"We've entered an era when the simple laws of Darwinian adaptation to the environment have passed," says Walter Truett Anderson, author of Evolution Isn't What it Used To Be: The Augmented Animal and the Whole Wired World (WH Freeman and Company, 1996), a book examining the changing world of biotechnology. Like many others who have been following the development of cloning, Anderson was surprised by Saturday's announcement that a scientist had cloned a sheep. He was also excited. "Things now change in all sorts of ways, just because humans decide to change them."
With all the surprise and worry that has swept the world since the announcement, Anderson is concerned that people keep their heads about them. "I think people better open their minds to the fact that we truly are entering a new world. A species in which individual members can exchange organs with other individual members doesn't exist anywhere in the world but in the human species. You'd say that that type of animal is fundamentally a different kind of creature. We now have to learn how to live sanely in this kind of world."
In other words, the answer lies in adapting to the new technology, rather than trying to suppress it. "Sometimes when people come across something like cloning, they say, 'God didn't intend this,' and they mumble something about ethical problems.... You cannot make information go away. People need to make a distinction between trying to make it all go away, and dealing imaginatively with a whole new world."
As excited as he is by the new technology, Anderson, too, has his fears. "The thing I'm concerned about is the matter of equity. Cloning has the potential to be just another piece of the wealth/poverty gap that's already obscene in the world. And the wealth gap is, among other things, a health gap and a longevity gap.
Anderson links his hopes for the development of biotech with digital technology. "The Information Revolution is a biological phenomenon as well as an economic, social, and cultural one. Biotechnology is very much linked to the development of information technology, and as that capability develops the biological capabilities will also develop. We are becoming a bio-information society."
