Remember what Moreau says, as quoted in the previous chapter:
I wanted—it was the only thing I wanted—to find the extreme limits of plasticity in a living shape. (The Island of Doctor Moreau, p. 56)
All of biology resides in this sentence, because the underlying chemistry and structure of life is all the same. What remains to be understood, as the science of the nineteenth century discovered, is its remarkable inherent dynamism. Living things not only change individually, they change as groups, and at a far larger scale, the composition of life’s diversity across groups has changed. Nor is this a long-ago story; all of its dynamic processes are still in operation right now.
The hard part is that living processes are layered and nested, with different changes and effects at different levels. We have diversity and changes of chemical processes for both inheritance and physiology, then diversity and changes of body shape and functions for a given individual’s life, then the diversity and changes of body shape and functions across different creatures, and finally the appearance and disappearance of types of creatures, all within the staggering contextual question of how the larger, interacting environmental cauldron of chemistry and physics imposed itself on this history.
Saying “natural selection!” isn’t enough. The childish version of that idea says, “mutations are random and environments shape the outcomes,” giving the false impression that anything can or could evolve because it might “mutate in” from the Nth dimension, and the guiding hand of the environment says yea or nay. The thinking version asks, instead, in the real world, what were the historical limits, and what are the hard limits beyond those? Are there different categories for different levels, like genes and chemicals, versus those for potential body shape and functions, versus those for environments and selective pressures? What shapes or functions cannot evolve among living things as we know them? And why not: contingent historical events, or hard-line chemical and biomechanical constraints?
Moreau’s project is better than it looks—it directly examines the limits of individual shape and function across the boundaries between species. Darwin suggested that these boundaries were strictly contingent details of different selective histories, so that there really isn’t anything such as a species boundary as far as causes are concerned, only effects. Was he right? He also suggested that we humans are one species among many, without special properties or historical processes. Would inquiry into species boundaries reveal the same results between us and others, as among them?
What if it were done without pain, without disregarding the experience of the subjects? Can that be done? The answer is—almost: yes and no, with the “no” being a matter of questions rather than brick walls. How abominable would that be?
What Moreau does to his subjects, effectively slicing and dicing them into new anatomical shapes, wouldn’t work. The pain involved would probably kill his subjects through shock, for one thing. The principles of its fictional effectiveness, though, make more sense than one might think. The terms chosen for his explanations are quite specific and are traceable to presentations and experiments made in physiological research during the mid-nineteenth century. For example, his phrase “the physiology, the chemical rhythm,” is a direct and accurate reference to Bernard’s milieu intérieur, prefiguring later discovered details such as negative feedback regulation and set points. His discussion of emotional functions being “seated” in the brain are nearly equally directly from the work of the historical Moreau, although it oddly does not include using psychoactive substances, as those would seem to fit right into our Moreau’s techniques.
The one thing that doesn’t fit at all is his concept of pain as transformation, because it’s bonkers, as I discussed in the previous chapter. That’s a metaphysical issue for him, perhaps even unconscious, as he only mentions it when excited, and it contradicts his earlier cool dismissal of pain as irrelevant to his goals. Fortunately that whole thing can be set aside.
A lot of Moreau’s techniques rely on damaging tissue and controlling the gross physical circumstances of its healing. Many elective surgeries, like nose jobs, involve revising a given feature’s appearance through such methods. The urethro-vesicular correction I mentioned in Chapter 4 is a therapeutic example. An extreme version is to transplant tissue from one part of the body to another, as with skin grafts, and in many cases, this works well. Sometimes, the regrowing organs can be astonishingly flexible—for instance, if you amputate a limb, say a leg at the knee, you don’t do anything to the internal anatomy but merely fold over the skin to make a stump. But inside, the capillaries at that point will regrow to connect the arteries leading to that location with the veins leading back from it, even though before the amputation, they didn’t meet there at all.
However, not all tissue is as flexible, based on what type it is and what’s being done to it. Sometimes it can’t repair itself well, or at all, as with most of our nervous system, and in other cases, what you’ve damaged may well repair as itself, not as what you tried to change it into.
Moreau’s techniques also include blood transfusions and, extensively, tissue transplants across species, which runs right into trouble. Both sets of techniques are facing the considerable array of the recipient’s immune system, which has no idea that this incredible invasion of alien cells is supposed to be therapeutic, and responds so aggressively that all sorts of negative effects occur. At the time of writing, the proteins that define human blood type were not quite yet understood. Until 1901, no one knew why providing a person with someone else’s blood sometimes worked perfectly but sometimes lethally did not. Once the proteins that prompt the immune response were understood better (and fortunately the blood types are so biologically simple and individually distinctive), the technology became reliable over the next two decades. Transplant rejection was even less understood, to the extent that people may have thought its failure was a matter of insufficiently refined surgery, rather than a tissue response. I shudder to consider that even through the 1920s and 1930s, people like John Brinkley and Sergei Abrahamovitch Voronoff were still hawking transplants of, respectively, goat gonads and primate gonad/thyroid tissues into humans. The first successful human organ transplant from a living donor was in 1954, between identical twins, soon followed by immunosuppressant techniques that enabled a person to receive organs from a non-identical donor.
Certainly all the cross-species transplants, which play a big role in characterizing the various Beast Folk, were impossible. However, none of them was intrinsically fantastic or silly in terms of one-step-into-the-future science fiction.
Let’s look at the explicit question, whether humanity can be coaxed to arise from nonhuman animals, and the first step is to acknowledge is that this is a biologically incoherent statement, and to rephrase it sensibly: whether a functioning member of Homo sapiens can be developed from the zygote of another species.
The discussion of assessing our measured variables all resides within a bigger discussion of experimental design: What is being compared to what, and what is being asked? Answering these questions is easy if you break the work into three distinct groups: the experimental subjects, the positive controls, and the negative controls.
Who are the experimental subjects? What species will provide these beginning embryos we are talking about? If the techniques have any a priori chance of working (and if they don’t, then we should scrap the project until they do), then arguably the easiest would be another ape. This leads to the interesting issue of whether that would be so easy that it would be cheating. Is that the question, whether human posture and various other functions can be developmentally produced from those in such closely related creatures?
That better not be the question. That’s a boring question. The question as I see it must be, to what extent is the incredible specificity of a given mammal the outcome of developmental rules that all mammals share? Mammals are pretty incredible when it comes to tuning a limited number of genes and tissues to very different forms. Why here, see exactly what the whole Evo Devo revolution has been about:
. . . are the morphologies corresponding to empty spaces defined by my data readily accessible developmentally?
