If we're not going to give the snake credit for evolving and using its rattle, we can hardly give the engineer much credit for evolving and using her brain.
And no matter what our engineer does, she is still a plaything in the hands of the fates, and the still larger hands of evolution. She's still just an experiment, a trial run.
Even though she stands at the doorway of being able to reengineer her own genes, and perhaps make an engineer twice as smart and longlived, she remains a pawn of evolution. It's the genes that will live on for thousands of generations, if successful -- not her.
If we're not going to give the snake credit for evolving and using its rattle, we can hardly give the engineer much credit for evolving and using her brain.
And no matter what our engineer does, she is still a plaything in the hands of the fates, and the still larger hands of evolution. She's still just an experiment, a trial run.
Even though she stands at the doorway of being able to reengineer her own genes, and perhaps make an engineer twice as smart and longlived, she remains a pawn of evolution. It's the genes that will live on for thousands of generations, if successful -- not her.
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