Fire and Knowledge

When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable. (Or worse, convenience-mart hot dogs and latchkey kids.) I consider it the great hoodwink of my generation.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), pp. 126-127.

We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), p. 31.

It turns out that being a stepchild is the strongest risk factor for child abuse yet found. And a child is 40 to 100 times more likely to be killed by a stepparent than by a biological parent.

–Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 280-281

[Genetically engineered] children will, in effect, be assigned a goal by their programmers: “intelligence,” “even temper,” “athleticism.” (As with chickens, the market will doubtless lean in the direction of efficiency. It may be hard to find genes for, say, dreaminess.)

Now two possibilities arise. Perhaps the programming doesn’t work very well, and your kids spells poorly, or turns moody, or can’t hit the inside fastball. In the present world, you just tell yourself that’s who he is. But in the coming world, he’ll be, in essence, a defective product. Do you still accept him unconditionally? Why? If your new Jetta got thirty miles to the gallon instead of the forty it was designed to get, you’d take it back. If necessary, you’d sue. You’d call it a lemon.

Or what if the engineering worked pretty well, but you decided, too late, that you’d picked the wrong package, hadn’t gotten the best features? Would you feel buyer’s remorse if the kid next door had a better ear, a stronger arm?
Say the gene work went a little awry and left you with a kid who had some serious problems; what kind of guilt would that leave you with? Remember, this is not a child created by the random interaction of your genes with those of your partner—this is a child created with specific intent. Does Consumer Reports start rating the various biotech offerings?
What if you had a second child five years after the first, and by that time the upgrades were undeniably improved: How would you feel about the first kid? How would you feel about his new brother, the latest model?

The other outcome—that the genetic engineering works just as you had hoped—seems at least as bad. Now your child is a product. You can take precisely as much pride in her achievements as you take in your dishwashing detergent. It was designed to produce streak-free glassware, and she was designed to be sweet-tempered, social, and smart. And what can she take pride in? Her good grades? She may have worked hard, but she’ll always know that she was specced for good grades. Her kindness to others? Well, yes, it’s good to be kind—but perhaps it’s not much of an accomplishment once the various genes with some link to sociability have been catalogued and manipulated.

–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), 59-60

So let’s say baby Sophie has a state-of-the-art gene job: her parents paid for the proteins discovered by, say, 2005 that, on average, yielded 10 extra IQ points. By the time Sophie is five, though, scientists will doubtless have discovered ten more genes linked to intelligence. Now anyone with a platinum card can get 20 IQ points, not to mention a memory boost and a permanent wrinkle-free brow. So by the time Sophie is twenty-five and in the job market, she’s already more or less obsolete—the kids coming out of college just plain have better hardware….

It’s not [, Gregory Stock adds,] “so different from upgraded software. You’ll want the new release.” The vision of one’s child as a nearly worthless copy of Windows 95 should make parents fight like hell to make sure we never get started down this path. But the vision gets lost easily in the gushing excitement about “improving” the opportunities for our kids.

–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), 34-35