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stormsewerSo a while back I poked some fun at people who think science fiction is supposed to be and/or used to be optimistic.
But recently I read The Windup Girl, and its pessimism annoyed me. And I had similar thoughts when reading Oryx and Crake. So I guess in some respects I can sympathize with the anti-pessimists.
It's not the pessimism per se that bothers me. Cause hey, life sucks, and then you die, and if life is relatively good that only seems to increase your sensitivity to the tiniest suckitude. I'm cool with that. But I feel like these novels are pessimistic about the wrong things. And wrong about what they judge optimistically, as well.
Specifically, both The Windup Girl and Oryx and Crake are wildly optimistic about what genetic engineering is likely to be able to accomplish and absurdly pessimistic about what effect that would have on the world. Basically they both view genetic engineering as pixie dust, which then RUINS EVERYTHING.
Alright, I'm speaking as a working genetic engineer here. I am perhaps biased by the endless frustrations I encounter, even in trying to accomplish relatively simple tasks, but...
Bending biology to your will is HARD. Living things are out to do one thing and one thing only, and that is to pass on their genes. They have been carefully honed over billions of years to be extraordinarily good at this. Living things are also mind-smashingly complicated. They are not made up of little modules that you can switch in and out or rewrite as you please; everything affects everything else, and minor tweaks will have all kinds of unintended consequences, which will mostly play out in the form of things simply not working. We are still fairly terrible at predicting how modifications will affect even relatively simple organisms like bacteria.
Related to this is the fact that rational design (or, alternatively, intelligent design) is a very crappy approach to engineering biology. It will sometimes get you something that works poorly, but to get it to work well you have to find some way to evolve it, to force it to do what you want in order to achieve its goal of replication. But optimizing an organism for artificial circumstances almost always makes it very poorly adapted for surviving in the real world. They just aren't going to make it. Which isn't to say, necessarily, that Nature won't remix our toys for its own purposes, but it's not going to be manmade designs that are winning out in the end.
Designing a plague that will kill everyone is extremely unlikely, for example. Pathogenic organisms don't kill because they have something against you. They kill as a side-effect of exploiting you to replicate themselves. If they kill all their hosts, they won't be able to replicate anymore. Infectious diseases that kill very quickly and are very contagious never last long. It's just not good business from the pathogen's standpoint, and so they evolve to be less deadly, or they disappear. Which isn't to say that someone couldn't engineer a virus that would kill a lot of people. But it is to say engineering a virus that would kill everyone would be virtually impossible. Doing it with bombs and bullets would be so much easier, though terribly mundane at this point.1
And even if you do use evolution, the time it takes to apply evolutionary methods is completely dependent on the generation time of the organism you're working with. For bacteria, it's pretty fast. For animals, not so much. While we have accomplished some pretty crazy animal modifications already over the course of a hundred years or so, churning out a drastically re-engineered animal that has any chance of being competitive in the wild is not something that's gonna happen quickly or easily. Because evolution takes time, and without evolution you're not going to get much. In fact, evolutionary pressures will easily work to dial back the changes you're trying to make as a bioengineer, even in the laboratory setting. (The progression of dog breeding also clearly demonstrates how much easier it is to break an organism than it is to improve it when we try to bend its biology to our misguided ideals, the bulldog being a particularly egregious example.)
The Wind-Up Girl and Oryx and Crake make it seem like complete and functional redesign of animals will be trivial in a few more decades. From where I'm standing, I don't see how that could be the case. Maybe with the help of some serious advances in computer models of biological processes, but even that stands a fair chance of merely further demonstrating how hard it would be.
Books like this encourage irrational fear about technology. This has consequences here and now. Take Golden Rice, for instance. This is a version of rice modified to produce beta carotene, which the body processes into vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiency is estimated to kill more than half a million children under five EVERY YEAR. The people who made Golden Rice are not trying to profit from it; they are giving it away for free. Or they would like to, if people hadn't been convinced that it's bad. Golden Rice has been around for decades, and there is no evidence that it is harmful or allergenic. In fact, there is not a single demonstrated instance of any GMO crop harming anyone. GMOs don't kill people, but blindly opposing them does.2
Such books annoy me because they validate people who'd rather let millions of children die than feed them something "unnatural." Such books exploit people's irrational fears about technology, which in turn amplifies those fears. And then it feeds back. As mentioned above, this can do great harm to those most vulnerable.
