{"id":10062,"date":"2004-01-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-01-01T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/a-more-child-like-science"},"modified":"2020-09-26T00:29:55","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T04:29:55","slug":"a-more-child-like-science","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/a-more-child-like-science","title":{"rendered":"A More Child-Like Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

W<\/span>hy do leaves turn red? Where does the sun go at night? What made Whiskers die? Will Mommy die sometime, too?<\/p>\n

Children are notorious for posing na\u00efve and perplexing questions. When one of our sons was four years old, he asked, \u201cWhy did God make poisonous snakes?\u201d I do not recall our answer, but very much doubt that it was helpful. And who among us can do justice to the most perplexing question of all \u2014 the one incarnated<\/em> in every newborn child: \u201cWho are you, and for what purpose have you entered our lives?\u201d<\/p>\n

The child\u2019s large and difficult questions arise not from complex theoretical constructions but from simplicity \u2014 \u201cchildish simplicity\u201d we are tempted to say, with a slightly patronizing smile. We need, after all, to defend serious discourse against fruitless inquiries about God and the moral significance of poisonous snakes. This is why our more child-like questions have, over the past few hundred years, disappeared from science. They are anachronisms, echoing hollowly off the instrument panels and surgically precise tools of the laboratory. Their implications would be only an embarrassing distraction, oddly disjoined from the prevailing paths of technical investigation. \u201cChild, for what purpose have you come?\u201d Imagine a genetic engineer or an evolutionary theorist asking such a question!<\/p>\n

Yet a strange thing is happening. Questions rather like the child\u2019s impossible ones are now being forced upon us from the side of science. The biotechnologist, faced not with poisonous snakes but with \u201cdefective\u201d children, is led to ask: \u201cWhere do these defects come from? Can we unmake them?\u201d And further, regarding the child\u2019s destiny: \u201cWhy do we age and die? Must we submit passively to human limitation?\u201d<\/p>\n

I say \u201crather like\u201d the child\u2019s questions. For the child is always inquiring about meaning and purpose. His<\/em> question about why we age and die is morally, teleologically, and aesthetically tinged. The scientist, by contrast, is asking about the mechanisms that \u201cimplement\u201d aging and death, and wondering to what effect we might manipulate them.<\/p>\n

Such, at least, is the usual distinction, not only between child and scientist, but also between the scientific dialogue and the larger human conversation. But the distinction is muddied when scientists tell us that they are gaining the knowledge to engineer better<\/em> children. How can you recognize a better child, after all, if you must shun the language of value? And how can we, as scientists or parents, propose to manipulate an individual child\u2019s destiny if we cannot ask serious questions about the child\u2019s identity and purpose?<\/p>\n

If the scientist is to join in this larger conversation, then nothing less than a second scientific revolution will have occurred. Science will have been reopened to the categories of meaning and value. The genetic engineer and the evolutionary theorist will learn to ask: \u201cChild, for what purpose have you come \u2014 and how can we make things better for you?\u201d<\/p>\n

Without such a revolution there will be no true societal conversation. Rather, we will hear two different and dissonant styles of speaking and they will spawn endless confusions between them. Using one style we will converse with<\/em> the child, and therefore at least partly in the child\u2019s terms. With the other we will converse about<\/em> the child, concerning ourselves with the manipulation of genetic, hormonal, neural, and other mechanisms as if we were engaged in little more than an engineering project.<\/p>\n

T<\/span>he President\u2019s Council on Bioethics, with its discussion of \u201cbetter children,\u201d has stepped boldly into the no-man\u2019s land between these two ways of speaking. Perhaps wisely, Beyond Therapy<\/em> has not asked for a revolution in science. Instead it has tried only to delimit the engineering project and to establish the propriety of discussing the ends and purposes of human life.<\/p>\n

The Council begins with the most fundamental question of all: \u201cWhat, exactly, is a good or a better child?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

