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Solving Climate Change By Bioengineering Humans?
derekmead writes "Forget CFLs, hybrid cars, and organic jeans. Buying our way out of climate change — even if it's green consumption — won't get us far.
A new paper (PDF), published in Ethics, Policy, and the Environment by NYU bioethics professor S. Matthew Liao, poses an answer: engineer humans to use less. The general plan laid out by Liao is straightforward, ranging from using pharmacological behavior modification to create an aversion to meat in people, to using gene therapy to create smaller, less resource-intensive children. The philosophical and ethical questions, on the other hand, are absurdly complicated. The Atlantic also has a great interview with Liao, in which he talks about gene therapy and making humans hate the taste of meat."
It's one thing to use genetic engineering to fight disease and obvious medical problems. But using something with such dangerous potential to advance a social agenda which society can't even agree on is going way too far. It's dangerous enough to screw with Mother Nature even when the objective is crystal clear. Screwing with something as dangerous as genetic engineering and altering humans en masse is insane for an objective this murky (not to mention the fact that it would violate every university's or hospital's ethics policies in about a million ways).
First, do no harm--even if you think it's for a good cause.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
ranging from using pharmacological behavior modification to create an aversion to meat in people, to using gene therapy to create smaller, less resource-intensive children.
Pretty sure I've read this book before. Now, if I could only remember what it was called. Hmmm...
Well, no time to waste, lets go create our bold refreshed earth, now with vegetarian midgets!
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Okay, completely setting aside the staggering ethical issues...
Let's say we all turn into hobbit-sized vegetarians and reduce our footprint. It doesn't fricking matter. Unless we do something about our fertility, our population will still keep growing and we will still eat the rainforests, it will just take a little longer for us to do it. And that's the thing: there really is only one variable that actually matters in the long run. With the right-sized population, we can all be 12-foot-tall gorillas that only eat the prime part of the cow and discard the rest.
Not that there aren't also ethical considerations on that side too, but jesus, it just irks me when so much effort is put into managing these little inconsequential variables that, in the long term, don't change a damn thing about our global impact.
The solution offered here is an example of the class of solution it is supposedly an alternative to:
Buying bioengineered humans is certainly an example of "buying our way out of climate change", and its far more speculative in its utility than any of the forms of buying our way out of climate change it is offered as an alternative to in TFS.
why wouldn't you engineer humans to be less in number... o right can't use birth control.
Is there any doubt that coercion would follow, since a lot of people would refuse? The effort to perfect man into someone's ideal image has always resulted in mass death.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
super soldiers that make up the people who refused this and didn't geneticaly tamper with their children to produce smaller people decide to just take what they want from the leaf eating midgets?
The Green Leopard Plague
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Leopard_Plague
By Walter Jon Williams
The ethical concerns are only absurdly complicated when trying to justify something which is clearly unethical.
We'll all be genetically engineered humans, probably patented by Monsanto, and will then have to pay a licensing fee to reproduce. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
A bioethicist advocating eugenics.
professor of philosophy and bioethics
His insights in nutritional science are likely to be as correct and relevant as /.s insights into modern interpretive dance. This was a LOL article.
Old world thinkers have just barely moved beyond the "vital force" principle in organic chem... still hung up on the differences between humans and animals being some mysterious vital force. Sorry, there's just not that much difference.
His theory seems to be he can create a bovine protein allergy. He might succeed at creating a bioengineered lupus-like autoimmune disease.
He might manage to make us allergic to hemoglobin (what could go wrong), or maybe unable to digest some essential amino acid that is in meat and also some plants... kwashiorkor here we come!
Another fun one would be cross species contamination into carnivorous species... Bye bye lions and tigers and housecats and wolves and dogs and...
You know what would be fun? Catholic mass is into the transubstantiation thing where the wafer turns into the body of christ. Unable to digest meat means unable to digest the host. Therefore catholics can't take the pill. The meat allergy pill, I mean, not the birth control pill. Although the jokes are already firing up about "eating meat". Except on Fridays during lent when you're not supposed to eat meat. Except for fish, which is a plant. This will be fun to watch.
Seriously though, it might be an interesting bioweapon. Imagine something that spreads like AIDS so religious types can blame the victim for their sex life, but it gives them fatal kwashiorkor.
Another fun one would be to build the industrial facilities to generate and package enormous quantities of some obscure non-essential amino acid, then release a plague that converts human digestive systems into having that formerly non-essential amino acid now be an essential amino acid. Then sell the food supplements to keep them alive... at a high profit of course. This is a subcategory of the old game of give new 3rd world mothers enough baby formula to supply the baby until they stop making milk, then say ha ha and charge whatever you can get out of them lest they watch their babies starve. Ha ha, its a great day to be an American isn't it....
