Poop Shute

Suicide Genes

I'm currently rereading RED MARS by KIM STANLEY ROBINSON. In the early stages of terraforming there is a passage where he discusses the engineering of microscopic life to release on the planet's surface. The genetic engineers are careful, and plan for natural selection to cull many of their creations. They know that the vast majority of what they put out on the surface will likely not survive, and they do not want just a few to completely dominate so they install "suicide genes" into them. The idea is that when the waste products produced by the organism reach a certain concentration then the organism dies. They simply introduce a sensitivity to whatever chemicals that the organism might give off, so that when it reaches X-level it can't handle it, and has a large die off until the trigger chemicals lower back down to tolerable levels. Not suicide, strictly speaking, but it technically brings about it's own death that way.

Anyway, it got me thinking about things I've learned about similar ideas throughout history. I remember reading somewhere some theory that the world seems to have a talent for bringing itself back to balance when things get out of whack. The general theory is that whenever humanity got too big and/or densely populated there would either be a big war or a plague or maybe both. Conditions would sort of reach a critical mass point and a large percentage of the population would die off, just like within any population in the wild would do.

Accepting that as true for a moment, I wonder what happens now? I mean for us. Now the human race is clearly reaching numbers of unimaginable proportions, but what might bring it all back into balance? Another great war? While its always possible, it seems unlikely. Nuclear weapons have changed the face of conventional warfare. Everybody's finger is on a button somewhere, so not so many thousands will be tossed around for cannon fodder.

And what about plague? Yes, there are some nasty diseases out there. Some REALLY scary ones, but modern medicine has shut down so many that I am skeptical that a plague will take us down a notch. Sure, thousands may die if this bird flu thing hits the tipping point, but (just for the sake of discussion) even if any plague at all killed the entire city of New York it would amount to something around .07% of the world's population.

So, I got to thinking about all the problems we are facing as a race right now. Maybe we are setting off those suicide genes with our wastes, just like the microcosm of the Mars soil treatment. I mean, as a species we are definitely producing a serious amount of waste products, and I don't mean just bodily waste either. Toxic chemicals abound in this the Information Age. We are putting them into the water, into the ground, into the air. They are all around us. More and more often we are hearing about cancer, autism, depression, alzheimer's even A.D.D. More and more research is popping up linking all kinds of conditions to all the crap we put into ourselves and the world around us. Even milder conditions like allergies and athsma have been written up and connected to it by scientists. And then again, some of this stuff can't yet be explained at all.

In the wild, creatures who exhibited all these problems I just mentioned would simply fade away. They would not receive any kind of treatment and would likely not mate. They and their genes would be swallowed by nature's machine to make room for more of "the fittest." BUT we humans don't allow that, survival of the fittest isn't how we roll anymore. It's survival for everyone, regardless of fitness, mental or otherwise. Don't misunderstand, I'm not suggesting that we should just allow these people to die, not at all. I don't actually know what I'm suggesting. But it feels to me like the boat that allows humanity to stay afloat has been making way too many waves for way too long, and now that we're feeling the ripples coming back at us, we react by splashing around some more.

We live in a world that we have filled with us. We have filled it with our image. the Christians say God made us in his image. We've outdone him. We've remade the whole world in our own image.

I just wonder about our suicide genes.

COMMENTS:

Have you been watching Heroes? If you're in to all of these ideas you should definitely watch Heroes. I'm technically a mutant now. The cancer and the chemo and the radiation has altered a bunch of my DNA. And with the old style of bone marrow transplants, your blood DNA would always be different from the rest of your DNA. Like what you might give from a hair or cheek sample. But I'm having the new kind, where they use your own bone marrow. They still take it out of you and clean it. I wonder if a lab could tell that my bone marrow's been altered. This shit is so cool.
Vega 05.08.07 - 6:08 pm