Synthetic Biology - Brutes or Angels: Human Possibility in the Age of Biotechnology - page 273

netic engineering are fundamentally different, the unique ethical problem
posed by synthetic biology pits evolution against human hubris. The ques-
tion is whether judgments of the marketplace and human desire can possess
the “wisdom” of 3.8 billion years of biological evolution (Bradley 2010).
natural, evolutionary mechanisms create stable, interdependent networks
of organisms in communities, ecosystems, and the biosphere as a whole.
The central ethical problem for synthetic biology is to discern the special
responsibilities that accompany our emerging role as creators of new life
forms.
four factors could combine, in the context of synthetic biology, to jeop-
ardize the future health of life on earth: (1) commodification of nature, (2)
human exemptionalism, (3) trained incapacities in the disciplines of evo-
lution and ecology, and (4) the sixth extinction now underway in our bio-
sphere. let's briefly consider each factor and how, together, they argue for
development of an ethic specially tailored to guide future synthetic biology.
Commodiication of nature. Commodification of nature refers to the mind-
set that values land mainly for its economic significance. in his famous es-
say The Land Ethic, Wisconsin naturalist and conservationist Aldo leopold
(1949) wrote against viewing land simply in terms of its economic value.
land is more than the board feet of lumber it can produce, its agricul-
tural value, or its commercial worth for tourism, maintained leopold, to
whom “land” is all of nature, not just soil. Treating nature as a commodity
to be exploited for corporate profit or human pleasure is the “key log” that
must be removed before an effective “land ethic” can be developed, wrote
leopold in 1949. six decades later a logjam of ignorance about evolution
and ecology and of shortsighted, proit-centered attitudes still thwarts the
development of a land ethic that recognizes the interdependency of all of
nature's components.
in his topic The Creation, harvard University biologist e. o. Wilson
(2006) identifies habitat loss, pollution, human overpopulation, and over-
harvesting as four of five human-caused factors responsible for the current
dramatic decline in earth's biodiversity. 23 each stems directly from human-
kind's commodification of nature. The eTC Group offered an extreme ex-