Genetically Modifying you and your Salad

A very frustrating part of having friends, who have such a wide range of metaphysical beliefs, is that a dinner conversation can become very long, and often end with misunderstandings or even anger. Though I am happy to have dinner party debates with friends of all types of religious and secular belief systems, I have tried to make my life a little easier, less stressful and more productive by not mixing in traditional religious fundamentalist. Certainly the combination of them and I make for fuel fired debates, but ultimately it becomes so personal that the evening ends with one of two outcomes. It is sometimes sadness, where the fundamentalist says something like “I feel so, so sad that we will not be spending the afterlife in paradise together. I really sympathize with the agony of the inferno where you will be occupying eternity”. The other side would be me causing rage, and maybe a full fist fight, when I say “go ahead and console yourself with those mindless, bigoted, pedophiles. That is a bunch I would want not to spend eternity with.”

As you can see, this is an example, one among many, of how a conversation like this can go wrong. Due to the severity of this, I avoid the party all together. Those people in general I spend only 5% of my time with. The other 95% of the time, I have two general groups of friends, who have a wide range of opinions, but whom we can make some generalizations about. The first group is the people I like in a deeply emotional way. They are often the people I cry with when I need to cry. They are passionate and dynamic. They cook well. They hike, and Kayak, and garden. They also see you as something greater than your material self. They are therefore classical Cartesian dualists, with some modern flair. That is they do believe that the mind is not the brain. It is a soul. Something which is either more important or responsive to our body, but exists separately or at least supplementary to it. The modern way of dealing with the soul is to erase some of the more dogmatic ideas of religion and search for truth outside of a religion. Many of these are great thinkers, poets or philosophers themselves. They intellectually and emotionally put together a treatise for existence based on multiple texts, from Eastern Religions and a general empathy with nature. This includes the avoidance of the suffering of animals, the elimination of pesticides, and the creation of natural temples of rocks, even in public parks, as a shrine to simplicity and nature. Thomas Jefferson was actually one of these types of people. There is another side of these friends that goes a step beyond what would appear to all of us non Osama Bin Laden, non Pat Robertson reasonable people. This other side is what is discussed in Michael Specter’s book “Denialism”. In this book, Specter looks at many claims of this group of my friends (well, he didn’t actually do this as a study of my friends, but I could have supplied him with some case studies) that when the scientific method is applied to them, the belief becomes just that, another faith based claim, similar to a fundamentalist claim. Examples of these types of claims are the use of vitamins, which science shows that 98% are completely useless. More importantly for my argument though is a dedicated belief in the wisdom of buying organically grown crops. The argument for this has its merits on some specifics. The use of pesticides is dangerous, and for me, the organic foods taste better most of the time. The argument though destroys a key desire of my friends, which involves connectivity and charity though a spiritual empathy with all other forms of life.

As a scientist and an artist, I feel the argument of my friends, but rationalize a completely other view. First I must say that being rational is essential for me. I just read from the Spinoza “Ethics”, and see that he has intellectual development as a progression, involving each step, from experience, to rational to instinctual. I get this very much. The goal would therefore be to have a great deal of experience with something, then work out why that thing happens, resulting in such knowledge that it then becomes instinctual. This is a wonderful design for an interpretive musician or for a scientist, and it is one that could be applied easily to the dualist viewpoints reaction to certain beliefs.

I would like to take just one belief of this generic stereotypical group, and one from myself, and my science friends. The first group might listen to the Deepak Chopra PodCast, while the second to “The Skeptics Guide to The Universe”. I want to look at how we perceive nature, because it is nature where both of the groups come together, in order to protect it. Both groups also claim to understand humans as a part of nature. When talking to the spiritual, organic food devotees, I ask if they are just uncomfortable with pesticides. If they say yes, I then say, “me too, they are dangerous in water supplies, and for the food chain”. If they say a more common thing though which is that they are against genetically engineered food, I become deflated, as my nature loving Chopraesque friends have lost track of truth. There have been literally billions of genetically engineered crops sold, without one instance of an illness ascribed to them. This is not even to mention that nature itself has been genetically modifying plants for thousands of years, especially if you consider humans a part of nature.

This is now an old argument. I want to introduce a new debate between these two groups, by first posting it here, and letting ideas form before we meet over wine and hydroponic winter melons. The concept is this; consider that we are all material parts of nature, and are either connected through a spiritual force as one group may claim, or through common elements as the other would claim. I think that no matter which philosophical leaning we are talking about, all seem to take some comfort, and understanding in the famous Carl Sagan quote that we are all “star stuff”. This is not just us, but all matter, and all life. So accepting this is not a stretch. Then consider biological sciences as it applies to human medicine. Most of us, all liberal politically, took the decoding of the human genome in 2000 to be a positive advancement, as it would help us not only understand existence better, but potentially cure diseases. We were also shocked and angered by the Bush Administration’s ban on government labs using embryonic stem cells, as the potential for those cells are so great. Just last month, now that Obama has ended this ban, an important study proved that embryonic stem cells injected into specific regions of the brain will create axons which reach a designated target. For example if the cells are placed in the visual cortex, an axon will grow to reach the optic nerve, potentially making the blind able to see again. This has been demonstrated in mice. Since axons can be so long that they can reach to the base of the spinal cord, this could one day be used for spinal cord injury. Paraplegics could walk again. Though this may be a while, it is on a testing regime that leaves many doctors and scientists hopeful. I would doubt that any of my friends would not be thrilled by this. Actually, the Chopra crowd also tends to fall into the old conservative jab of being “bleeding hearts”. This is likely the reason they are my friends. I want friends with empathy and compassion. So, stem cell research is a genetic engineering that we can all agree on. Which then gets me to what I would consider a double standard. If all life is connected, why is genetic engineering good enough for people, but not for plants? This seems surprising for two reasons. It is Genetic Engineered foods that will feed starving parts of the world. This should appeal to us bleeding hearts. It also makes for stronger crops, the way we are trying to make for stronger humans.