Speaking more broadly, it's obvious that technology has caused problems. But to say it's caused more problems than it has solved is to be willfully ignorant of what things were really like before. Take the 20th century, for example. We love to wail about Nazis and nuclear weapons and how good we've gotten at killing people. Which is true. But let's take a look at the actual numbers. Wikipedia provides a nice referenced list of various estimates of population levels over time. In 1900, there were about 1.6 billion people on the planet, up from about 1 billion a hundred years earlier. In 2000, there were about 6 billion. Almost four times as many people than a hundred years earlier, a far larger increase than ever before. The 20th century actually did an unprecedented job of keeping people alive, and science and technology deserve most of the credit.
Now certainly we've got big problems now and even bigger problems approaching fast, many of which have been brought on by our successes. But chances are good that you and most everyone else you know are only alive today because of those successes. And the challenges we face are not going to be solved without applying the powerful tools we have at our disposal (unless you think letting billions of people die counts as a solution). To bust out one of my favorite Bertrand Russell quotes, "Intelligence, it might be said, has caused our troubles; but it is not unintelligence that will cure them. Only more and wiser intelligence can make a happier world."
So while I do enjoy ribbing the optimists, I kinda understand their concerns. To the extent that science fiction encourages Luddism, I'm not sure it's doing us a favor. Specifically, there is a line between asking people to think carefully and rationally about where things are headed, on the one hand, and presenting ridiculous apocalypse scenarios as plausible, on the other. Technology may have gotten us into a mess, but I'll take this mess any day over any of the historical messes that preceded it.
1And this is why it's so hard to write science fiction about science you actually have expertise in, because you recognize so acutely how many story ideas don't make scientific sense.
2Which isn't to say that I think Monsanto is a force for good in the world. But the questions "are GMOs going to be useful and important for us in the future" and "should a handful of companies control the world's food supply" are not one and the same. Not even close.
But recently I read The Windup Girl, and its pessimism annoyed me. And I had similar thoughts when reading Oryx and Crake. So I guess in some respects I can sympathize with the anti-pessimists.
It's not the pessimism per se that bothers me. Cause hey, life sucks, and then you die, and if life is relatively good that only seems to increase your sensitivity to the tiniest suckitude. I'm cool with that. But I feel like these novels are pessimistic about the wrong things. And wrong about what they judge optimistically, as well.
Specifically, both The Windup Girl and Oryx and Crake are wildly optimistic about what genetic engineering is likely to be able to accomplish and absurdly pessimistic about what effect that would have on the world. Basically they both view genetic engineering as pixie dust, which then RUINS EVERYTHING.
Alright, I'm speaking as a working genetic engineer here. I am perhaps biased by the endless frustrations I encounter, even in trying to accomplish relatively simple tasks, but...
Bending biology to your will is HARD. Living things are out to do one thing and one thing only, and that is to pass on their genes. They have been carefully honed over billions of years to be extraordinarily good at this. Living things are also mind-smashingly complicated. They are not made up of little modules that you can switch in and out or rewrite as you please; everything affects everything else, and minor tweaks will have all kinds of unintended consequences, which will mostly play out in the form of things simply not working. We are still fairly terrible at predicting how modifications will affect even relatively simple organisms like bacteria.
Related to this is the fact that rational design (or, alternatively, intelligent design) is a very crappy approach to engineering biology. It will sometimes get you something that works poorly, but to get it to work well you have to find some way to evolve it, to force it to do what you want in order to achieve its goal of replication. But optimizing an organism for artificial circumstances almost always makes it very poorly adapted for surviving in the real world. They just aren't going to make it. Which isn't to say, necessarily, that Nature won't remix our toys for its own purposes, but it's not going to be manmade designs that are winning out in the end.