To address [this family of] questions, three separate strategies of the developmental approach to adaptation (embryology, manipulation and comparative studies) have sprung up, and making explicit the connections between them gives clear avenues for future work. Each strategy offers distinct advantages. The comparative approach offers generality, with inferences spanning many species, and is based on the products of natural, not laboratory, evolution. Studies of ontogeny of single species provide mechanistic detail, and manipulation methods can examine performance or fitness of variants directly. All are means to explore developmental potential in an adaptive context, to determine what is common, what is possible, and what is prohibited. Deliberately combining strategies would fortify inferences by drawing on the strengths of all three. (Mark E. Olson, “The Developmental Renaissance in Adaptationism,” p. 285)1
That is Moreau speaking, or rather, it’s Moreau the scientist rather than the pain-transformer and romantic admirer of the human mind. Our project, then, is to do just this: ontogeny + comparative + experimental.
For that question, the human form itself, as a species of primate, is of no special interest. The good reason to include people at all is because so much is known about our species’ genetics and physiology that it jump-starts the range of necessary studies about the other. But choosing which species provides the target form must rely on more than an ineffable romance attached to our own, which is to say vanity. That was ultimately the biggest flaw in Moreau’s project, as I described it in Chapter 3.2
The scientific question makes most sense if it studies the constraints in both directions, or in plain language, fair is fair. That means we need to see if species X can become a Homo sapiens, and also if Homo sapiens can become a species X. This design has a nice elegance, too, as the positive control for species X is the negative control for Homo sapiens, and vice versa.
Who is species X, then? If this were all homage to the novel, I’d include lots, first among them the black bear (Ursus americanus), leopard (Panthera pardis), puma (Felis or Puma concolor), spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta), domestic pig (Sus scrofa), ox or rather cow (Bos taurus), and domestic dog (Canis familiaris), for reasons pertaining to the most relevant Beast People in the story. However, not only would back-and-forth crossover comparisons among multiple species be overwhelming to conduct and design, these species represent a pretty tight cluster among the diversity of mammals, all effectively the same degree of difference from primates (Figure 5.1). Much as my literary side would gravitate instantly to the puma or hyena, this has to make some kind of phylogenetic sense.
Figure 5.1 Mammalian phylogeny.
Subject to much debate, I’m sure, my call is to begin with ordinal-level comparisons within the Euarchontoglires, and among those, looking right at me, are another two species we happen to know quite a lot about, which is to say Mus musculus, the house mouse, and my old friend Rattus norvegicus, the Norway rat (which is not from Norway, but Indochina; I have a personal tic about saying that). That might seem a bit of a letdown, but if you want, consider this just the beginning to a gradual stepwise comparison, branch by branch.
We have two experimental groups, one beginning with rats and ending with humans, and the other beginning with humans and ending with rats. The two control groups operate as criss-cross positive and negative controls, as in Figure 5.2:
Figure 5.2 Experimental design groups with people and rats.
•Control group 1 are rats that experience all the same conditions but without interventions, expected to develop into ordinary rats; they are the negative controls for the experimental humans and the positive controls for the experimental rats.
•Control group 2 are humans who experience all the same conditions but without interventions, expected to develop into ordinary humans; they are the negative controls for the experimental rats and the positive controls for the experimental humans.
If the control groups don’t turn out as expected, that tells us something is dreadfully wrong with our entire conditional setup. If they do, then they provide a baseline for comparing and assessing our experimental individuals. A completely ideal design from some perspectives would even have the controls be clones of the respective starting species, but I think that would introduce more compromises than it would solve potential problems.
Development is the key. This will be about growing a creature, not sculpting one. However, before anyone shouts “Genetic engineering! DNA!,” my first call is that we can’t use human genetic material, because that dodges the issue. The textual Moreau was determined to create humans without using human sources at all, sticking to what the nonhuman animals provided singly or in combination. The same applies here, although I can rephrase it in more rigorous terms. Remember, this isn’t an engineering experiment to get a human from a nonhuman as cheaply and easily as possible, so it’s not about genes and closest-possible relatives. Instead, it’s about the plasticity of development, so discovering whether genetic differences operate as a constraint is part of the point.
However, Moreau did fall right into another bad design feature: defining humanity in an ineffable, “know it when I see it” fashion, which doomed him to disappointment. I have to avoid that trap, as he did not, by setting pre-experimental design goals in strict performance terms, without recourse to abstractions like rationality, consciousness, looking into a creature’s eyes to see its soul, or any other functionally vague referents based on exceptionalism. We need at least one performance variable.
Still, defining the performance goals isn’t simple. There is no single feature that we can point to in isolation and say, given this, the creature is human regardless of anything else. When we look at someone and tag them as a fellow human, we’re actually seeing quite a few things at once. To focus on the anatomical and physiological (because sadly, people also do tag others as non-human on the basis of cultural practices), these things include
•Posture: pelvic shape, thigh orientation, knee articulation, vertebrae count, lumbar curvature, spine and skull articulation, plantar foot, reduced and fused tail
•Hands: length and specific orientation of the fingers, degrees of opposition, and pressure among them
•Facial and other cranial proportions, for example, ear placement
•Reduced mandible, associated features of palate shape
•Dentition: number of each type of tooth, shape for specific teeth
•Cerebral cortex: increased volume, dense microanatomy (note: none of the rest of the brain needs to be changed, in terms of size and shape)
•Characteristic laryngeal, lingual, and other hyoid anatomy
•Eye anatomy, for example, pupil shape, iris color, retinal neurology
•Mobile facial musculature, everted lips
•Two teats positioned at the pectoral region
•Characteristic sizes of the penis and clitoris; absence of the penile sheath for the former; absence of baculum and baubellum
•Simplex (single-chambered) uterus and duct anatomy
•Location of the testes (outside the body cavity) and location of the scrotum (behind the penis)
•Specific anatomy and capabilities of the digestive tract, including a particular shape for the cecum (appendix)
•Kidney shape and specific range of water-salt regulation
•Characteristic metabolic rate (fortunately boring)
•Aseasonal reproductive capacity
•Monthly estrous cycling including true menstruation, reduced chemical signaling of fertility
•Thickened dermis, absence of underfur, specific colors, morphology, and distribution of cover fur
•Shape of the cartilage of the pinnae (outer ears) and nose
•Growth rates and body size at all stages
Listing these variables raises crucial questions: to be rated as successful, how many of these features need to be made human or rat, which ones for sure, and for each one, how human does it have to be? Reproductive capacity isn’t a priority, as we’re discussing species differences in particular functions, not literal speciation. But aside from that, what’s more important, hand anatomy and appearance, or the placement of the eyes and shape of the pupils? Would the species-specific combination of color, thickness, and length of hair be an irrelevant detail or a deal-breaker?
