Posted on 03/10/2002 12:38:04 PM PST by Phaedrus
I'll tell you what I think it is.(No, hold the tin foil hat!)
I think these guys have sold a lot of altered genes that are going to get(or are already)in the food chain and they're afraid they have unloosed some "destroyer" genes.
Funky soy beans turning up in feedlots, burger filler,medicine binders, etc.
And that genie (no pun intended)can't be put back in the bottle!
Kind of what I thought.
Well it sure would be nice to get some examples of these "mysterious" complications that are not getting reported.
I've worked with this stuff and if you think there is some sort of nefarious plan to cover up problems you're wrong.
What I think is that there is a conspiracy of silence within so-called science abetted by the "major" (and largely brain-dead) media such that whatever the problems, and there ARE problems, their response is: "No worries, everything is hunky dorey, we are in charge and we are the Masters of the Universe". Which is to say there is a lot of lying by omission going on, which in turn is a fabulous medium for conspiracy theories. "Leave it to the experts" is NOT a suitable resolution to issues that are so sensitive to our future physical well-being and to our moral sensibilities. Is this clear enough or should be contemplate having Rabbit Man for dinner?
The most obvious thing that is not being reported are the tremendous amounts of failures. You will hear that someone cloned a sheep. They may say that it took years to do it or they may not. What do you think they were doing all those years of research? They were cloning and cloning and cloning and getting monsters instead of sheep.
They only tell us the successes, but not the failures. Even in that sheep example, they did not wait for a thorough examination, they pronounced it a success but later when problems were found there was no publicity for that.
It sure does, and they really should have known better. Before this genome project was taken up, we knew there had to be something else. We knew for example that cells must be communicating with each other in some way. We knew that some processes in life were triggered and shut off such as the two sets of teeth humans get, puberty and even old age. We also knew that while each cell has the same set of genes they end up doing different things and that there had to be some way, something telling each cell what its job was to be. We also knew that each individual is a biological system with numerous interconnected functions and that genes alone were not a sufficient answer.
Yes, it is different, but you see this new research shows the problem with "local" changes also. The problem is that genes are not individual entities, they are part of a whole. They also have more duties than are immediately apparent. We may change a gene which we know performs a certain function, but we do not know what other functions it is performing and what connections those functions have towards other genes.
What I’m most reminded of, by the Human Genome Project’s results thus far, is the persistent failure of the “science” of alchemy to transmute dross metal into gold. In the Mediaeval ages and later (and maybe sooner), some of the most brilliant and penetrating minds were devoted to facilitating this object. But nobody ever got anywhere. After centuries of trying, the answer always came up: “No, you can’t do that. It is in the nature of things that that should be so.”
So gambling is all you’ve got left to satisfy such cravings….
Some passages from Voegelin on the general context in which the present hush may be whispered:
* * * * * *
We must remind the reader that at the end of the sixteenth century Giordano Bruno had formulated clearly the issue between speculation on the infinite substance of the cosmos and a mathematized science of the “accidences of accidences.” Bruno’s speculation, on the one hand, found no immediate succession.
The “accidences of accidences,” on the other hand, had become the absorbing interest of scholars as well as of a wider public in the centuries of the rising natural sciences. The impressive spectacle of the advancement of science and of the Newtonian system created attitudes and sentiments that have become a decisive ingredient in modern man and modern civilization.
One element in this new complex of sentiments … [is] scientism: the belief in mathematized science as the model science to the methods of which all other sciences should conform.
We must now deal with the complex as a whole, and we shall call it phenomenalism in order to indicate the preoccupation of man with the phenomenal aspects of the world, as they appear in science, and the atrophy of awareness of the substantiality of man and the universe.
Phenomenalism has nothing to do with the method of the advancement of science itself; the term is supposed to designate sentiments, imaginations, and speculations, as well as patterns of conduct determined by them, which originate on occasion of the advancement of mathematized science.
Furthermore, we must beware of the assumption that the advancement of science is the one and only cause of the rise of phenomenalism. The new sentiments and attitudes, while hardly conceivable without the prodigious advancement of science, are not necessitated by it. That phenomenalism could gain the importance that it actually has is primarily due to the atrophy of Christian spirituality and the growth of intramundane sentiments.
The advancement of science is a contributing factor in the process, insofar as its success is apt to fortify intramundane sentiments; and insofar as phenomenalism, grafted on science, has become an important instrument for their expression.
[Eric Voegelin, The History of Political Ideas, Volume VII: The New Order and Last Orientation. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. ]
* * * * * *
EV is daunting. (Personally, I almost had a heart attack the first time I encountered his term, “hypostasization of reality.”) Maybe some notes on the above text might be helpful. (Please beware, this according to my interpretation.)
First, Giordano Bruno was an “Italian philosopher, b. at Nola in Campania, in the Kingdom of Naples, in 1548; d. at Rome, 1600. At the age of eleven he went to Naples, to study "humanity, logic, and dialectic", and, four years later, he entered the Order of St. Dominic, giving up his worldly name of Filippo and taking that of Giordano. He made his novitiate at Naples and continued to study there. In 1572 he was ordained priest.” [Catholic Encyclopaedia on-line] In 1600, however, he was burned at the stake as a heretic of pantheist and Unitarian persuasions.
