Three Scientific Revolutions: How They Transformed Our Conceptions of Reality (34 page)

In dynamic societies, like many in the West today, the separation of state and church has been crucial because it has precluded religious institutions from exerting a controlling influence on society, as has the present opposition of the Catholic Church to same-sex marriages. In democratic or republican forms of government there are documents such as constitutions to define “the rights of man,” along with
elected
heads of state such as presidents or prime ministers and parliaments or congresses entrusted to pass laws to enforce these rights and promote social and economic equality with law courts to adjudicate the law. Finally. they insist on access to a free press and uncensored televised news so the public can be well informed and compare their political and social systems to others which has been a major motivation for change, such as the Arab Spring.

Static societies, in contrast, historically have mainly been religious (but include secular dictatorships and fascist regimes) that do not accept the separation of the state and the church or the right of the people to rule. This in turn has justified the repression of free speech and control of the news media to avoid challenges to their authority, along with the enforcement of their laws and restrictions by the fear of imprisonment, torture, and death. Thus the culture of most Islamic countries, excepting the United Arab Emirates, resemble that of the Western medieval period and explains from the Western perspective why they appear to be so backward.

It is this schism between the static societies of the Middle East and the dynamic societies of the West that I believe, as does David Deutsch, to be the major cause of many of the political conflicts in the world today and that has been a deterrent to the democratic liberation and intellectual enlightenment of those ethnic regions. Yet in attributing the conflict to these contrasting differences, it should not be overlooked that religious and political institutions, along with cruel and repressive behaviors, are created by human beings who therefore are ultimately responsible for the resultant conflicts and atrocities and thus any effective remedy must be traced to them.

Consider the imprisonment, torture, and assassination of opposition leaders in Russia, China, Iran, Liberia, and Syria for their advocacy of free speech, an open press, democratic and legal rights. Or recall the murderous assaults of innocent people by deranged individuals in places in the United States such as Aurora, Fort Hood, Tucson, Columbine, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Recall two bombs that devastated Patriots Day during the Boston Marathon detonated by two immigrant brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from the Russian republic of Chechnya, killing four people and causing severe injuries, including numerous amputations to more than 250 others, and the more recent attack in Paris on the newspaper
Charlie Hebdo
and later on a Jewish grocery shop.

Despite all the past changes brought about in the West to enhance its social, economic, democratic, intellectual, and technological developments, no attempt has been made to improve
human nature
because there lacked the knowledge and means to do so, and therefore instilling reasonable, benevolent, humane behavior was entrusted to religious indoctrination, family instructions, ethical teachings, and governmental constraints. But as Kaku graphically describes, with the advances in genetic engineering and the ability to etch everyone's entire DNA on a computer chip or CD, it now will soon be possible to identify the malevolent genes or systems of genes and deactivate, remove, or replace them.

Instead of pouring so much of our financial and scientific resources into developing artificial intelligence and humanoid robots we should devote more of our efforts to improving human nature by detecting and removing the genes causing the depraved behaviors and murderous assaults that pervade society. Just reading the newspaper accounts is extremely depressing. But just as geneticists have discovered the single gene or genes causing such previous fatal afflictions as Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases, diabetes, cystic fibrosis, and hemophilia, and now are on the verge of discovering the genetic cause of various forms of cancer, Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia and other mental infirmities, they are acquiring the capability to identify the particular genes related to mental derangements that are a primary cause of such abusive behaviors as deadly crimes, vicious rapes, child abuse, sexual trafficking, and tortuous killings. There will be many ethical issues to address and concerns about individual privacy, but this is a social debate well worth having.

This application of genetic engineering to enhancing human nature has been disparaged as attempting to create “designer genes,” “recreate eugenics,” or rejected as “playing the role of God.” But the latter is precisely what scientific knowledge has achieved, as Kaku indicated in showing how scientific attainments have often mirrored the earlier alleged supernatural powers of the gods. In fact, as I write this an analogous example of the contentiousness due to the attempt to remove and replace certain genetically inheritable defects has just been reported in the
Washington Post
.
¹³⁵
The question of replacing defective genes to eliminate harmful traits from being inherited has already arisen in the recent FDA debate over the possibility of creating three-parent babies called “three-parent IVF.” The new procedure would enable mothers who carry mutated or defective DNA in their mitochondria that would transmit such tragic inheritable defects as blindness, epilepsy, schizophrenia, and Down's syndrome to their embryos could have them surgically removed from their extracted egg cells and replaced by refined mitochondria taken from the eggs of a healthy or normal women. Then, after being fertilized in a laboratory, the mother's refined eggs would be replanted in her uterus so that the embryo would not carry the abnormal mitochondrial inheritance.

While this gene replacement procedure would have to be very carefully supervised and regulated, it does not deserve the harsh moral criticism and rejection it has received by some moralists and religionists. Yet such a way of eliminating abominable human traits, analogous to removing sources of horrible diseases and crippling human physical defects, would seem to be another major benefit of genetic discoveries. Consider the tremendous advantages of replacing such inherited genes causing such innate human drives as sadism, pedophilia, hedonism, harmful addictions, avariciousness, vindictiveness, dishonesty, treachery, viciousness, and despotism. Improving human nature and conduct is what I would like to see as the primary achievement of the fourth transition in our revision of reality and way of life. In my view, this would do more to alleviate human suffering and enrich our lives than all other achievements and advances, and it's within our reach.