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Suprised this hasn't been mention. If any thread fit that tag, this sure enough would.
Instead of ideas such as making people smaller why not simply confront the fact that we need to severely restrict births.
yes
A lower population eats less meat, needs less roads and cars and allows general preservation of the environment as well as having natural land for wild life.
yes
Simply have rules that allow only the best young people to have one child in one marriage. Problem solved and no test tubes or fancy thinking need be involved at all.
NO! You are wrong on so many levels I could write twenty essays and five dystopian novels on the subject.
Instead of ideas such as making people smaller why not simply confront the fact that we need to severely restrict births. A lower population eats less meat, needs less roads and cars and allows general preservation of the environment as well as having natural land for wild life. Simply have rules that allow only the best young people to have one child in one marriage. Problem solved and no test tubes or fancy thinking need be involved at all.
Yes, great idea! Let's create a world government with enough power to: - measure the best-ness of every single human - decide who gets to have children. Not the best? Sorry, no kids for you dumb-ass! And I'm sure this entire process would be done fairly and transparently and wouldn't favor the people in power.... - the power to enforce its decisions from people who may not want to follow the rules and may be trying to hide pregnancies. That means somehow getting all females on the planet to take periodic pregnancy tests (probably a blood test so the results can't be faked) and aborting the preganancies of anyone who is pregnant without permission. Great world you envision.... I'd personally rather give up meat....
Also, have you ever given up salt for an extended amount of time? You'll be amazed how much it seems like candy after the first time you try it again ( was off salt for a 3 month personal test
You cannot give up salt. You will die with no salt in your diet. Yes that is correct you will die if you don't eat enough salt. While too much salt can be detrimental, this crazy idea that salt is bad for you is just that "Crazy". I'm sure it tasted like candy because your body needed that salt. Salt helps maintain the fluid in our blood cells and is used to transmit information in our nerves and muscles. It is also used in the uptake of certain nutrients from our small intestines. Eat your salt.
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
similar to the one mentioned, namely the project to dissuade humans from the taste of meat. My team works in shifts to identify common foods and cravings people may have. we have assembled around 30 meals we've identified as generally enjoyed
in the US, and after nearly a decade of extensive testing and development im proud to say we've made significant progress. Of the commonly consumed edibles we've engineered, many test subjects eat only some of the food. often times they refuse to eat certain items entirely. By changing the color and texture of the food we've ensured that even the most visibly palletable foodstuffs remain of limited interest to numerous test groups.
the project ive overseen has the potential for proven commercial success. should any reader need more information on patent licensing, design or independent consulting/partnering please feel free to contact me.
regards,
Mike Archer, President
AppleBees Restaraunts.
Good people go to bed earlier.
You may notice that many of the replies so far advocate population control* as the solution to climate change, aka anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
* Forced sterilization, mandated use of birth control and so forth.
A quick question for AGW proponents: do you want to give control over who can and cannot have children to the same people who gave you the TSA?
measure the best-ness of every single human - decide who gets to have children
Children cost money to raise. When the parent has no money, then the state has to step in and pay. If there were a system where people had to pay upfront for the costs of raising their children before they were conceived then it would introduce a financial control metric into the system. Being poor wouldn't necessarily be a problem - there would be various providers offering you loans, and they would evaluate your ability to repay the loan before making it.
Sure, it isn't "fair" to people with no money that they can't have kids, but it also isn't "fair" that people with no money expect the rest of society to pay for their kids. If having a single child is important for society, then maybe the first one should be free, and you only pay after that. The bottom line is that if, at some point in the future, people don't self-regulate their fertility, and society can't afford a constantly expanding population, then the only societies that will prosper will be the ones that enforce regulations on fertility. Could you imagine China without One Child Per Couple? The population would have been approaching 2 billion by now. There are parts of Africa where overpopulation is already resulting in there being not enough land to support the people, and this is a driver of conflict and wars.
Yet the 1991 Honda CRX/HF still gets 72 MPG
You know, if you don't run it on crappy California reformulated gas. If you run crappy California gas, it only gets 64 MPG. Which puts it in the same ballpark as the 1991 Geo Metro convertible, which gets 64 MPG on non-crappy California reformulated gas.
Gotta keep that Chevron refinery monopoly going, they did so well by us with MTBE. Never mind that all vehicles since 1981 have Oxygen sensors, so Oxygenation of fuels does squat for pollution, unless you are driving a 1969 Ford Thunderbird or some other vehicle more than 31 years old.
PS: the US auto industry specifically came up with transverse crash testing to disallow the CRX/HF being imported into the US. Basically, they had to figure out a crash test they could pass that CRX/HF couldn't in order to kill it. Never mind that being simultaneously T-boned from two directions is unlikely as hell.
-- Terry