Beautiful
and Ugly Girls and Women
People say it would be terrible if we made all girls
pretty. I think it would be great.
James Watson, American Biologist, in NewScientist.com,
28/2/2003
James Watson, one of the two co-discovers of DNA, was a man
of strong convictions who did not fear being polemic. To him
to change our genome and change ourselves through genetic
engineering was entirely justifiable.
The important thing, to Watson, was human happiness. To
change our genome to turn ugly into beautiful women was just
a means of removing the suffering linked to ugliness.
To James Watson there wasn’t any sort of sanctity in the
genetic code responsible for the construction of the human
body and brain. This code was just a product of millions of
years of small events moulded by chance and the blind logic
of nature, involving tremendous suffering and the
disappearance of millions of species in the framework of the
struggle for survival and adaptation to the environment.
Something Darwin has described in well known sharp terms:
«What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy,
wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of
nature».
Hence James Watson’s position: it’s totally legitimate to
alter our genetic code, even if the case was turning ugly
into beautiful women.
But this is not the perspective of conservative and namely
religious circles. To them, the human genome is impregnated
with sanctity. Our genome is the result of God’s superior
intentions, and shouldn’t be altered. To open the door to
such modifications is to alter human nature and a step to
making us hybrid beings.
Both positions are pertinent. Our concordance or discordance
depends on what we love most. If we love, as the
conservatives, the idea of a mankind created in the image of
God, a somehow superior nature, determined by mysterious and
divine forces, then we would abominate James Watson’s ideas
about pretty and ugly girls. Otherwise, if we love the idea
of secular happiness, progress and science, and if we don’t
place our nature at any special top level, we would agree
with Watson. It’s those nuclear loves that turn the making
of the pretty girls proposed by Watson into a good or
horrible thing.
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