|
Throughout history, we have selected and manipulated the genomes
of plants, animals, and even ourselves. Until now, however, such control could
be exerted only at the level of the entire organism. Scientific and technological
advances now allow us to manipulate genomes directly at the level of single genes
and their constituents, with a speed and precision that far exceed what natural
evolution has been able to achieve over the past 3.5 billion years. These advances
open new possibilities for medicine, biotechnology, and society as a whole.
We already have in vitro fertilization and animal cloning; in
the near future human cloning and the exploitation of embryonic
stem cells, among other capabilities, may be routine. At
the same time, we are developing machines that will surpass
the human brain in raw computing power and building an interconnected
world of information-processing devices that makes science
fiction pale in comparison. In this book Baldi explores
what it is about these phenomena that makes us uneasy --
the shattering of the human self as we know it.
Through
evolution our brains have been wired to provide us with an inner sense of self,
a feeling that each of us is a unique individual delimited by precise boundaries.
We have also been wired to reproduce ourselves in a certain way. Baldi argues
that this self-centered view of the world is scientifically wrong. Its past success
lies in its being an adequate model during our evolutionary bootstrapping: a world
without molecular biotechnology, human cloning, and the Internet. Eventually we
must come to terms with the fact that genomes, computations, and mind are fluid,
continuous entities, in both space and time. The boundary between the self and
the world has begun to dissolve and ultimately may evaporate entirely. Baldi offers
not predictions but an informal exploration of our current state of knowledge
and the possibilities that lie ahead. Pierre Baldi
is Professor of Information abd Computer Science, and of Biological Chemistry
(College of Medicine) and Director of the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics
at The University of California, Irvine. He is a the coauthor of Bioinformatics:
A Machine Learning Approach. |
