Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
11
Telos, Value, and Genetic Engineering
Bernard E. Rollin
Legend has it that when Alexander the Great conquered North Africa,
he remembered his old teacher, Aristotle, fondly and sent him a gift, an
elephant, escorted by a legion of troops. The legend unfortunately stops
there and fails to record what Aristotle did with the elephant. Of two
things, however, we can be morally certain: first, as a practicing biolo-
gist, and as a philosopher infused with biology as his root metaphor,
Aristotle was doubtless delighted. Second, we can affirm that he did not
favor his own former teacher, Plato, by passing the gift on.
Aristotle had little tolerance for Plato's contempt for the world we live
in and correlative penchant for seeking truth beyond the world. For Aris-
totle, truth was, for the most part, in the world of ordinary experience,
and humans were built to find it.
“All men by nature desire to know,” is the first line of Aristotle's
Meta-
physics
(1.1.980a22). Our biology makes us capable of knowing, and
the proper object of this desire is the dynamic world we find through
sense experience, not an extraworldly, frozen realm of Platonic objects.
Contrary to Plato, the real world is a world of change, flux, coming to
be, passing away, although such change is not chaotic; there are consis-
tent patterns in change, that which happens for “the most part.” Change
is lawlike; patterns repeat.
Telos and Biology
It is wrong, for Aristotle, to look at the world the way the atomists did
then or the mechanists have done since the Newtonian revolution—as a
machine
. The world is more like a living thing than it is like a clock.
Plants, animals, birds, fish, tools, and even rocks have
natures
, regular