ENDNOTES

*
Galileo Galilei,
The Assayer
, trans. Stillman Drake and reproduced in Stillman Drake and C. D. O'Malley,
The Controversy on the Comets of 1618
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), p. 3112.

1.
Robin Lane Fox,
The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian
(New York: Basic Books, 2006), p. 87; brackets added.

2.
Carl Sagan,
The Demon-Haunted World
:
Science as a Candle in the Dark
(New York: Random House, 1995), pp. 424–26. The subsequent parenthetical citation is to this work.

3.
Richard H. Schlagel,
Contextual Realism
:
A Metaphysical Framework for Modern Science
(New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1986).

4.
Aristotle,
Metaphysics
, 1080b16–22; Ross translation.

5.
Richard H. Schlagel,
From Myth to Modern Mind: A Study of the Origins and Growth of Scientific Thought
, Vol. I,
Theogony through Ptolemy
(New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1995).

6.
Plato,
The Republic
, trans. by F. M. Cornford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), ch. XXV.

7.
Richard McKeon,
The Basic Works of Aristotle
(New York: Random House, 1968), p. 159.

8.
Schlagel,
From Myth to Modern Mind
, p. 320.

9.
Cf., Charles Singer,
A Short History of Scientific Ideas to 1900
(London: Oxford University Press, 1959), Ch. III. Also see John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, Oswyn Murray, eds.,
The Oxford History of the Classical World:
Greece
and the Hellenistic World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

10.
T. L. Heath, ed.,
The Works of Archimedes with the Methods of Archimedes
(New York: Dover Publications Inc., 19??), pp. 221–22.

11.
Henry Osborn Taylor,
The Medieval Mind: A History of the Development of Thought and Emotion in the Middle Ages
, Vol. I, fourth ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 73.

12.
Frederick B. Artz,
The Mind of the Middle Ages
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), p. 82.

13.
Stephen Greenblatt,
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), pp. 92–93.

14.
Nicolas Copernicus,
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
, trans. by Charles Glenn Wallis (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), p. 6.

15.
Letter to David Fabricius, “
Johannes Kepler
,”
Gesammelte Werke,
Vol. XIV, p. 409. Quoted from Arthur Koestler,
The Sleep Walkers
(New York: The Universal Library, 1963), p. 330. The two subsequent parenthetical citations are also to this work.

16.
Johannes Kepler,
Astronomia Nova
, “Introduction,”
Gesammelte Werke.
Quoted from Arthur Koestler,
The Sleep Walkers
, p. 337.

17.
Max Caspar,
Kepler
, trans. and ed. by C. Doris Hellman (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1993), p. 286.

18.
Johannes Kepler,
Harmonice Mundi
, Book 3, ch. V. R. M. Hutchins, ed.,
Great Books of the Western World,
Vol. 16 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 1020.

19.
Letter to Herwart von Hohenburg, 1612, 1598, G. W., Vol. XIII, p. 264
seq.
Quoted from Koestler,
The Sleep Walkers
, p. 340.

20.
Richard H. Schlagel,
Forging the Methodology that Enlightened Modern Civilization
(New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. 2011), p. 42.

21.
James Gleick,
Chaos: Making a New Science
(New York: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 41.

22.
Stillman Drake,
Galileo at Work
:
His Scientific Biography
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 100.

23.
Galileo Galilei,
Sidereus Nuncius
(or The Sidereal Messenger), trans. by Albert Van Helden (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 36–38.

24.
Quoted from Stillman Drake,
Galileo at Work
, p. 200. Unless stated otherwise, the subsequent parenthetical citations are to his book.

25.
Galileo Galilei,
Discourse on the Comets
, reprinted in
The Controversy on the Comets of 1618
, trans. by Stillman Drake and C. D. O'Malley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 1960, p. 53.

26.
Galileo Galilei,
The Assayer
, reprinted in Drake and O'Malley,
The Controversy on the Comets of 1618
, p. 311. The subsequent parenthetical citation is also to this work.

27.
Galileo Galilei,
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
—
Ptolemaic and Copernican,
trans. by Stillman Drake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), p. 108. Until otherwise indicated, the subsequent parenthetical citations are to this work.

28.
Drake,
Galileo at Work
, p. 336. The subsequent parenthetical citations are also to this work until otherwise indicated.

29.
Galileo Galilei,
Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
, trans. by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1963), p. 147. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent parenthetical citations are to this work.

30.
Alexander Koyré,
Galileo Studies
, trans. by John Mepham (New Jersey: Humanities Press), 1978. For the quotation and the source for Mersenne, see p. 126, f.n. 177; for Descartes, see p. 107 and source p. 126, f.n. 176.

31.
Maurice Clavelin,
The Natural Philosophy of Galileo: Essay on the Origins and Formation of Classical Mechanics
, trans. by A. J. Pomerans (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1974), p. 383.

32.
Richard S. Westfall,
Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 143. Until otherwise indicated, the subsequent parenthetical citations are to this work.

33.
Sir Isaac Newton,
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
, Vol. I,
The Motion of Bodies
, Motte's trans., revised by Florian Cajori (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), p. xv. Unless or until otherwise indicated, subsequent parenthetical citations are to this work.

34.
Sir Issac Newton,
Opticks
or
A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, & Colours of light
(New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1952), p. 351.