This is where the project needs more intellectual grounding. It is absolutely unacceptable to set the project’s response variables by various recognition features hardwired into our own sensory and psychological systems. If I were reviewing a grant proposal for this project, that’s the first thing I’d check out: exactly why the performance variables, and the standards they’re to achieve, are deemed important.
For example, what about features of cellular and tissue function? To be successfully experimentally human, would the rat-based experimental subjects need to exhibit human-characteristic onsets, locations, and types of cancer? And of course, reversed for the human-based experimental subjects?
I also need to consider behavioral criteria, which is much trickier than it looks. “Can it talk and build a fire” is definitely not on target. It’s about as rigorous as “look into its eyes to see its soul.” The project must be free of some deeply rooted assumptions. For example, there is no reason to think the experimental subjects would be inherently unregulated or violent, because calling such behavior “beastly” is a value judgment, not critter-descriptive at all. Nor should they be expected to be childlike or primitive in any meaning of the word, nor should they be expected to exhibit some magical moment of “awakening” from beastlike confusion into human awareness.
During their debate in Chapter 14, Moreau and Prendick disagree about the cognitive capacities of nonhumans:
“But,” said I, “These things—these animals talk!”
He said that was so and proceeded to point out that the possibilities of vivisection do not stop at a mere physical metamorphosis. A pig may be educated. The mental structure is even less determinate than the bodily. In our growing science of hypnotism we find the promise of a possibility of replacing old inherent instincts by new suggestions, grafting on or replacing the inherited fixed ideas. Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion. And the great difference between man and monkey is in the larynx, in the incapacity to frame delicately different sound-symbols by which thought could be sustained. In this I failed to agree with him, but with a certain incivility he declined to notice my objections. He repeated that the thing was so and continued his account of his work. (The Island of Doctor Moreau, p. 54)
This exchange is dated and almost completely blended between obsolete and still-powerful points, and the framework of understanding is so different—cell theory was very young, development was not tied well to evolution, and no useful principles of genetics were yet discussed—that there’s no point in engaging with their direct disagreement. I’ll extract the valid points and frame them in modern terms.
Moreau is right about one thing. The current understanding of nonhuman behavior suggests that they—or rather, a broad and numerous plurality of separate “theys”—are already doing very many of the things we’d like to reserve for ourselves and call “human.” Every animal studied for cognitive abilities can count, for instance, as long as we’re talking about variables and a scale of measurement that are relevant to the creature’s life-history strategy. The project doesn’t need to instill so much as to permit and to redirect.
However, he’s wrong about the specifics being wide open; there’s no such thing as a mental blank slate. The problem lies in falsely separating mental processing into instinct (Beast) and learning (Man), which is where he and Prendick get hung up. Instead, it’s better to start with the observation that developing sophisticated behavior may include learning (trial-and-error, for instance) or it may not, depending on the organism. Therefore learning is one mode of embedded developmental processes, and in fact is probably better understood as a wide range of consequential interactions with the environment rather than a single or simple thing. How specific it is, both in its topic and how wide or narrow its results can be, are case-by-case phenomena, and much experience or trial-and-error is another variable entirely. Simply put, there is no single “learning” phenomenon to identify.3
When learning—in the most familiar sense of exposure, experiment, and study—is involved in development, then the creature absolutely needs certain kinds of experience as raw material, but again, a particular sort with its own particular processing for that species. Therefore the real variable to address would be the parameters of what can be learned. In this, Prendick’s species-limitation position is also valid. A pig can be educated startlingly well, even resulting in previously unseen behavior, but it will be an educated pig; one may well say the same about a human. Language capacity is an excellent example; all human infants are already language producers, but they need input and interaction to utilize those mechanisms, and they need the cognitive capacity to internalize and develop it. You won’t get a pig to speak merely by altering its larynx. Conversely, that a parrot can say a word has nothing to do with what it may be communicating by it.
To turn a creature’s current parameters for cognition into a human profile, including language if you like, then the techniques must target the cortical neural correspondence to perceptual biases of all sorts. Perceptual biases refer to what an animal finds relevant and actively includes in its cognitive processing, both during development and in its later functioning behaviors. Concretely, how would such an altered rat be attracted to creatures like itself rather than to ordinary rats? How would its range of preferred foods, its aseasonal and non-fertile sexual arousal and proceptivity, or its spectrum for aggression be established? Reverse all these concepts for the corresponding human-to-rat switch. Our understanding of these precise neural mechanisms, in their extensive species-specific diversity, remains minimal. That’s what would require the groundwork research in this project, at this point a dizzying prospect.
The word “program,” the favorite stand-in for “instinct” since computers became household items, is not very helpful. Developmental details for complex behavioral capacities are apparently species-specific, but that doesn’t mean these details are not themselves dependent on environmental, interactive conditions, or that they are irreducible units of inheritance and function. They must be addressed from the experiential side as well as the anatomical, because living functions are not a matter of forming an embryo and activating it at birth. Instead, behaviors begin to develop as soon as physiology does. The resolution to Moreau’s and Prendick’s disagreement applies to the embryo’s immediate environmental experience as well, in that you need the circumstances of both a pig’s uterus and a pig embryo to get a pig, in so many variables that it’s exhausting to imagine summarizing them. For this project, the baseline research to establish the ground rules for the uterine environments and microenvironments is an equally open topic.
As long as we’re talking about language, I think it’s overrated and should be treated as one variable among many in this difficult category. It’s especially debatable whether being able to verbalize things symbolically really matters when it comes to what can be conceived, communicated, and acted upon. The scientific community is still, funnily enough, incoherent about what nonhuman language is even supposed to look like, partly because it’s so easy to assume that whatever it is, the nonhumans aren’t doing it. I still don’t think we know whether chimps or gorillas communicate in language or not. They’re so good at solving the researchers' assessment techniques as a social puzzle that they effectively defeat our measures to assess what they’re doing.
It’s probably inevitable that the project will concentrate on hands and brains, which present a nice example of two kinds of intervention. For all of our talk about the “fantastic and phenomenal” human hand, it’s actually not much modified from that of a salamander—thus more ancestral in form than the forepaws of most other mammals. Therefore getting a humanoid hand from a developing rat-like forepaw would require inhibiting its development rather than adding to or “advancing” it, although not very much compared to the far more altered paw of a cat or dog, to say nothing of the single-fingered and hooved endings of some other mammals.
