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The Unnaturals
Life has a natural order which must be respected in order to achieve happiness. Most conservatives agree to that. Men and women are naturally different. Children are naturally different from adults. Suffering and death are a natural part of life, and we should be skeptical of any utopian scheme that wishes to circumvent them.
I concede all that. Yet in conceding that, I cannot help but conclude that my own existence is deeply unnatural. Let me explain.
Without the intervention of modern medicine, I would have died several times over in childhood. If you asked me whether Mother Nature intended me to be alive, the only reasonable answer I could come up with is “No”. Moreover, I’m a third-generation unnatural: the child of a child who would have died in childhood without heroic medical intervention. I married a man who has robust good health, but it’s likely that our children (should we manage to have any) will be fourth-generation unnaturals.
Moreover, asthma — the most obvious (though not the only) problem that should have caused my childhood death — intensifies with each successive generation. My siblings were luckier, some not having asthma at all. But when children with asthma are rescued from death and survive to reproduce, is it any surprise when future generations are born with worse asthma? Moreover, wouldn’t we expect similar results to hold for any heritable malady that used to kill people off before they reproduced but now — thanks to modern technology — doesn’t have to? What, if anything, does that mean for humanity as a whole?
Now, many asthmatics are highly intelligent and productive people. That is, productive if they can keep the asthma and its many comorbidities under control. Thanks to modern pharmacology, many can. Regardless, asthma is inherently an impediment to productivity and even life itself. Attempting to live a productive life with severe asthma these days involves all sorts of artificial manipulation, from consumption of artificial hormones to injecting yourself with mouse antibodies raised in hamster cells. Sometimes, even that is insufficient.
Wait, back up a sec. Injecting yourself with mouse-hamster antibodies in order to become more productive? Isn’t that sort of like transhumanism?
Well, is it?
Or what if — instead of injecting themselves with the mouse-hamster antibodies — asthmatics could inject themselves with a virus that infected their DNA with genes to express those antibodies? Would deliberately changing their DNA in this way make asthmatics any less human?
So often on Ricochet, we talk about natural-versus-unnatural in the context of death or reproduction; but if this divide is important at the endpoints of life, isn’t it more important in its midst? Where do we draw the line between natural and unnatural survival, between natural and unnatural functioning? And is it any surprise that — to unnaturals like me — the line already seems pathologically blurred? Is it any surprise that we unnaturals who respect traditionalist arguments for natural human boundaries also feel alienated from those boundaries?
What about you? Are you an unnatural, too? Has that changed your conception of what “natural” means, or if “natural” means anything at all?
Image Credit: DeviantArt user ThE-UnKO-LeMa.
Published in General
No, of course not.
“For example, is an old man being “noble and tough” if he forgoes palliative drugs for his arthritis and spends his golden years irritable, whining and snapping at everyone?”
Bad example: given that “irritable, whining and snapping at everyone” is the natural state of old, conservative men, what would the difference be? ;)
But it’s true for a lot more things than I would have thought…
I think that’s a terrible example.
Post-industrial man lives much longer than pre-industial man. Therefore, one must care for one’s teeth over a much longer period of time. It wasn’t the braces which extended the child’s lifespan, but rather the extended lifespan than provided the impetus for the parents to make the child wear braces.
Braces are a result of a paradox: Older organisms tend to be weaker than younger organisms, therefore as humanity’s lifespan gets longer it also gets weaker, but what is strength if not the ability to survive longer than one’s competitors? Braces exist so that the child will be stronger (have straighter teeth) when they are weaker (as they become senior citizens).
LOL. No, because those Africans aren’t going to scare crooks, coyotes, and deer off my property.
It’s a great example, that’s why I picked it.
We have crooked teeth that don’t fit in our heads not because we live longer, but because we eat soft foods.
