The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution - Hardcover

Baldi, Pierre

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9780262025027: The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262025027 ISBN 13: 9780262025027

Publisher: Bradford Books, 2001

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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 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 so 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 blur and ultimately may evaporate entirely. Baldi offers not predictions but an open-eyed exploration of our current state of knowledge and the possibilities that lie ahead.

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About the Author:

Pierre Baldi is Professor of Information and Computer Science and of Biological Chemistry (College of Medicine) and Director of the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics at the University of California, Irvine.

From Publishers Weekly:

At the dawn of the 21st century, Baldi (a professor of computer science and biological chemistry at UC-Irvine) says, the human genome has been mapped; genetic technology can prevent inherited disease; and biogenetic techniques such as cloning and in vitro fertilization make it possible for people to choose traits for their babies. How, he asks, does such burgeoning scientific achievement alter the nature of the human self? How does cloning, for example, change our conception of ourselves? Is a clone a human being? Is a full-term in vitro aka test-tube baby a human baby? What are human attributes? Baldi observes that "our notions of self, life and death, intelligence, and sexuality" are primitive and evolved to provide us with "a feeling that each of us is a unique individual delimited by precise boundaries." He contends that a world dominated by computer and biotechnologies shatters this model, making us uneasy with scientific advances. For example, in vitro techniques may render sexual intercourse unnecessary for conceiving children. Thus sex, perhaps the clearest evolutionary example of human will to survive, could become extinct. Baldi provides an accessible overview of molecular biology and a masterful survey of scientific techniques, like DNA-manipulation, that challenge our sense of ourselves. While he finds many of these scenarios disturbing, he emphasizes that, in the quest for self-knowledge, we must face these scientific challenges openly. Baldi's powerful, elegant book deftly navigates the interactions between science and psychology. (May)Forecasts: While Robert Wright and E.O. Wilson focused on evolutionary theory as it demonstrates the emergence of self, Baldi goes further to show how the self evolves after natural evolution has ended. Readers of Wright, Wilson, Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins will enjoy Baldi, so this title could do relatively well with attentive handselling.

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