The brain is anatomically more like the stereotype, though, or at least one piece of it is. Most of our brain is boring and ordinary, exactly what you’d expect for a mammal of our size, including, interestingly, the limbic system, which Moreau was understandably having trouble with in the novel—he should have just left it alone. The big size-and-shape difference lies in the outer six layers of the neocortex, present in all mammals. In humans, it is not only freakishly huge—which makes it look like a bloated, wrinkled space-alien—but also contains much denser interconnections among its neurons than are found in most other mammals. Therefore these two features would have to be induced to expand and proliferate, rather than be inhibited.
As a comparison to both of the previous examples, consider metabolic rate, which, compared to body size, is pretty boring and ordinary for both rats and humans, and would not be targeted for a deliberate change. Therefore insofar as metabolic rate influences aging, a long-held concept, perhaps merely scaling up the experimental rat subjects’ size will do the trick for human-type longevity, or at least get partway there—except that recent work shows that an array of proteins in cell membranes may be more important in the species diversity of longevity. Unfortunately (logistically speaking), a lot of what look like ordinary traits are going to uncover similar differences in detail that throw a wrench into the project.
Again, we’re starting from early embryos, and we’re going to tweak it so it grows up with the anatomy and physiology we’ve outlined. How might this be done? By using various means to alter the morphogenetic field at specific locations and at specific times.
The morpho-what? Good question. The term was coined a long time ago, in 1910, but it wasn’t appreciated as the powerhouse it is across all of biology until the 1990s, and it took another decade for it to show up in basic biology texts. Hold onto your seat because this is serious business.
You existed first as a single cell, which duplicated its genes, split into two cells, and then each of those did that again, and (insert about a zillion begats) now you are made of trillions of them, almost all clones of that first one. But—if that’s all it took to make your body, you would be simply a big blob, with no structural cohesion at all, and therefore a puddle. Soon, any cells surrounded by others would die, as they would have no access to oxygen or any other constantly required resource, like water and sugar. Therefore, in order to develop into an organism, various layers and locations in this rapidly expanding blob need to become segregated in both structure and function, to produce body cavities, systems for bulk transport, a platform for locomotion, a reproductive subsystem, and chemical and neural regulatory systems integrated with all of them.
For any given piece of the body, this occurs in two steps: morphogenesis and differentiation. The first one is the freaky part: when cells that show no individual specificity—that is, they’re extremely generic and boring in function—cluster together into recognizable shapes, like the tubes of your circulatory system, or the bean-shapes of your kidneys. All your organ systems are set up this way, in shape, but made of these “blah” cells that effectively do nothing but live, and thus the organs are not yet functional. At this point, each piece we’re looking at is effectively made of cellular play-dough and has little or no integrated functions or transport. Since each cell is effectively on its own physiologically speaking, the overall body cannot be very big, especially in terms of volume, or cells would die from lack of oxygen and glucose.
The second step, differentiation, occurs for each organ system at different rates, such that the circulatory system, for instance, differentiates well before the others. This is the part that’s easier to understand: various genes in the cells composing each tissue at a given location are activated, and others are inactivated, so that the cells, and correspondingly the tissues, take on very recognizable, very functional shapes. At this point, when you look at the heart, it’s no longer cellular play-dough in the shape of a heart, but is composed of muscle cells, all of which are now going lub-dub, lub-dub, in unison. And when you look at the kidneys, totally different genes are doing their thing in those tissues, so the distinctive cell shapes and subunits called nephrons can now be seen, carrying out their various activities. At this point, cells receive oxygen and glucose through fluid transport systems, so the distance limits on diffusion are no longer a constraint, and the embryo can grow rapidly.
Biologists are understandably fascinated by morphogenesis, and Karl Ernst von Baer, who first described these events in the 1820s and 1830s, is considered one of the leading intellects of historical biology, easily rivaling Darwin and Mendel for those in the know. How do these undifferentiated, individually totipotent cells move, proliferate, divide, and group, such that the play-dough version of the creature is established? Because this is how every big multi-celled creature develops, by setting up its parts during morphogenesis, and then differentiation makes them work.4 The project is merely to adjust these processes experimentally.
The key players in morphogenesis are several (although surprisingly few) proteins called morphogens. If you think of the early embryo as a ball of cells rapidly increasing in size because the cells are continually dividing, then the morphogens operate as local influences on how much the cells divide, how much they stick together, or even whether they live or die in that spot. Morphogenesis proceeds insofar as the various morphogens are released at the right locations for the right amount of time, at the right time. Two things make this more complicated. First, the place in the embryo that releases a given morphogen may not be where it has its greatest effect, because at this stage of development, a protein spreads through the cellular matrix of the embryo like an inkblot across paper, except in three dimensions; this is called a “field.” Second, a morphogen’s specific effect often depends not on its presence versus absence, but upon exactly how concentrated it is in a given spot.
For example, put your finger at your shoulder joint, press a bit, and then move your finger all the way out to the end of your middle finger. As you go along, you’ll find that there are more and more bones involved, both sideways (e.g., two in your forearm as opposed to your upper arm) and lengthwise. This is because during your embryonic development, a single surge of retinoic acid was released at your shoulder, and as your limb lengthened, this morphogen diffused down its length, getting less and less concentrated as it went. The more retinoic acid present when the initial skeletal morphogenesis occurred and cartilage was laid down in it, the more the early versions of the bones fused together. So at the end of your arm is a fan of segmented bones, instead of another big stick like your humerus. So much complexity from one little physical effect, diffusion, of a single substance!
Morphogens typically work like that, practically simpleminded in their immediate release, but when produced in a given spot in a given quantity at a given time, profoundly consequential. Other interesting details include the homeotic genes that affect body segmentation, and the all-important instances of organized cell death, or apoptosis. For example, your hand has fingers instead of a paddle because the cells between the (future) fingers up and died, effectively sculpting the hand before its internal anatomy differentiated. A lot of your body cavities initially formed that way, too.
The real beauty, though, lies in the observation that animal morphogens are apparently closely conserved throughout evolutionary history—in other words, although you and the nearest fruit fly differ drastically in body materials and form, you and it used very similar physiological devices to organize your bodies. This conservation often goes all the way down to the genetic level. If you restrict your attention to the mammals alone, then we are talking about vastly different outcomes from what amounts to minor differences in the use of nearly identical toolkits.
