Tests with the DNA code have found their way back to the original truth that created life in the first place. The 21st has been the Biotech Century according to Jeremy Rifkin. Early on, futurists predicted the new age to be advanced in biotechnology. Most predicted great gain in medicine and agriculture, but threats to human dignity such as cloning, chimeras, cyborgs, genetically engineered subhuman slaves, and superhuman masters.
Lee Silver of Princeton said that genetic engineering might create a new species of human, unable to reproduce with its "worse half."ÃÂ Nature always reaches a limit: Luther Burbank said "a tendency to stay true to type keeps all living things within some more or less fixed limitations." But science vanquished the genetic barrier. Darwin proposed that "living things form a continuous chain with ever shifting boundaries, each species melding into the next on the evolutionary ladder."ÃÂ Darwin's theory was never confirmed.
Animation of the structure of a section of DNA. Th...
Industrial Darwinism
Jeremy Rifkin, Foto: Stephan RöhlScientists could not cross Burbank's "more or less fixed limitations." When the limits of humanity became flexible, who could say we had any ethical status? Brian Goodwin wrote "Darwinism eliminates the idea of species as natural kinds, with disastrous ethical consequences: Human nature disappears as a concept from neo-Darwinism, and so life becomes a set of parts, commodities that can be shifted around." By the 20th century, Darwinian reductionism leaked into fields such as ethics, where philosophers like Michael Ruse were presenting morality as "an illusion. What is in our genes' interests is what seems 'right'"ÃÂmorally right," Paul Ramsey noted that most arguments for abortion "defined the person as a choosing consciousness, while reducing the body to a possession or instrument under our control, like a car that takes us where we want to go."ÃÂ This also accounted for the creating of human embryos for research, and cutting and...