Is it a child who is more able and talented? If so, able in what and talented how? Is it a child with better character? If so, having which traits or virtues? More obedient or more independent? More sensitive or more enduring? More daring or more measured? Better behaved or more assertive? Is it a child with the right attitude and disposition toward the world? If so, should he or she tend more toward reverence or skepticism, high-mindedness or toleration, the love of justice or the love of mercy? As these questions make clear, human goods and good humans come in many forms, and the various goods and virtues are often in tension with one another. Should we therefore aim at balanced and \u201cwell-rounded\u201d children, or should we aim also or instead at genuine excellence in some one or a few dimensions?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Against the backdrop of these unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions, the Council considers various genetic and pharmacological technologies that promise to give us \u201cbetter\u201d children. The first set of technologies aims at shaping, choosing, or improving a child\u2019s native endowments. Prenatal diagnosis permits us to \u201cweed out\u201d fetuses with undesirable genetic traits. Preimplantation genetic screening allows us to select in vitro embryos with desired genetic traits. Genetic engineering would allow us to produce certain genetic traits by deliberate design.<\/p>\n

For now, prenatal diagnosis and preimplantation screening present only restricted possibilities for \u201cimproved\u201d children. These methods are limited by the genetic resources of the parents, neither of whom may have the desired trait. Further, most traits require the interplay of many genes, so even if the parents had the right genes, it would be nearly impossible \u2014 short of producing and screening thousands of embryos \u2014 to find one with the right genetic combination. And even if our scientific understanding enabled us to identify trait-specific gene combinations, our powers of control would still be limited. As the Council points out, \u201csince most traits of interest to parents seeking better children are heavily influenced by the environment, even successful genetic screening and embryo selection might not, in many cases, produce the desired result.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for genetic engineering \u2014 the direct insertion of desired genes into an embryo \u2014 the difficulties are even more imposing. Not only is there the challenge of working with genes that interact in still largely unknown ways, but there is also the problem of inserting these genes into the embryo without damaging it or causing unintended \u201cside effects.\u201d The history of genetic engineering in non-human species has been one long crescendo of discovery about such unintended consequences.<\/p>\n

The root of the problem is that the side effects are not really side effects. They are a meaningful activity of the organism. As my colleague Craig Holdrege has shown in Genetics and the Manipulation of Life<\/strong><\/a><\/em>, the organism deals with a genetic or biochemical intrusion much as it deals with a disturbance of its external environment \u2014 by responding as an integral whole. This is true even in the plant. For example, when researchers inserted carotene-producing genes in tomato plants, the plants did produce more carotene. But the substance appeared in plant parts that normally don\u2019t have carotene (seed coats and cotyledons) \u2014 and the more the carotene, the smaller the plant became. Similarly, when herbicide resistance was genetically engineered into a mustard species (Arabidopsis<\/em>), the generally self-pollinating plants started cross-pollinating at twenty times the normal rate. Such \u201cside effects,\u201d whether obvious or subtle, turn out to be more the rule than the exception.<\/p>\n

The reason is simply that the organism adapts to a disturbance with its entire being and according to its own distinctive manner of existence. Manipulating the parts forces a question that can be answered only by the governing whole: \u201cWho are you? What sort of a unity are you trying to express?\u201d Even when our<\/em> aim is nothing more than effective, machine-like control, we cannot prevent the organism<\/em> from responding in a meaningful and conversational manner. And if this is the case with a plant, it is certainly also the case with a child.<\/p>\n

Given the difficulties and limitations involved in the various genetic technologies, the Council believes that \u201cprophecies and predictions of a \u2018new (positive) eugenics\u2019 seem greatly exaggerated.\u201d But this does not relieve it of concern about the changes now afoot. Even prenatal screening for disease, already a common practice, may be \u201cshifting parental and societal attitudes toward prospective children: from simple acceptance to judgment and control, from seeing a child as an unconditionally welcome gift to seeing him as a conditionally acceptable product.\u201d<\/p>\n

I<\/span>n the second part of the chapter on \u201cbetter children,\u201d the Council explores new pharmacological ways of altering children\u2019s behavior. It endorses the therapeutic use of behavior-modifying drugs in difficult cases, while questioning the casual reliance on drugs as a general strategy for obtaining well-balanced children. It notes that \u201cmost children whose behavior is restless and unruly could (and eventually do) learn to behave better, through instruction and example, and by maturing over time.\u201d Drugs short-circuit this learning process by acting directly on the body. As a result, the \u201cbeneficiaries of drug-induced good conduct may not really be learning self-control; they may be learning to think it is not necessary.\u201d The child may come to \u201clook upon himself as governed largely by chemical impulses and not by moral decisions grounded in some sense of what is right and appropriate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Making the distinction between behavior control and moral education is an important step. It helps to clarify the divide between the language of science and the language of life. But it should not lead us to imagine that we have harmonized the two styles of speaking. The dilemma remains: How do we bring the researcher\u2019s language of fact and control into dialogue with the parent\u2019s language of ethics and purpose? Wouldn\u2019t this be like bringing the sober, sophisticated world of the mature scientist into meaningful relationship with the na\u00efve, morally infused world of the child?<\/p>\n