This makes everything so much easier in some ways. It means that a creature’s DNA is not a magic blueprint for all its features. Some traits, a very few, can each be traced directly to a single gene, such as the components of our immune system and our blood types, to name one consequential and one trivial example. However, the majority are best thought of as participants in chains of biochemical effects, operating in steps, called “cascades” in the jargon of Evo Devo. Different cascades occur at different times and at different locations in the embryo, influencing the ongoing development.
As a general point, we talk about genes as “information,” but we give them too much credit in isolation. Genes by themselves are a handful of idiotic compounds and contain no “direction” or “instruction”—they are one feature of the chemical effects in a context of conditions, interactions, and combinations of events. As Lewis Wolpert (who coined the term “morphogen”) put it, they are best understood as positional information, phrased by Patrick Bateson as recipes rather than blueprints. This phrase has perhaps been diluted through overuse, so I stress that it means the combination of genes involved entirely in the context of the local conditions and available raw materials.5 In a body, nothing happens, not anatomical or behavioral, except as Gilbert Gottlieb described it for psychobiology, the entire developmental manifold.
Fortunately, the remarkable diversity of mammals apparently represents few variations on a limited range of recipes. I like to think of it as the Japanese game called Go: the rules are so simple that you can learn them in a couple of minutes, but a given game can become extremely complex, and different opening moves can influence the whole picture of what eventually turns out to be the winning strategy. Given a few nudges for yea or nay in a few morphogens and conditions at the right places and times, and you could well have developed into a musk ox.
But perhaps my meaning grows plain now. You begin to see that it is a possible thing to transplant tissue from one part of an animal to another or from one animal to another, to alter its chemical reactions and methods of growth, to modify the articulations of its limbs and indeed to change it in its most intimate structure? (The Island of Doctor Moreau, p. 53)
Plain indeed, and at this point, there is no need for tissue transplant or surgery at all. Using human development as a map and schedule for morphogens’ release and similar effects like apoptosis, tweaking a nonhuman mammal into a different mammalian species’ configuration may well be a matter of finding what morphogens to drip in, or to inhibit, and where and when.
So the watchwords become location, location, location; and conditions, conditions, conditions—as well, of course, as knowing whether a particular outcome-detail gets socked into place early versus what is due to twiddling later. Even if you have the right morphogen in the right amount at the right place, you don’t want to introduce it at the wrong time. The point is to mess with the cascade of events in the right way to induce the rest of the cascade, operating normally, to do what you wanted without further need to mess with it. Another procedural parameter is to consider whether you want to change the substance affecting the tissue, or the tissue’s response to the substance.
Here are the ways in which a morphogenetic field can be influenced.
•Genes: That is, inserting content into or deleting it from the embryo’s genes very early so that all the developing cells will receive this new sort of instruction. It’s probably the most laborious way to change the embryo, especially since the effect involved would have little or nothing to do with altering the gene product (protein) and everything to do with its timing. The current knowledge base is pretty slim for these techniques at this level of intervention.
•Certain single-protein traits, traceable to single genes, may have to be altered this way, especially for the immune system.
•Morphogens: This is what I described earlier—literally reaching into the developing embryo and altering the chemical concentration of a given morphogen (or an equivalent, like growth hormone or an apoptosis inducer), either by adding it or by adding some substance that inhibits it.
•Physical intervention: A somewhat cruder version of the previous method, effectively holding down or forcing apart or otherwise physically intervening with the developing tissues.
•Gene therapy: This is gene modification, too, but only at a given place and at a given time; it might be important to generate a one-time but very significant “bend” in the cascade of a given creature for some crucial bit of anatomy or eventual physiology.
•Conditions: Providing changes in heat, pressure, salinity, or any of dozens of other exterior effects that turn out to be consequential for the development of a given type of creature.
•Uterine environment issue: Same or different carriers; effects and tolerance regarding multiple in-and-outs—techniques need to be refined for minimal removals and maximum impact.
•Stem cell bank: One for each subject, so cells can be modified externally (genetically or otherwise) and sent into the embryo at key points.
If this is striking you as impossible, well, it pretty much is at present. But to focus on one element, bear in mind how much more we know about the genes compared to even twenty years ago. Both human and rat genes have been fully sequenced, and one of the big game-changers of recent years is called genomics, the technology that permits not only mapping the entire range of genes of an organism, but also measuring their activity. Since the real meat of development lies not in single genes and single proteins, but complex interactions among them, the new technology makes it at least conceivable to measure such interactions as epistasis, heterosis, and other such jargon-named events directly, which is exactly what this project would rely upon for its initial procedural designs.
I know I keep harping on this, but it really bears thought that the project’s biggest intellectual barrier isn’t the biochemical technique but the developmental, contextual one. Since we know very little about the mechanisms establishing a given species’ parameters and biases, all the genetic and morphogenetic manipulations would be like poking our fingers around in a dark room. For this actually to be a scientific project, much more groundwork about the necessary and effective experience of development remains to be laid first. A whole library of techniques and a language for discussing them would probably have to be worked up first from experiments with mice and zebra fish.
For example, human cerebral cortex size and density do not in themselves reflect an increased competence of thought. A lot of nonhuman animals with average-sized and ordinary-density cortices can process things cognitively a lot better than we can; rats beat the pants off us when it comes to spatial memory and the probabilities of which tunnel to try next. If they could read and write, our recreational mazes and Sudoku games would strike them as fit only for toddlers. More subtly, among social animals, the capacity for social interactions, ranking, and manipulations varies widely across species—and at the more complex end, we might find ourselves clueless and baffled among the intricacies and obligations spanning, for instance, a group of baboons or hyenas. If you want to make a functional human out of a chimp, that would entail reducing the capacity for social manipulation, not increasing it. It’s quite false to think the expanded, denser human cerebral cortex indicates generalized expanded thinking abilities, or that merely influencing it to be there anatomically would also generate its ordinary function in humans.
Would a version of the project contain such fanciful goals as Bear-Vixens, Mare-Rhinoceri, and Hyena-Swine? It may seem arbitrary in the book—if you want to make a human out of a wolf, why complicate things by throwing bull tissue in there, too? However, combined structural components may be needed, in some cases. To make a cat’s forelimbs function in a humanoid way, they’re going to need clavicles, for instance, and one way to do that is to graft in early-stage clavicles from some other creature.
