Intuitions About Science, Technology, and Nature: A Fruitful Approach to Understand Judgments About Socio-Scientific Issues - Affective Dimensions in Chemistry Education - page 93

•“Human as creator” (humans can create new life, they playing God).
•“Human as machine” (similar to machines, we can replace organs)”
•“Perfection and beauty” (we go for optimizing ourselves, and at the same time,
being perfect is boring).
•“Individualism” (genetic engineering is the end of the individualism, and
individualism has an intrinsic value).
•“Language of genes” (scientists can read the genome like a book).
In the following, the belief “nature is a meaningful idea” will be presented as an
example. The general belief that nature has a strong intrinsic value could also be
relevant for the students

image of chemistry as a laboratory science. The belief
“nature is a meaningful idea” relatively often comes across in the involvement
with genetic engineering, especially as a normative concept of nature, which
guides us. This belief leads to the position: Whatever is natural is good! In
the group discussions, we can observe the tendency to argue in the logic of a
“naturalistic fallacy” (Frankena, 1939 ), because nature becomes the epitome of a
normative instance, which sets the orientation for moral judgments and behavior.
“Natural” and “morally correct” coincide in such naturalistic ethics. For example,
in a sequence, when the participants discussed the possibility to select diseased
genes:
Just now I have this picture of animals in my head, I don

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t know, like when a tiger mom is
having a tiger baby. Well, she has four and one of them is blind or something. Then she
would reject it. And I don't know, I mean, that

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s nature and it (genetic selection) is left to

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humans themselves and I guess that it s not necessarily negative.

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Against this background, changing the everlasting and constant nature shouldn t

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be:
I don t know, I think we have screwed up nature enough, some things should stay natural.

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According to the belief “nature is a meaningful idea,” evolutionary positions
often come across. This becomes particularly clear when employing scientific,
evolutionary concepts, especially in evaluating genetic therapy. An evolutionary
idea of man is referred to in the following quotations:

For the ones affected certainly good, but even humankind is just a biological cycle, that you
shouldn ' t retard for decades!
For the individual an ideal solution. For humanity as a whole, however, not only good.
So far the law of the strongest is applied (—he survived) ... but illnesses were invented by
nature to accomplish a selection which is disrupted, prevented.
I think that it's a positive thing when brings about a relief for sick people. But what
about natural selection?

“Natural selection” and “selection” are used remarkably often as categories for
evaluating genetic therapy. Such eugenic and partly social Darwinian ideas become
obvious in the apprehension that the “strongest” cannot prevail. Either when sick
people are cured by gene therapeutic means or when too many people survive due to
optimized agriculture by genetic engineering. In this kind of argumentation, a
possible overcoming of hunger problems by means of genetic engineering is