The idea of any such convergence may seem outrageous. And yet, when the scientist offers the parent a menu of options for obtaining \u201cbetter children,\u201d it is he himself who puts the questions of meaning, value, and purpose on the table. When the going gets tough, he cannot fairly retreat into the \u201csilence of objectivity.\u201d He cannot reasonably say: \u201cI offer you better children, but do not ask me what \u2018better\u2019 means or who the child is.\u201d This passive-aggressive refusal to engage the issue is least acceptable when coming from the person who forced the issue in the first place.<\/p>\n

But scientists do have apparent reason for their reluctance to \u201ccome out of the closet\u201d with their values. It has long been part of their discipline to refuse as best they can all explicit dealings with questions of value, and the practical benefits of this austere objectivity appear to have been spectacular. Viewed in this light, the latter-day quandaries of biotechnology look suspiciously like a trap, baited with all those metaphysical and discipline-sapping enticements that scientists have taken such great pains to flee. How, then, can we possibly ask the scientist, as a scientist, to participate in discussions about the moral education of the child or the moral implications of a genetic alteration? Don\u2019t we leave those topics for the ethicist?<\/p>\n

More and more we do, which helps to explain the disjointed nature of the two conversations. The disjunction has long been canonized in the philosophical proverb: \u201cYou cannot get from facts to values.\u201d There is no way to get from statements about what is<\/em> to statements about what ought to be<\/em>. \u201cIs\u201d and \u201cought\u201d seem to come from different, incommensurable worlds. It hardly needs adding that the scientist is passionately committed to the factual and objective \u2014 to the is<\/em>-ness of things.<\/p>\n

Look at the world through more child-like eyes, however, and the situation is wondrously transformed. The question becomes not how do we get from an \u201cis\u201d to an \u201cought,\u201d but the reverse: How do we manage to narrow our value-laden world to a mere statement of fact? For we do<\/em> start with terms like \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cevil,\u201d \u201cugly\u201d and \u201cbeautiful,\u201d \u201cmeaningful\u201d and \u201cpurposeful.\u201d Historically, a narrowing down is exactly what happened. By all accounts the ancients experienced themselves as living within an ensouled world \u2014 one thoroughly drenched in perceptions of goodness and value. Even the physis<\/em> or \u201celementary substance\u201d of the early Greek philosophers was, as Francis Cornford remarked, not only a material thing but at the same time a \u201csoul-substance.\u201d Further, \u201cthe properties of immutability and impenetrability ascribed [by some Greek philosophers] to atoms are the last degenerate forms of divine attributes.\u201d<\/p>\n

What is true historically is true also of the individual biography. The child, too, lives in an ensouled world. His incessant questions of meaning and purpose (\u201cWhy…?\u201d) testify to an inborn conviction that the underlying reality of the world is psychic and voluntary, bearing an obligation to sustain good and reasonable appearances. Only with maturation does the child slowly gain a world of fact \u2014 an is-world to set beside his birthright-world of congenial value.<\/p>\n

But this birthright is never truly relinquished. Look at the mature human being \u2014 in the life of family and community, work and recreation, friendship and enmity, politics and education \u2014 and you will be hard pressed to find a single act, word, or gesture that is not suffused with value and purpose. This is true even of the scientist in his laboratory, who, if he could really drain all his actions of their valuative content \u2014 say, by treating his colleagues like objects or treating his sophisticated instruments like junk \u2014 would be dismissed as a psychopath.<\/p>\n

We do not find a realm of psychically disinfected fact within the human sphere \u2014 except in the intellectual constructions of modern science and its philosophy. These constructions take place according to certain restrictive rules, and the historical acceptance of the restrictions was a matter of choice. Moreover, the choices amounted to a decision, conscious or otherwise, to exclude from consideration everything meaningful and psyche-laden \u2014 everything that did not serve the insistent drive toward a world of mere fact. Only by reconsidering these choices can we see the loss of vision entailed by modern science, and perhaps how science remains parasitic upon the less denatured reality from which it arose.<\/p>\n

