we enter the danger zone of the most complex questions of man, human nature, and society with a cadre stuck on the basics, rigid thinking on genetic fundamentalism, reductionism, self, soul, and evolution. The basic incoherence of the whole gestalt is not seen for what it is. That makes this cautionary treatment the more interesting. Accused by one reviewer of Bolshie tendencies, it should be said that the charge is unfair, and the critique of market driven technologies through such dangerous terrain summons precisely that original critique of economy that gave birth to the original left. We are having our commons taken away from us once again, and replaced with capital markets, as the self and nature of man is being given the most pedestrian mechanized definition by those who mixing science and profit.
A valuable sweep of the whole field and worth study.
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