“The infinite substance of the cosmos” refers ultimately to the life of God and its manifestation in man and nature. It grapples with the questions, “why does anything exist? And why is a given thing the way it is, and not some other way?”
A student of culture and history knows that such ultimate questions have resonated with intelligent human beings for millennia by now. They constitute the formal philosophical discipline called ontology: the study of Being. I conclude that “being” and “substance” are virtually synonymous terms in the contexts of Bruno – and EV.
With the Greeks and the Christians, the result of such questions has been the development of a “science of man,” an anthropology, that is premised on man being a “natural creature,” but also a “spiritual creature.” That is to say, man lives in the space-time dimension that conditions empirical reality; but he is not completely contained, constrained, or determined by empirical conditions. (This is why man is said to have Free Will. But again, this development deduces from classical/Christian premises.)
The “intramundane man” has extension into the infinite; that is, there is a native capacity for transcendence in the nature of man. He lives in at least two time orders, the “natural,” spatio-temporal order in which we all “naturally” live; and also an order that is “outside” or “beyond” time. The mystery is that both orders interleave, or “play” more or less simultaneously, whether we are specifically conscious of this or not.
(But this would be the subject of a whole ‘nother thread. I’d love to get back to it some time; but right now, we’re out of time and bandwidth.)
“Accidences of accidences” is Bruno’s quaint way of signifying a chain of causation that never reaches out beyond the intramundane dimension. That is, it confines itself to the study of causal relations among observable phenomena – the way science must.
But that supposition suggests to me that a very great deal of the human picture must be deliberately erased in order to make this “understanding” turn out “right.”
If you properly understand the point of the phenomenalist exercise, you know it seeks to account for man and the universe without reference to anything lying beyond time and space such that sensory perception can register. Its basic definition (it doesn’t even have an anthropology) is that man is abstract individual, with no ties to the past, the most tenuous ties to the present (living in TV land and admiring hard-core sophistry as much as he seems to do) no expectations of the future, and no interest in understanding his own existence as having extension and expression beyond a world which itself is condemned to intramundane existence.
I figure you get “accidences of accidences” problems anytime you get your fundamental premise wrong. As arguably, the Human Genome Project has done exactly this.
But then, the point and purpose of the Human Genome Project from the beginning was to factually establish the theory of “accidences of accidences,” not to refute it.
It’s late. Must be time to stop. Anyone wants to continue with anything above, please just give me a yell. Thank you for a wonderful discussion, Phaedrus. Peace and love, bb.
Thanks for the note!
In general, "pop" scientists scare me because it's usually impossible to separate "fact" from social/political agenda. But Sheldrake is just so darn interesting and seems to steer clear of politics generally (although he certainly involves himself in unpleasant New Age stuff) that I've always enjoyed reading him.
For lurkers who might want to know more about Rupert Sheldrake, check out his website: the website of Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D.
The site is no replacement for his books, but it does give you an overview of the guy. (Although he doesn't flat out give space to James Randi, he at least acknowledges Randi's views of his work (under the "Controversies" link), and provides excerpts from some of his e-mail exchanges with Randi.)
Mark W.
Aside from the issue of complexity of the cell, the concerns that Commoner has are not limited to him alone. E.G.
GE crops with Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) genes suspected to harm soil ecology
| By contrast, the toxins in many Bt crops are already in the active form. Researchers from New York University, including the renowned soil ecologist Guenther Stotsky, found that unlike natural Bt, these active toxins do not disappear when added to soil, but become rapidly bound to soil particles, and are not broken down by soil microbes. This contradicts what Monsanto scientists have been soying about soil persistence of Bt toxin from their Bt crops. Dr Charles Benbrook, former Executive Director of the Board on Agriculture for the US National Academy of Sciences has commented: "Compared to the volume of Bt in the soil in a conventional agroecosystem, the quantity of Bt entering the soil in corn stalks and stover must be enormous... Remarkably millions of acres of Bt GM varieties have been allowed to be grown in the US with little, if any, research being carried out as to the long term effect on soil fertility of such potentially toxic plant residue material (i.e when incorporated into soils post-harvest in preparation for the next crop). That this fundamental question has been overlooked is symptomatic of modern systems of agriculture generally, which frequently pay little regard to the fundamental role microbial activity plays in maintaining genuine soil fertility." For more about the ecology of soil microorganisms and soil fertility, see "Genetically Engineered Crops and Soil Fertility". |
And so all the leading lights of the biotech community, concerned about the small number of human genes, are misled and wrong, except you of course. Enlighten us. Please.
Sheldrake is a former director of studies in cellular biology at Cambridge who has taken to investigating things normally termed 'paranormal' using statistical methods and good experimental design. The Michael Shermers of the world and similar science vigilantes hate the guy because his methods are above reproach, his credentials are vastly better than theirs, and there is basically nothing they can do about him.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.