I remember seeing my first chimera in 1989, when I was interviewing for graduate studies and happened to attend the departmental seminar being given that day at the University of Maryland. I don’t recall who the speaker was, but he was certainly either working with Nicole le Douarin, whose chimera system had been recently published in Science, or with a lab directly applying her techniques. I arrived a bit late, so I encountered the slides cold.
My first reaction was, “What the hell is that?” Why was I looking at a plate of goo holding a partly developed chick embryo, a whole side of which displayed recognizably distinct quail anatomy?
Let me explain my reaction. Like all modern biologists, I consider life to be cellular, or, phrased at its most extreme, that only cells are indeed alive. In that context, organisms like you, me, chicks, and quails are cooperating collectives of cloned cells, which take on interesting properties when they’re big and complicated enough. All I was seeing was that cells could be induced to multiply and form organs—what they’d be doing anyway—even when stuck to another set of cells already doing the same things. I recognized it as a technical success at a difficult logistic task, but at first glance I didn’t see it as answering a recognizable scientific question.
Listening, though, I remembered that cells move around the body a lot during early development, so at the least, the introduced cells make a great marker device for tracking the routes. Later, I would find I’d luckily encountered one of the early stages of the Evo Devo revolution, laying the groundwork for not merely combining two creatures, but affecting the functions of one with the other. Le Douarin–style techniques could be instrumental in getting the developmental template of creature A to tweak in a direction that itself might not be that of creature B exactly, but that yields the human-type experimental goal.
The big problem of rejection remains: a chimera does not survive once its immune system matures, as it rejects the intruder organs with severe effects, and they are typically euthanized before that happens. This becomes much harder when species differences are involved, not due to gross incompatibility, but to subtleties that aren’t detectable until they’re found the hard way. Stephanie Fae Beauclair (Baby Fae) was kept alive with a baboon heart for twenty-one days, but unfortunately not long enough for a human donor to be found due to a subtle immune incompatibility. To date, using pig organs for human transplants remains hypothetical for the same reason. Some clues to solving that problem may be found in marmoset twin studies; it turns out their cells have lower numbers of receptors to detect intruders.
A more subtle approach might be to get the recipient animal’s tissues to respond in a permanent fashion due to transitory contact with chimeric tissue—that is, the introduced tissue would not last or be expected to integrate with the recipient, but it would bring about a given specific response.6
Research doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There’s no body of devil-may-care, off-the-leash, fully funded and equipped “scientists out there” doing whatever comes into their heads, any more than there’s a white-robed, soft-spoken Council of Science vetting every last project for ethics and its purported benefit to humanity. Scientific work today is a plural, variable institutional phenomenon, and most definitely, you don’t get to do anything that isn’t paid for in some way.
This whole endeavor would therefore either be some kind of Manhattan Project, or it would be scattered around many, many researchers working on bits and pieces and related elements all over the world, probably all arguing and disagreeing over everything, with no set schedule and piecemeal results, which would produce tons of insights but no viable outcomes.
In its engineering phase, however, the project would have to be more centralized and institutional, for the logistic reason that its subjects must ultimately be gestated and mature normally. There is no such thing as a people jar, such as you see all the time in science fiction cinema and TV, nor is there any viable means of accelerated gestation and maturation. For the rat-ending subjects, that means born with rats, nursed by rats, reared by rats, and living in rat environments, for this purpose let’s say an extensive semi-natural one skewed heavily toward rat preferences, living quarters, and patrol spaces. For the human-ending subjects, if we’re looking for human-style development and performance, that will require human-type levels of gestation, nurturing, learning, and maturation time, in a functioning social environment. And that means a genuine human environment, ordinary families in ordinary society, as a serious design parameter. You can’t keep them in a stereotyped science fiction “facility,” because if you marginalize them, you interfere with the performance variables. Don’t forget the double-blinding, such that none of the subjects, the families, or the people recording data would know which individuals came from which original species. Arguably, the subjects and families wouldn’t even know about that aspect of the experiment at all. The final “do it” step would itself be huge, to bring up all those kids, so it would need serious infrastructure.
I raise this to strike to the heart of the Man/Beast false dichotomy. In the novel, Prendick first mistakes the Beast Folk for experimentally mutilated humans, which drives no less than seven full chapters of the story. His error isn’t irrelevant, but instead fits right into the problem at hand. Specifically, why does learning that the direction of Moreau’s work is reversed make it less wrong to him?
Let’s say the techniques are eventually rock-solid, amazing, and we get lovely rats from both the experimental subjects and their positive controls. Some of them were born from the pairing of human beings. Consider them carefully, the rat pups in this project, regardless of parentage. They live in their rodent environment, sleeping, patrolling, eating, and socializing in rat fashion. They squabble, huddle, burrow, and yes, mate like rats. Even if the experimental subjects happen to be non-reproductive, that doesn’t stop them from giving it a good try. They last for the several years that rats get, they age, and they die.
Similarly consider the kids in this project, both the other group of experimental subjects and their positive controls. Some of them were born from the pairing of rats. They are human children: raised in families, probably observing various religious practices, going to day care, going to school, wearing backpacks, playing with favorite toys, finding friends, and making a place in their families and social lives. They get sick and they get hurt, and they need family help and support. They learn, laugh, and cry. They’re loved and included just as any children are, which is to say, to varying degrees. They grow up, they have favorite music, squabble in their pre-adolescent and adolescent cliques, and they seek an adult identity.
If you’re horrified, is that because the project would treat humans as experimental subjects like the rest? Is it time to talk about the dignity of humans who by every imaginable metric are experiencing the absolute minimum of stress and pain? Or because it would treat a member of another species exactly like a fellow human? Is it time to ask the same question raised regarding human-on-human bigotry: “Would you let one marry your sister?”
As if that weren’t enough, consider this: because the variables in this project are all so graded and scheduled in terms of small steps, a given series of subjects should be terminated and assessed just to see whether the earlier steps are working. So that’s a huge number of embryos that would be started and stopped almost right away; then if those seem to have worked well enough, then a next wave that would be taken a step or two beyond that, and so on. Such a step would probably have to be repeated later, too, if a given phase of the development turned out to be balky and to require isolated testing, or even new such steps might have to be imposed. Since so much of development is postnatal, extending into adolescence, that raises the issue of terminating individuals: Should that be done to the rat-origin human-like kids who are already well into their childhood? If instead the subjects were removed from the project, tended to as best we might, and permitted to age and die without intervention, that’s pain category E in the IACUC schedule—for animals, the most extreme category, the least permitted relative to the other features of the project. Why is euthanasia considered the most ethical end for a lab animal but the least for a person?
