Too fast for you and me… well you maybe. Have you ever noticed
how fast children adapt to things?
I don’t think an extrapolation of fast (okay), Faster (even better), and then some how even Fast equals bad!?! How does that fit the trend?
What would be a blur to us will be slow motion to the fast thinking next
generation. Remember what happened to the Neanderthals? Neoluddilite ROFL.
Here’s a little article 4 ya -
From: cp@panix.com (Charles Platt)
Subject: Jeremy Rifkin’s book
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics
Date: 18 May 1998 16:27:24 -0400
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Rarely, a writer has an opportunity to say something about
someone he regards as a true menace to the human future. I
was offered this chance recently (on a very modest scale)
when The Washington Post asked me to review the new book by
Jeremy Rifkin, “The Biotech Century.”
I believe Rifkin is the commentator who poses the greatest
threat to attempts to transcend limitations of the human
condition. His book is useful as a catalogue of recent
advances in molecular biology and genetics, but is pernicious
and dishonest in its pretense to be a “guide,” when in fact
it is a polemic.
Normally I don’t quote my own work online, but in this case I
offer the text of my review, largely because I would like as
many people as possible to know about Jeremy Rifkin. If you
are unconvinced by my evaluation, I invite you to look at his
book for yourself. Anyone who believes in the promise of
technology to improve our lives should be extremely concerned
by this man.
–Charles Platt
Profits of Doom
by Charles Platt
Doomsayers have always been in plentiful supply.
“Resources are scarcely adequate to us,” wrote the Roman
scholar Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus, “while already
nature does not sustain us. Truly, pestilence and hunger and
war and flood must be considered as a remedy for nations,
like a pruning back of the human race becoming excessive in
numbers.”[1] This was around 200 AD, when world population
was under 300 million.[2]
Tertullianus was wrong, Malthus was wrong, and modern
academics have been wrong–most spectacularly when an MIT
study team deduced from a massive computer simulation that
all reserves of lead, tin, zinc, and petroleum would be
exhausted within 20 years. (This was back in 1972.)[3] Still,
the abysmal track record of pessimistic pundits has never
impaired their popularity–which explains Jeremy Rifkin’s
lucrative career as a gene-splicing alarmist, even though
none of his horror scenarios has come close to reality, while
research continues safely under severe restraints and
promises huge benefits ranging from cancer cures to new crops
that will fight third-world hunger.
Of course, recombinant DNA raises ethical issues and has
frightening military applications. But in The Biotech
Century (Tarcher/Putnam, $24.95) Rifkin goes far beyond
these specifics. With Old Testament hyperbole he warns of an
impending “second genesis” threatening “a biological Tower of
Babel spreading chaos throughout the biological world and, in
the process, drowning out the ancient language of evolution.”
(page 68)
In fact nature already is a chaotic system, and the
“ancient language of evolution” is a risky process of random
mutations. The AIDS virus emerged from one such mutation;
likewise, numerous hereditary birth defects that cause untold
misery. We’d be wise to learn how to inhibit these “natural”
processes merely for our own self-defense.
Rifkin, though, warns that the power to cure defects can
also be used to create superchildren. “‘Customized’ babies
could pave the way for the rise of a eugenic civilization in
the twenty-first century,” he says (page 3). Yet no one
complains, today, if a woman chooses a husband for his
intelligence or his good looks, hoping that her children will
inherit those traits. Shouldn’t individuals be allowed to
control this process with less uncertainty?
In March, 1996, UNESCO denied this right,[4] claiming
that “the human genome is the common heritage of humanity.”
Thus, women should be forbidden to modify their ova, or men
their sperm, because germ plasm belongs to future generations
of our species, not the person in whom it resides.
Rifkin extends this dubious principle even further,
opposing private ownership even of plant genes, especially by
pharmaceutical companies that extract useful DNA sequences in
third-world countries. He doesn’t explain who will pay to
turn these sequences into drugs, test them, and market them
if no one is allowed ownership rights. He simply rejects the
idea. “Life patents strike at the core of our beliefs about
the very nature of life,” he writes (page 62).
His view of life, however, is somewhat inaccurate. He
complains that gene splicing alters “our concept of nature
and our relationship to it, reducing all of life to
manipulatable chemical materials” (page 14). But life cannot
be reduced to chemistry; it is chemistry, as was proved
almost a century ago when sea urchins were fertilized with
inert chemicals in a famous experiment at the Woods Hole
marine biological laboratory.[5] Since then we’ve established
that every cell contains its own DNA program, and currently
we are learning how to modify that program with greater
precision. To Jeremy Rifkin, this seems a threat and an
insult, possibly for religious reasons, though he avoids
mentioning his own faith.
The Biotech Century purports to be an objective guide,
but this is a deliberate deception. Mr. Rifkin makes no
attempt at a fair or balanced assessment, and does not reveal
to the reader his long record of anti-science activism. His
“survey” of the next century is an endless catalogue of
horrors, real or imagined, and he offers no suggestions for
solutions.
If genetic research is impeded, millions of people will
remain hungry or will die unnecessarily. If scare tactics by
doomsayers encourage legislation that outlaws some activities
(such as cloning), the work will move offshore to nations
where fewer safeguards may exist, thus creating greater risk.
Since The Biotech Century encourages these outcomes, it
raises an intriguing question: who is more dangerous, the
scientist seeking to enhance our lives, or the pundit who
promotes unreasoning fear?
Mr. Rifkin would like tighter controls on risky research
conducted by greedy pharmaceutical companies. By the same
logic, he should favor restrictions on reckless doomsayers,
who work without regulatory supervision and profit handsomely
while accepting no responsibility for the social consequences
of their scaremongering.
References
[1] Quoted in Joel E. Cohen, “How Many People Can the World
Support?” (page 6). W. W. Norton and Company, New York, 1995.
[2] Same source as [1] (page 77).
[3] Donella H. Meadows et. al., The Limits to Growth (pages
56-61). Universe Books, New York, 1972.
[4] In “Declaration on Protection of the Human Genome,” from
UNESCO web page; quoted in “The Evolution Revolution” by
Charles Platt, Wired magazine, January 1997.
[5] Boyce Rensberger, Life Itself (page 9). Oxford
University Press, New York, 1996.