Reply #10: we are ignorant pieces of crap who can't find our ass with both hands [View All]

[dusmcj]

and a flashlight. We presume to influence what several billion years of physics and random chance has wrought.

The Carl Sagan timeline, showing that 10,000 years of recorded human history fits 100 times into a million years, and 100,000 times into a billion years, is instructive. All the people we know of today, all the advances, writing, agriculture, law, endless war, Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, Greece, Rome, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, America, the Industrial Revolution, the World Wars, nuclear weapons - the entire book, everything we know today - all of that would be repeated 100,000 times in a billion years. Our species has been evolving for a few million years. Several hundred repetitions of ALL of recorded human history.

Our genetic code has been evolving over a few billion years if we include our complete ancestry. This was the time it took for physics and random interactions of chemicals and energy to form compounds capable of forming into living things, and specifically into a blueprint for our structure which makes all the parts work individually and together. It took that long for the nonfunctional results of changes in the code to be discarded, for more optimal forms to outlive less optimal ones. We've gotten to the point where we can list all the genes in the human genetic code, which means that we can make a table of the chemicals in the order they appear in our chromosomes.

HOWEVER, we by no means know what each of those genes does, nor do we understand all the interactions between them, nor do we understand all the implications of changing the form of what they produce, and how the interactions between bodily systems that we alter via genetic modification would change because of that modification. Poke here, and it wiggles there.

We barely manage to avoid annihilating ourselves regularly, and we are incapable of maintaining a civil society which does not fall prey to the degenerate impulses of some of its members (greed being the primary one in evidence currently), and we want to arrogate to ourselves the claimed ability to modify the structure of life in fundamental ways ? And talk about destiny and guidance ? Please, we have a moral obligation not to kill each other over who gets to stand on top of the nearest mound of shit. Let's get that one down before we presume too much about remaking the universe in our image. It has a way of repaying us in kind when we try that.