Or take the issue of their legal status relative to being under scientific observation. It’s not ipso facto illegal or wrong to study humans scientifically. Humans are the most extensively studied species on the planet; we have voluntarily normative observation, voluntary clinical trials, and use of already available information across non-planned groupings. In a study of this kind, with no pain and no limitation of movement, with only normative observations, permission would lie with parental consent, or with those empowered to act as parents. Is that what applies here, too? I assume that few or no parents would permit their children to be in the rat-ended experimental group, but would it apply to all the children with human features, human origin or not? In fact, are the people who raise them—who ideally would not know their origins—legally their adopted parents? Is this, you know, real adoption?
At last, we are talking about research ethics that have nothing to do with Bernard, nothing to do with the two windows—never mind either “agony for knowledge” or “the higher purpose.” The issue lies in our inability to process that humans are a kind of animal. This is the freak-out moment I described in Chapter 3, because the leveling of human and nonhuman already exists, but is now made visible and put into practice. It necessarily places humans of nonhuman origin into our own society, and therefore this project grades right outward from development, physiology, and evolution into social engineering. Individual compliance with professional regulations is no longer the concern, because it’s not single-study ethics at stake. Instead, the challenges are made to and demands made upon policy, which means—just as Biller-Andorno has written—this concerns justice. One cannot blind oneself to ethics in order to work with live animals, as Bernard says and as I think is still implied in the current activist discourse, but rather should embrace this as an ethical task, fully articulated and in a community effort.
So, what is justice, regarding nonhumans? At all? Within scientific use? Certainly my injured vole deserved some, and given the changes since that quarter-century ago, I think that current dialogues and use-practices in science have considerably more justice-oriented content than they receive credit for. But the concern of such practices is still focused upon pain and suffering, and complex as that’s been, it’s comparatively easy. Justice in regard to this project is another thing entirely.
Current scientific standards are not sufficient to handle that because nothing in our cultural vocabulary, for this issue, is sufficient to handle that.
For example, does injustice lie simply in being a human being? Is it cruel to be made into one? If not, then is it wrong to alter a nonhuman into a human? If so, then why? Because it is unworthy of presumed elevation? Is it wrong to treat these individuals as human beings (or rats), or wrong not to? How are they treated: people or not, rats or not, treated well or not? Are they citizens or property?
The rats in the project aren’t proxies, which is to say, stand-ins for human subjects due to certain common parameters or for useful comparisons. There aren’t any stand-ins in this study; each species is there as a comparative point for the other, on equal footing in terms of biological interest. Since the techniques by definition equate their biological status, some case can be made for all of them to be treated as people, legally—as human subjects. And then we have to debate whether that applies to all four groups, regardless of outcome, such that a completely ordinary rat resulting from the control group would legally be a person for the rest of its life.
So far, I’ve been discussing animal welfare, but the term “animal rights” is established as a different thing—the concept that the use of nonhuman animals is an inherently unjust thing, subject to criticism on the same basis of the denial of human rights. The concept was introduced by Tom Regan in his A Case for Animal Rights and has gained considerable traction.
The argument is strong in many ways, not least in that it rightly calls out the classic naturalistic fallacy inherent in the concept of human rights insofar as they rely on a special status for humans. Taking as a given that people, all people, have rights regardless of personal abilities or specific performance indicators is a fine assumption as far as I and most people are concerned, until one realizes that its rock-bottom justification is merely that we belong to a particular species. The critical term for that is “speciesism,” coined by Richard Ryder, which is the assignment of literal value and consequential legal protection solely on the basis of belonging to a given species, and as such, patently a matter of maintaining privilege. Citing “humanity” is arguably no more than exploiting a loaded variable that is devoid of moral or other higher/lower content, and it should be more sensible to refer to the less species-specific concept of dignity. Animal rights advocates call for a reassessment of nonhuman animals’ legal status, in many cases supporting the position that current scientific animal use is a rights (dignity) violation.
Let’s take a look at that, because I admit to some confusion. So far, all discussion of rights begins with the assertion that humans have them. It’s essential—and I choose that word precisely—that Man, in the Man/Beast divide, is gifted not only with special abilities, but with a special status, a way to be treated. Much discussion of rights concerns how we can get them to people who are denied them, wrongly denied because they too are Man, and the discussion of animal rights simply extends that same question to more creatures. This strikes me as an arguable position, although some of the justifications baffle me. I have not been able to grasp why many of the arguments analogize nonhumans with disabled people because they cannot talk, possibly because I think speech is an animal ability, like a bird’s capacity to fly, so I can take another animal’s dignity as given without the need to cut it slack.
A deeper look exposes human exceptionalism, though. This claim relies on the existence of the special status as a profound and mystic thing. Rights in the abstract are an example of religious thought. To say that rights come from God is more honest than to say we “just” have them in some ineffable and unquestionable way within an otherwise material existence. God may have gone out of fashion, but the “rights of man” still rely on Man as a special status, as metaphysical as ever. Adopting some other species into that category maintains the category, unless all life on earth is included, which seems a bit odd since rights are supposed to be a method of arriving at policy. Put most harshly, nobody actually has rights or dignity—as soon as you leave the realm of abstraction, you’re back to the grosser realm of what you’re going to do.
That brings up the practical problem with ineffables, that having them on paper, or in the ether, as it were, guarantees nothing about having them in a tangible sense. In practice, rights need to be named and applied. In this case, are we talking about protection from one or more forms of harm? Being permitted a wider (free) scope of action? And for whom?
The application is the toughest, because the designation of rights is not a force field. You may have the right to live, but that by itself doesn’t mean someone isn’t going to kill you. Here I distinguish between talk of rights and actions of humans toward one another, which includes all too much slaughter, misery, and exploitation, and not just from “anti-social” or “barbaric” people either, but mainly through institutions of vast organization, wealth, and power—the civilized ones, I believe they are called. When I look at the action relative to the purported rights, much of it concerns how we can deny them to people whom we happen not to like, or from whom, bluntly, we gain advantage by killing or immiserating. This turns out to be easy because the perpetrators can simply say they are not Man. Unfortunately, in practice, rights are circular: we say we have them because we are Man, and we designate who is Man by assigning them rights. This is not about inherent and essential qualities, but about inclusion and exclusion.
Perhaps Man, out there, up there, somewhere, not here, does indeed have rights. Good for Man. But you and I and everyone we know aren’t him. Moreau would be disgusted by us, just as Prendick is in Chapter 22. We're grubby, confused, ordinary, committed to one practice or another, trying to talk to one another about what to do next, able to cooperate and able to fight. With much pomp and verbiage, we include and exclude other humans in our spheres of power. Everyone calls the way they do it, or want to do it, “my right.”
