Reply #91: Ok, let me make sure I'm understanding your claim [View All]

[Stunster]

You're claiming that human beings are capable of creating undrownable physical beings with the capacity to do physics, and that this process itself would not result in any overall increase in natural harm?

Ok? Here's my question.

On the neo-Darwinian scientific picture, evolution has had much longer to naturally select beings who are capable of doing physics than humans have had time to do genetic engineering. So, if natural selection is what Darwinian theorists say it is, is there any reason why undrownable physical beings capable of doing physics have not yet evolved on planet Earth? Is there some reason, to do with complex brain chemistry, say, which makes it non-adaptive for there to be undrownable physicists, or, maybe they'd be undrownable, but because of various water-borne bugs, or piranha fish and sharks, or something else, they wouldn't survive as a species for an optimal time?

Even if you could do this, does it follow that this is what God should have done, if God exists? Let's say that there are reasons of a moral/spiritual/intellectual growth kind, related to the whole process by which humans evolve to the point where they become capable of doing this genetic engineering, such that a great deal of value would be lost by simply starting humans off as undrownable physicists. Suppose you had a baby---would you necessarily want it to be, straight out of the womb, undrownable, pretty much indestructible, and capable of doing quantum mechanics? I don't know myself, probably because I find that idea so bizarrely removed from reality as to be able even to get started on any normative assessment of its comparative value, relative to what nature has given us to date.