• for: cultural evolution, cumulative cultural evolution, CCE, bioengineering, novel life form, culturally evolved life, bioethics, progress trap, progress trap - bioengineering, progress trap - genetic engineering
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  • cultural evolution, which itself emerges from biological evolution is acting upon itself to create new life forms that have no evolutionary backstory
  • this is tantamount to playing God
  • progress traps often emerge out of the large speed mismatch between cultural and biological/genetic evolution.
  • Nowhere is this more profound than in bioengineering of new forms of life with no evolutionary history
  • This presents profound ethical challenges

I came here after recalling a critique by Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma" regarding the disease model and it's negative impact on adequately helping people with trauma. van der Kolk's critique was similar to Marc Lewis' critique of the disease model as it applies to addiction from "The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease". This made me wonder what the term "disease" actually means and whether or not some general consensus existed within the medical community. This article suggests there is no such consensus.

This article is by Jackie Leach Scully who holds a "PhD in cellular pathology, University of Cambridge; BA (Hons) in biochemistry, University of Oxford; MA in psychoanalytic studies, Sheffield University".

Scully does several insightful things in this paper the following are the ones that were most salient to me upon the first read: - distinguishes "disease" from "disability" - contrasts the "social model" and "medical model" perspectives on "disability" - The "medical model" referred to here is probably what Lewis & van der Kolk are critiquing as the "disease model".<br /> - Are the "medical" and "disease" model different? - the social model seems to have arisen as a response to the inadequacy of the medical model

    - "The social model's fundamental criticism of the medical model is that it wrongly locates 'the problem' of disability in biological constraints, considering it only from the point of view of the individual and neglecting the social and systemic frameworks that contribute to it. The social model distinguishes between impairment (the biological substrate, such as impaired hearing) and the disabled experience. In this view the presence of impaired hearing is one thing, while the absence of subtitling on TV is quite another, and it is the refusal of society to make the necessary accommodations that is the real site of disability. A social model does not ignore biology, but contends that societal, economic and environmental factors are at least as important in producing disability."

• brings up a subtle point that there are two jumps "from gene to phenotype, and from phenotype to experience" and that some of the arguments mentioned "suggest that the 'harm' of the impairment is not straightforwardly related to phenotype. What ought to concern us about disease and disability is the disadvantage, pain or suffering involved, and in a sense the impairment is always a kind of surrogate marker for this experience."

Matthews, D. (2020, May 20). How exposing healthy volunteers to Covid-19 for vaccine testing would work. Vox. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/5/20/21258725/covid-19-human-challenge-trials-vaccine-update-sars-cov-2

Huang, K., Bernhard, R., Barak-Corren, N., bazerman, m., & Greene, J. D. (2020, April 22). Veil-of-Ignorance Reasoning Favors Allocating Resources to Younger Patients During the COVID-19 Crisis. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/npm4v

Is this the philosophical problem underlying CRISPR? Isn't anything else beyond the widespread availability of the technology that is troublesome? It also reiterates the dual use problem: good and bad people can have access to the technology and we need to make sure only good people have access to it

For the dual use, see Bennett et al 2009

Is that how we should portray He Jiankui? Like a "rogue scientists enticing couples who do not realize the risks to babies that might result from the experiments"? But what if the current values (in the sense of a virtue ethics for example) that we uphold for the life sciences, are the ones that brought He to take these actions? Values that do not correspond to what we should think regarding science's values, but rather to the values that are usually uphold in corporations.

See Shorett et al 2003

This is a very important piece in the discussion of the ethical issues of CRISPR-Cas9. Instead on focusing only on the aspect of editing of human germ-line, the authors focus on more pressing aspects such as the use on foods, gene drives to decimate vector species, and biofuels, pharmaceuticals.

Some of the outstanding issues are:

• More transparent and accountable regulatory processes
• Risks on ecological balance and unforeseeable effects on decimating vector species
• Need to assign liability for ecological damage
• Measures to halt the effects of edited animals if they prove harmful