Designing a plague that will kill everyone is extremely unlikely, for example. Pathogenic organisms don't kill because they have something against you. They kill as a side-effect of exploiting you to replicate themselves. If they kill all their hosts, they won't be able to replicate anymore. Infectious diseases that kill very quickly and are very contagious never last long. It's just not good business from the pathogen's standpoint, and so they evolve to be less deadly, or they disappear. Which isn't to say that someone couldn't engineer a virus that would kill a lot of people. But it is to say engineering a virus that would kill everyone would be virtually impossible. Doing it with bombs and bullets would be so much easier, though terribly mundane at this point.1
And even if you do use evolution, the time it takes to apply evolutionary methods is completely dependent on the generation time of the organism you're working with. For bacteria, it's pretty fast. For animals, not so much. While we have accomplished some pretty crazy animal modifications already over the course of a hundred years or so, churning out a drastically re-engineered animal that has any chance of being competitive in the wild is not something that's gonna happen quickly or easily. Because evolution takes time, and without evolution you're not going to get much. In fact, evolutionary pressures will easily work to dial back the changes you're trying to make as a bioengineer, even in the laboratory setting. (The progression of dog breeding also clearly demonstrates how much easier it is to break an organism than it is to improve it when we try to bend its biology to our misguided ideals, the bulldog being a particularly egregious example.)
The Wind-Up Girl and Oryx and Crake make it seem like complete and functional redesign of animals will be trivial in a few more decades. From where I'm standing, I don't see how that could be the case. Maybe with the help of some serious advances in computer models of biological processes, but even that stands a fair chance of merely further demonstrating how hard it would be.
Books like this encourage irrational fear about technology. This has consequences here and now. Take Golden Rice, for instance. This is a version of rice modified to produce beta carotene, which the body processes into vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiency is estimated to kill more than half a million children under five EVERY YEAR. The people who made Golden Rice are not trying to profit from it; they are giving it away for free. Or they would like to, if people hadn't been convinced that it's bad. Golden Rice has been around for decades, and there is no evidence that it is harmful or allergenic. In fact, there is not a single demonstrated instance of any GMO crop harming anyone. GMOs don't kill people, but blindly opposing them does.2
Such books annoy me because they validate people who'd rather let millions of children die than feed them something "unnatural." Such books exploit people's irrational fears about technology, which in turn amplifies those fears. And then it feeds back. As mentioned above, this can do great harm to those most vulnerable.
Speaking more broadly, it's obvious that technology has caused problems. But to say it's caused more problems than it has solved is to be willfully ignorant of what things were really like before. Take the 20th century, for example. We love to wail about Nazis and nuclear weapons and how good we've gotten at killing people. Which is true. But let's take a look at the actual numbers. Wikipedia provides a nice referenced list of various estimates of population levels over time. In 1900, there were about 1.6 billion people on the planet, up from about 1 billion a hundred years earlier. In 2000, there were about 6 billion. Almost four times as many people than a hundred years earlier, a far larger increase than ever before. The 20th century actually did an unprecedented job of keeping people alive, and science and technology deserve most of the credit.
Now certainly we've got big problems now and even bigger problems approaching fast, many of which have been brought on by our successes. But chances are good that you and most everyone else you know are only alive today because of those successes. And the challenges we face are not going to be solved without applying the powerful tools we have at our disposal (unless you think letting billions of people die counts as a solution). To bust out one of my favorite Bertrand Russell quotes, "Intelligence, it might be said, has caused our troubles; but it is not unintelligence that will cure them. Only more and wiser intelligence can make a happier world."
So while I do enjoy ribbing the optimists, I kinda understand their concerns. To the extent that science fiction encourages Luddism, I'm not sure it's doing us a favor. Specifically, there is a line between asking people to think carefully and rationally about where things are headed, on the one hand, and presenting ridiculous apocalypse scenarios as plausible, on the other. Technology may have gotten us into a mess, but I'll take this mess any day over any of the historical messes that preceded it.
1And this is why it's so hard to write science fiction about science you actually have expertise in, because you recognize so acutely how many story ideas don't make scientific sense.
2Which isn't to say that I think Monsanto is a force for good in the world. But the questions "are GMOs going to be useful and important for us in the future" and "should a handful of companies control the world's food supply" are not one and the same. Not even close.