That’s why I can never quite get the charge of speciesism, or at least, what seems to be rock-solid certainty that assigning nonhumans rights would turn into genuinely better practices toward them. In the constitution of the nation where I was born and am a citizen, slavery is barred—except for convicts and conscripts, as stated in the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. At the time of this writing, this nation leads the world in its absolute number of imprisoned convicts, in the length of incarceration, and in the practice of solitary confinement. Convict labor is leased to private industry in an explicit act of chattel sales. The convicts’ status as slaves, badly treated ones at that, is blatantly apparent in any terms you care to name. I guess their rights don’t matter? Or they don’t have them? Which is it?7
Is that what animal rights activists want for nonhumans, the same discrepancy between the paper rights and the power-based, provisional reality that real-life humans experience? In that case, I don’t see the difference that assigning rights would make. Cows would get well-phrased, resolved, and ratified rights, except, you know, for the cows we eat. If we can’t get human rights universally applied to humans, then I don’t even know what we’re talking about. I find more value in the now thirty-year-old practice of applying the Animal Welfare Act to lab rodents, despite their not being covered by it.7
This isn’t about them, it’s about us, because we have the power and the capability. The question is what we will or won’t do, letting “why” remain the community quilt that it is, rather than an arrived-at truth. In that case then, in this imaginary Moreau project, are the rats’ rights being violated? In fact, let’s go all the way and legally place the experimental subjects of rat origin into the status of humans as raised by humans, subject not to the Animal Welfare Act and associated regulations, but to the provisions of the Nuremberg Code and the Belmont Report. If that were so, is this project a violation of their nonhuman rights? Is a given creature’s dignity violated, although it now has exactly the dignity of another kind of creature? Would treating the rat-derived people as rats rather than people be appropriate due to their “native” origins?
The Moreau experiment doesn't “challenge natural law.” It’s flatly confirmatory of current thought on evolutionary history and humans’ biological identity, as there is simply no technical controversy in the phrase “human beings are a species of animal,” or in “species’ differences result from changes in developmental mechanisms.” But just as SCINT cloning disrupts nothing but the familiar timing of ordinary twins, and thus prompts a social and legal freak-out regarding what “family” means, a Moreau project disrupts nothing but the familiar designation of ordinary species, and would clearly prompt an even more profound freak-out regarding what “human” means, including issues of human rights, human interests, human dignity, or anything else tagged with the term.
Fortunately, we have a book to talk about instead of being confronted with it cold. This is the brilliance of The Island of Doctor Moreau, because it disrupts the entire ethical and political discourse, whatever degree of animal welfare is under negotiation, whatever rights of humans or nonhumans are adjudged to exist, and whatever side of a currently designated controversy one may fervently support. Pain is only the opening topic, and even when that issue is removed, the novel still challenges the sides’ very existence to expose the exceptionalism within.
The literature of Evo Devo is among the most exciting scientific reading available, including Theodore Garland and Michael Rose, Experimental Evolution (2009); Alessandro Minelli, Forms of Becoming (2009); Mark S. Blumberg, Freaks of Nature (2010); Lewis Held Jr., Quirks of Anatomy (2009); Wallace Arthur, Biased Embryos and Evolution (2004); Mary Jane West Eberhard, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution (2003); Benedikt Hallgrimsson and Brian K. Hall, Epigenetics (2011); Rudolf A. Raff and Thomas C. Kauffman, Embryos, Genes, and Evolution (1983); Günter Wagner, Homology, Genes, and Evolutionary Innovations (2014). Great credit is also due to Stephen Jay Gould for the early contribution, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977).
References for human subject controversies include the Tuskegee syphilis studies and the Nuremberg Code. The primary current reference in the United States is the Belmont Report, published in 1978–1979 by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. Some provocative examples are found in Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2011); and John D. Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate” (1991).
Primary texts regarding technical rights for nonhumans include Tom Regan, A Case for Animal Rights (2004); and Richard Ryder, Victims of Science (1975) and Animal Revolution (1989). For summary and further debate with a strong grounding in biology, see James Rachels, Created from Animals (1999); and Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum, Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (2005). Matthew Scully, Dominion (2003), develops the issues of agency and justice for scientists, rather then seeking intrinsic qualities within the subjects.
1.Eric Olson, “The Developmental Renaissance in Adaptationism,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 27(5): 278–287, 2012, published by Elsevier Ltd.
2.Sherryl Vint’s points about anthropomorphism and theriomorphism in Animal Alterity (2013) are relevant here—we objectify nonhuman species’ features and status precisely as we do our own.
3.This construction of learning also applies to purely anatomical variables—in order for the limb bones of vertebrates to develop, they have to be utilized as the creature learns to walk. Genes don’t simply gift the creature with functional legs; instead, the process of learning to walk, the interaction of neurology, biomechanics, and gravity, helps to build the materials with which it’s done.
4.Cells’ mechanisms for recognition and signaling weren’t identified until the 1960s. Until then, developmental processes did seem almost supernaturally directed, and it’s no surprise that developmental mechanics had always been the sticking point concerning evolutionary processes. Once the cellular mechanisms had been exposed, however, both theory and experiments about development boomed.
5.With the term “recipe,” I am not referring to a single gene’s activity in protein synthesis, but rather to the activity of many genes at particular intensities and at different times, in the presence of specific raw materials and conditions, which results in a functioning physiological structure.
6.Phillip Karpowicz et al., “Developing Human-Nonhuman Chimeras in Human Stem Cell Research: Ethical Issues and Boundaries,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 55(2): 107–134, 2005, critiques the idea of human-nonhuman chimeras as an affront to human dignity at several levels. To my eyes, their reference to The Island of Doctor Moreau raises the interesting question of whether Moreau’s experiments would in fact “degrade human dignity” because no original human cells or tissue were employed.
7.It may clarify my point to explain my position regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964, based on scholarship which holds that the Act itself was not instrumental in securing better circumstances for black Americans, and that in the areas most associated with the Ku Klux Klan and other murderous and humiliating practices, more credit is due to the Deacons of Defense and other armed security and resistance groups, at the very least in combination with the peace marches, boycotts, and the Act. The argument is that legislation is not the single most valuable solution or end-goal, but is at most a useful part of a multipronged, even decentralized, set of efforts. Useful texts include Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense (2006) and Charles E. Cobb Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed (2014).