“Changes in the technology of food preparation over the last few thousand years (especially cooking, softening, and grinding) are hypothesized to have contributed to smaller facial size in humans because of less growth in response to strains generated by chewing softer, more processed food. While there is considerable comparative evidence to support this idea, most experimental tests of this hypothesis have been on non-human primates or other very prognathic mammals (rodents, swine) raised on hard versus very soft (nearly liquid) diets. Here, we examine facial growth and in vivo strains generated in response to raw/dried foods versus cooked foods in a retrognathic mammal, the rock hyrax (Procavia capensis)….”
“Effects of food processing on masticatory strain and craniofacial growth in a retrognathic face.”
Yes, the same thing’s been seen in humans.
(You also have a flaw in your logic: we don’t put braces on grandparents, but on adolescents: increased lifespan would have no impact.)
Yes, but the texture is totally different!
Except, that any archaeological evidence from more than a few thousand years ago which indicated that humans of that era had straighter teeth would come from a population where the average age was much lower at the time of death, therefore the data regarding the health of the teeth at later age would be largely missing.
Also, one of the reasons parents get their children braces because they KNOW the children WILL live longer, therefore they want the teeth to last a long time. You don’t give braces to the elderly because their teeth have ALREADY lived out the majority of their lives, and therefore it would be a waste of resources at that point to invest in braces.
Heheh.
Watch it, we have a CoC here!
Averages don’t have teeth: only individuals: If they got through early childhood, and didn’t get murdered, they lived to 70-80 years, just like us. If you want a source, I’m happy to provide one.
Again, teeth go crooked when you’re a kid, not a grandpa.
There is a lot in the comments about technology making us “weaker,” etc.
It is tautological that all of us are fit to live in the times in which we live. Otherwise, we’d be dead.
If any of us were transported back in time a few hundred years, we’d have a pretty hard time of it, but the inverse is also true. If the ancients were transported forward into our time, how many of them would get run over before they figured out where it was safe to walk?
But I think you’re missing the more fundamental point: they didn’t give their kids braces because their kids didn’t NEED braces.
They didn’t get crooked teeth because they were eating a suitable diet.
But it is a skill that modern crows have figured out.
LOL. It would be an interesting experiment if we could transport ancient crows into the present and see how they do.
Raccoons as well. There was a project in Toronto where lots and lots of urban racoons where fitted with GPS trackers, in order to map out each family’s territory. It was discovered that the territorial boundaries lined up almost exactly with the busiest streets. The racoons rarely crossed the major streets.
(They also, somewhat surprisingly, rarely entered parks. There’s much more food along the periphery of a park, because that’s where the garbage cans tend to be placed.)
The thing is, you hit the nail on the head when you wrote “modern” crows had figured it out. They’ve figured it out because they’ve adapted to the cities. An ancient human transported forward in time would not have this advantage.
In the same way, the raccoon study found that rural raccoons did not have the same degree of adaptability and intelligence as urban racoons. Behaviourally-speaking, they’re virtually a different species.
Actually, I wasn’t aiming for “Why shouldn’t we allow for genetic parents of the same sex?”, though of course that’s one question (out of many) that could be raised by what I wrote.
I was actually wondering more about the proper use of artificial means of sustaining already-existing life.
(Though I did idly wonder whether, if some manipulation had been performed on the egg that eventually became “me” to silence any asthma genes, would that be such a horrible thing? Risky maybe, if the manipulation didn’t work the way it was intended to – and certainly expensive – hence something only to be approached with caution if at all. But would it be innately evil?)
Except that
If straight teeth are an evolutionary advantage (because folk are more likely to choose a reproductive mate if they have straight teeth), then the lack of braces would itself be a primary factor which would reduce the number of people with straight teeth.
The fact that braces were invented meant that people with a genetic predisposition to crooked teeth are more likely to have them straightened, which improves their odds of reproducing and therefor passing along to their offspring their genetic predisposition for crooked teeth.
If crooked teeth make it harder to eat tough food, then the fact that one has easy access to soft food means that the person does not “need” straight teeth.
The British stereotype of having crooked teeth comes from Imperial era. If “softer food = crooked teeth”, and “more wealth = softer food”, then which side of the colonial divide was truly “stronger”? The straight-teethed natives who failed to resist being colonized? I rather doubt it.
