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Title: The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World by Jeremy Rifkin ISBN: 0-87477-953-7 Publisher: J. P. Tarcher Pub. Date: April, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.62 (21 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A must read for all Christians
Comment: I read this book cover-to-cover in one weekend, and I have rarely encountered a work that challenges the imagination and expands the boundaries of thought as thoroughly as this book. Rifkin's book falls somewhere between economics, biology, futurism, sociology, and theology - and it's a masterful blend.
Rifkin lays out the potential of the new genetic science (curing diseases, ending our dependence on environmentally-destructive technologies) and underlines the risks (genetic warfare, eugenics, genetic contamination of natural species). But I was the most impressed by his analysis of how the new science offers a new paradigm for understanding nature, humanity, and our place in the universe. I have read similar treatments from a number of scientists, but Rifkin's was by far the most accessible and compact. The new paradigm is a shift away from Darwinism, which holds that life evolved through a random process of natural selection, toward a view that life is the driving force of its own evolution, changing its shape through the way it interracts with the environment - the upswing of this is that life is an evolution of consciousness. Life evolves based on how it chooses to evolve. Our deliberate control of genetics is seen as an extension of life's evolution toward greater conscious control of its own destiny. (If I fail to adequately convey the substance of the new paradigm, my apologies.) The new view of evolution is in sync with "process theology" proposed by A. Whitehead and championed by figures like Salvador Dali, among others, and chaos theory. Rifkin doesn't use this term, but on the popular level, I think many people will immediately recognize this line of pantheistic thinking as "New Age." I couldn't help but be reminded of the "evolutionary messiah" motif of films like the Matrix, Dune, and Dark City.
According to Rifkin, societies always invent a cosmological understanding of how nature works that mirrors the way their society is organized. Darwinism came about from 19th-century Englishmen reading Capitalism - with its emphasis on competition and survival of the fittest - into nature. As a result, western society was able to assure itself that laissez-faire capitalism, despite its brutality, was the way the world was supposed to work, because it was exhibited in nature itself. In the process, Darwinism overthrew theism as the reigning ideology among society's elite and substituted atheism.
Now society is creating a new cosmology - a form of pantheism that makes humankind the ultimate manifestation and guiding agent of cosmic Mind. This cosmology mirrors the networked, nodal existence of our computerized world, where "survival of the fittest" has been replaced by the survival of those best able to acquire, adapt, and manipulate information.
Rifkin points out that if we are to challenge the indiscriminate use of genetic engineering, we must fight the new paradigm before it becomes taken for granted in society. Once people accept the assumption that nature is inherently mutable and re-shapes itself according to its will, then those who argue against genetic tampering will be viewed much the way Young Earth Creationists are viewed today. To most people's minds, genetic engineering will be right and natural - and to protest it will be ridiculous.
The unanswered question is this: how do we fight the new paradigm? If Darwinism was simply the result an English botanist reading Capitalism into nature, then what is the truth about how nature works? Rifkin doesn't offer any suggestions.
I personally think that the Intelligent Design movement led by Phillip Johnson, William Dembeski, and Michael Behe stands the best chance to proposing an alternative vision of how nature works - and restraining indiscriminate use of genetic engineering. Intelligent Design is a Christian ideology. It explains genetics as the result of a transcendent God who designed the nature of each living thing (with some potential for adaptive change). As such, the genetic differences between species are part of the Creator's design, and not something to be tampered with lightly. Darwinism will fall - and with it, the last fortress of Modernism. Freud and Marx have both fallen, kicking out two legs of the Modernist troika. Once Darwinism falls - and the sheer implausibility of natural selection and the incompatibility of natural selection with molecular biology assures us that it will - western society will plunge headlong into a postmodern era. The battle for the postmodern mind might easily be a battle between Intelligent Design and pantheistic process evolution. One theory holds that life is a creation of God - the other holds that life is evolving to become God.
(I think the growing influence of the new cosmology is behind the unfounded attacks on this author and this book, especially from the "post-human" disciples of utopian secular humanists like Julian Simon and Gregg Easterbook. Rifkin has come much too close to hitting the nail on the head.)
That's why the Biotech Century, although not an expressly Christian book, is required reading for all modern Christians.
Rating: 5
Summary: Raises Awareness
Comment: I agree that this book is not perfect, nor the author the most appropriate person to write it, but what's a hell! You can find errata in almost every book! At least he cares and has the courage to write this book.
Jeremy Rifkin is very well informed and what really matters here is that this book is an excellent source of information to raise awareness of what is going on in this field, about the irresponsible work that is been conducted by big corporations playing with genes and doing dangerous things that can affect the present and future life in our little world. Rifkin also outlines that everyone has to be responsible for his own actions.
I have read also his other book "Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture" (5 Stars)
Rating: 3
Summary: The Fire Flower
Comment: Rifkin does not attack the idea of creation as an anti-thesis to an divine creator. Instead proposes the genesis of life was a composition of diversity produced by genes. Rifkin says man first major break through was fire. Fire allowed elements to be separated and recombine. Fire empower man to move into the industrial century. The next century would be the biotech century. It all started with a major advancement in science put a Japanese company who gained the the spotlight after they discovered who to classify a gene, remove specific gene material, and reinsert the geneic material various DNA species. The effective extracting and recombination open the door of new life. Thus, man would be able to recombine the genes to create new forms of life blocked orignial by barriers of the species. The idea of the second genesis is to take the best genes properties and introduce them into high demand life forms. Rifkin points out that the biotech century emerged proportional to increasing computer computations. The commerical of living material was thoughtfully presented. Rifkin explains legally, we do not have ownership over cell matter taken from our body. Unique celluar resistence to specific diseases can be exploited, catalog, recombined, and marketed. The gene database will produce exponential increase in new drugs, products, foods, and material. Commerical companies use the gene information which does not necessarily benefit the original sources of the genetic material. So, the creator created all diversity of life. Life was suppose to act within a sphere of influence. It seems to enhance of modify those bounds of influence would be unwise. Just rationally, I fear the unknown and lack of control. Those spheres of influence limit the range of destructive capability nature can impose. Nature can not produce an elephant which can walk up a wall.
Suppose, a gene is introduced into a potatoe plant to kill aphids. The genetic property responses effectively and the number of aphids significantly drops. However, a drought reduces the water supply and the genetic deterence stops because the gene does remain active in drought conditions. The point, genetic engineer works well in a laboratory where all the variables are controlled and measured. It is conceivable Rifkin warnings are valid consider, we don't know all the properties of the gene and how they will act, in all conditions. The example, did not demonstrate harm, because the farmers could apply pesticide to kill the aphids and recovery some their crop.
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Title: The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where all of Life is a Paid-For Experience by Jeremy Rifkin ISBN: 1585420824 Publisher: J. P. Tarcher Pub. Date: 01 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the World-Wide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin ISBN: 1585421936 Publisher: J. P. Tarcher Pub. Date: 12 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era by Jeremy Rifkin, Robert L. Heilbroner ISBN: 0874778247 Publisher: J. P. Tarcher Pub. Date: April, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture by Jeremy Rifkin ISBN: 0452269520 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: March, 1993 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future by Gregory Stock ISBN: 061806026X Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 15 June, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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