The child who asks about the red leaves of autumn is asking about red, not the wavelengths and frequencies of a physics text. He lives within a vivid world of sense qualities. This is why the Dutch psychologist, Jan Hendrik van den Berg, conceives the following exchange:<\/p>\n\n\n

\u201cWhy are the leaves red, Dad?\u201d \u201cBecause it is so beautiful, child. Don\u2019t you see how beautiful it is, all these autumn colors?\u201d There is no truer answer. That is<\/em> how the leaves are red.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Of course, this is not the final or complete answer. As the child gets older, the answer could be enriched, not diminished, by understanding the interworkings and so called \u201cmechanisms\u201d of a natural world that remains qualitative through and through. But a fateful choice intervened to alter any such understanding.<\/p>\n

B<\/span>eginning with Galileo, there was a conscious disregard of qualities<\/em> within science \u2014 and this for the simple reason that qualities, as every child knows, are inescapably freighted with psyche. We experience qualities \u201cin here\u201d \u2014 within consciousness. But what is insufficiently realized is that we also experience qualities \u201cout there,\u201d in the only external world we have. We cannot characterize a world \u2014 any sort of world \u2014 without qualities. Subtract all qualitative content from your thoughts about things and there will be no things left. Try to imagine a tree without color or visible form, without sound in a breeze, without the smell of sap and leaf, without felt solidity, and the tree will have ceased betraying any sign of its existence. If you are inclined to redeem the situation with talk of molecules or subatomic particles, try to characterize those<\/em> without appealing to qualities.<\/p>\n

It is fine to say, \u201cWe get from the qualitative world to the realities of hard science by dealing only with what can be quantified.\u201d But the phrase \u201cwhat can be quantified\u201d is puzzling, since it has no meaning if we cannot say anything significant about the \u201cwhat\u201d we are quantifying. Given a set of quantities, we have to know what they are quantities of<\/em> if we are to know anything at all about the actually existent world. And how do we characterize a \u201cwhat\u201d without qualities?<\/p>\n

Of course, scientists do in fact rely on their awareness of qualities. Otherwise, the world would have completely disappeared and they would have nothing to explain. It\u2019s just that the discipline of science does not explicitly recognize the sense world in its own terms \u2014 the qualitative terms that a truly observation-based science needs to address in order to remain grounded in empirical reality.<\/p>\n

A second historical choice, less conscious in its origins, was to proceed by a certain method of analysis<\/em>, assigning ultimate explanatory significance to the furthest products of the analysis. The problem here is that one never stops to consider a thing in its own terms. The fiery tree of autumn resolves into root, branch, and leaf, the leaf into cells, the cells into organelles, the organelles into biochemicals…and so on without end, down to the most remote subatomic entities. \u201cWithout end\u201d because there could be no satisfactory end. If understanding must be given in terms of analysis, and if the analysis were ever to stop at some fundamental, unanalyzable thing, then that thing (upon which all else is erected) must, according to our method, stand as an incomprehensible mystery, no more approachable than divine fiat.<\/p>\n

Analysis is an essential direction of movement in all scientific cognition. But if it is not counterbalanced by an opposite movement, then we can never say anything about what is there<\/em> \u2014 what is presenting itself as this particular thing of this particular sort. We can speak only of the elements it consists of. But this hardly helps, since we can say nothing about these elements in their own right, but must refer instead to what they consist of. We have no place to stop and say, \u201cBehold this<\/em>.\u201d By itself alone, the method is a way of never having to face anything. No wonder, then, that neither the evolutionary theorist nor geneticist ever sees in the organism a creature of which we might stop and ask, \u201cWho are you?\u201d<\/p>\n

A one-sided method of analysis, in other words, brings us to a kind of emptiness. And again, we must say: science is not really so empty. The scientist is always recognizing the insistent presence of things in the world \u2014 significant wholes \u2014 even if the nature of this recognition receives no formal or systematic acknowledgment alongside the analytic cleaving of wholes into parts. After all, you are not likely to set about analyzing a thing if you have not first glimpsed it, at least intuitively, as a significant entity in itself. But your preferred method of analysis does not encourage you to attend to this whole in its own terms. If it did, you might find yourself caught up in something more like a conversation and less like the manipulation of mere parts.<\/p>\n

