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GENETIC ENGINEERING
The moratorium on GE cropping is currently under threat as a result of pressure brought to bear on governments by powerful vested interests. The moratorium has been terminated in NSW and VIC and crops of GE Canola are being sown in these states this season.
The foundations of Genetic Engineering are set in Neo-Darwinian biology. The neo-Darwinian view proposes biology as a discipline adequate to the comprehension of life. The neo-darwinian metaphysic proposes a worldview in which life is a product of chemistry. The fundamental units of life are not organisms but genes. Organisms are vehicles made by and for genes, which enable genes to take advantage of different environments and thereby replicate more successfully. Organisms evolve as elaborate contraptions constructed and controlled by genes.
One of the central tenets of neo-darwinism is that genes have causally privileged status because they transmit information from one generation to the next, whereas other causes of development are merely material and have no informational status. This conception of the gene as a discrete unit of information has proved to be an inadequate metaphor. Science contradicts neo-darwinist metaphysics in demonstrating DNA is not a program for building organisms. Nevertheless, this metaphysics, masquerading as science, is the entrenched orthodoxy institutionalized in our schools and universities today.
To gain some perspective on this stream of metaphysics, which is the bulwark of genetic engineering, the work of Lynn Margulis, Alister McGrath, Mae-Wan Ho and Evan Thompson may be helpful.
"Carl Woese at the University of Illinois is the world's greatest expert in the field of microbial taxonomy ( Freeman Dyson)". Dr. Woese proposes a new biology for a new century (Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, vol 68, p173). Woese's main theme is the obsolescence of reductionist biology as it has been practised for the past 100 years, and the need for a new synthetic biology based on emergent patterns of organization rather than on genes and molecules. Dr Woese is not alone with this view but, rather, this is the direction in which our leading minds have been moving for some years now, bringing the post modern view into closer alignment with that of Rudolf Steiner and Goethe.
To further illustrate this point, Woese likens organisms to eddies in a turbulent stream, that reappear no matter how often they are disturbed. He writes: "It is becoming increasingly clear that to understand living systems in any deep sense, we must come to see them not as machines, but as stable, complex, dynamic organizations."
"The big problems - the evolution of the universe as a whole, the origin of life, the nature of human consciousness and the evolution of Earth's climate - cannot be understood by reducing them to elementary particles and molecules. New ways of thinking and new ways of organizing large databases will be needed (Freeman Dyson)".
Recommended Reading
Ho, Mae-Wan (2000) Genetic Engineering. Dream or Nightmare. NY. Continuum Publishing Co.
Ho, Mae-Wan (2003) Living with the Fluid Genome. London , Institute of Science in Society.
McGrath, Alister E. (2004) Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life. Malden, Mass. : Blackwell
Margulis, L.,Sagan, D. (2002) Acquiring Genomes. NY. Basic Books
Storl, W. (1979) Culture and Horticulture. Wyoming, Rhode Island. Biodynamic Literature
Steiner, R. (1993) Agriculture. PA. USA. Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Assoc.
Suzuki, D (1999) Naked Ape to Super Species. Toronto, Stoddart Pub. Co.
Thompson, E. (2007) Mind in Life. Cambridge. Harvard University Press
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