Or improves their odds of a stable, middle-class marriage where they produce fewer offspring than the might have if they and their crooked teeth had pursued multiple unstable, lower-class liaisons.
Marital success and reproductive success are somewhat different, at least if you’re considering quantity the measure of reproductive success.
I must have stated my initial point poorly.
1. There are no genes for crooked teeth. Only for straight teeth.
2. People ONLY get crooked teeth because they eat a poor diet that produces crooked teeth.
We’ve seen, in the United States, entire populations go from straight teeth to crooked teeth in one generation. This obviously CANNOT be caused by genes changing.
This has also been seen in populations all around the world.
Are you making some sort of slur about country folk versus city folk? ;)
With raccoons as with humans, you’ll find that a country raccoon will do much better transplanted to the city than the reverse. ;)
Raccoons are supposed to be pretty smart, but I’ve sure seen a lot of dead ones alongside roads. Perhaps many raccoons are smart, but suicidal.
I too am an unnatural, though for a more prosaic reason: myopia. I’m ~ -7.0 in both eyes. Of course, that’s supposed to be associated with intelligence.
A few girlfriends have accused me of this also…but that’s another post.
Makes sense. Being able to do differential calculus won’t help get a campfire started.
;-)
I leave for a few hours and this turns into a dead raccoon thread? I was going to bring up ensoulment…
Anyways, what we see a lot of around here is young-of-the-year getting squashed. Those busy streets have a steep learning curve.
OK, so what about ensoulment?
I love Sam and Dave.
Is the body just a container for the soul, or is there something sacred about the body, that should limit how much we monkey with it? If it’s the former, which is pretty much how we act, cutting it up for parts, etc, then there’s really no limit to what we can do with it, right down to introducing non-human genes. Or cloning.
Would a clone have a soul? Or does that occupy the body only when we make people the old-fashioned way? I take a view kind of like Pascal’s Wager: we might as well act like they do. I’d go so far as to say it’s time to have a constitutional amendment, or whatever you consider to be equally robust, to state definitively that we won’t do to a clone what we wouldn’t do to a normal person–or a normal embryo.
My “drunken dormroom philosophy” is that the soul is made up of energetic particles which became quantum-entangled during the Big Bang.
Eventually, over billions of years, these entangled particles attracted each other and became “observed” at the moment of conception, creating consciousness.
At the moment of death, consciousness ends but the particles remain entangled until the end of the Universe when they rediscover each other in the afterlife.
In this way, I can drunkenly reconcile the Standard Model of Particle Physics with Judeo-Christian theology, as long as no actual physics major is participating in the conversation.
;-)
For the bulk of my life I would have said “yes”, as that definitely was my lived experience. But then, I’ve had a fairly antagonistic relationship with my body, so the idea that all the dysfunctional things it kept on doing weren’t really “me” and I was simply “trapped inside” it may have held special attraction for me.
Now I’m less sure. I do think I’ve learned that body and soul are better off learning to make peace with each other if they can, if that makes sense.
Identical twins are natural clones of each other, and have never been treated as having only one soul between them as far as I know of, even though they’re often said to share a special bond.
All of those things are non-falsifiable.
If there is no soul, then we can do whatever we want. We can clone little copies of ourselves, maybe with no upper brain, grow them to a year or two, and cut out their skin for skin grafts–or elective surgery, their livers for alcoholics, whatever.
That may be a ways off. But as the price of screening embryos and in-vitro fertilization drops off, you might well have a situation where you could never have anyone defective again. Would this make God angry? Does he send people a child with birth defects to test their faith? We kill a million unborn children a year or something, and he hasn’t vaporized the Earth yet. If we got rid of abortion entirely, would things improve down here? Would Jesus come back? Or are we all totally depraved, so we might as well embrace utilitarianism anyway?
Well, yeah. D’uh! Why else do you think I keep it to myself when there are actual physics majors in the room (or when I’m sober)?
;-)