These historical choices \u2014 to reject qualities and to proceed by a one-sided method of analysis \u2014 confront scientists with a problem that looms so threateningly near and so incomprehensibly large that ignoring it is almost the only option. If, however, we could get up the courage to face the problem squarely, it might suggest to us that we can never shrink the child\u2019s rich cognitive inheritance all the way down to an is-world of mere fact. We can approach this end-point only in modern physics, and we achieve the approach only by depriving our theoretical constructions of their content. The reassuring certainties we enjoy in these constructions are the formal certainties of mathematics. But they alone cannot give us a world or help us make sense of the world we now have. Some of the greatest physicists, in their more child-like, soul-searching moments, have admitted as much. As Einstein once remarked:<\/p>\n\n\n

As far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Likewise Sir Arthur Eddington wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n

[Our knowledge of physics] is only an empty shell \u2014 a form of symbols. It is knowledge of structural form, and not knowledge of content. All through the physical world runs that unknown content, which must surely be the stuff of our consciousness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

And Richard Feynman confessed: \u201cwe have no knowledge of what energy is<\/em>\u201d \u2014 and this same cognitive darkness overshadows the other key terms of our physics, such as mass<\/em>, force<\/em>, motion<\/em>, time<\/em>, and space<\/em>.<\/p>\n

You may think it strange to arrive at puzzles of physics in a discussion of biotechnology and its application to children. How have we gotten so far afield? But in an analytic era, with its inevitable fragmentation and intense specialization, recovering a single, unified language for approaching the child means realizing that far afield is not really far afield. The most fateful, scientifically developed \u201cdrug\u201d we administer to the child may not be some highly specialized biomolecule bathing his neurons; it may be the scientific worldview saturating his consciousness. One way or another, we conduct a gravely significant conversation with every child. If our language remains that of fact and control, then the language itself will dehumanize the child as much as the biochemical and genetic ministrations that are such natural consequences of the language.<\/p>\n

I<\/span>n Beyond Therapy<\/em>, the President\u2019s Council on Bioethics has shown how revealing a second, value-centered language can be. But the decisive question remains whether we can bring the two ways of speaking together in a harmony of meaning: Can we, for example, learn to approach the human genome in the spirit of the child\u2019s soul-piercing \u201cWhy?\u201d or the parent\u2019s quizzical \u201cWho are you?\u201d Might it be that real breakthroughs in genetics \u2014 breakthroughs of understanding rather than of technique \u2014 await our ability to look at the organism qualitatively, in its own meaningful terms? And if we do so, will we not find the whole speaking through every part, so that the child\u2019s genome can, when approached in the right spirit, be discovered as part of the child\u2019s \u2014 this<\/em> child\u2019s \u2014 revelation of himself? Is not our receptivity to this revelation the prerequisite for entering into a conversation with the child about his \u201cbetterment\u201d?<\/p>\n

These questions, like those of the child, may seem hopelessly large and impossible, ill-fitted to the science we are comfortable with. But perhaps what makes them discomfiting is our long habit of turning away from them, and our attempt (always unsuccessful) to escape the meaningful and living language adequate for framing them.<\/p>\n

If we could transform our dealings with the child into a genuinely two-way conversation, it might prove healing, not only for the child, but for us adults and our science as well. Then the most important thing might not be our perhaps impertinent question: \u201cHow can we make you better?\u201d Rather, it might be how the child\u2019s innocent simplicity can counterbalance our sophisticated but one-sided adult constructions. If the child does bring a task, part of it may be to help us<\/em> become a little more child-like in facing a value-soaked world \u2014 fearless in addressing the world with impossibly large questions, and fearless as well in listening for impossibly large answers.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why do leaves turn red? Where does the sun go at night? What made Whiskers die? Will Mommy die sometime, too? Children are notorious for posing na\u00efve and perplexing questions. When one of our sons was four years old, he asked, \u201cWhy did God make poisonous snakes?\u201d I do not recall our answer, but very much doubt that it was helpful. And who among us can do justice to the most perplexing question of all \u2014 the one incarnated in every newborn child: \u201cWho are you, and for what purpose have you entered our lives?\u201d The child\u2019s large and difficult…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","article_type":[13],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[5006,2292,5010,2279,5045],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10062"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10062\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=10062"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=10062"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=10062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}