There is an unusual place at 4913 Penn Avenue in Pittsburgh. The Center for Post-Natural History or Post-Nature History is a small museum with an eclectic and bizarre mixture of specimens: you will find a ribless mouse embryo, a sterile male worm, a specimen of E. coli x1776 (a harmless specimen unable to survive outside the laboratory) and a stuffed transgenic goat by named Freckles, genetically modified to produce spider silk proteins in milk.
Humanity has profoundly changed nature, but this may only be the beginning
The theme of the museum - post-nature - is the study of the origin, habitat and evolution of organisms that have been deliberately and hereditarily altered through genetic engineering, as well as the influence of human culture and biotechnology on evolution. The slogan of the museum: “It was so then. Now it is. Each visitor is shown that each species has a natural, evolutionary history as well as a post-natural, cultural one.
From the very appearance of man, his influence on the flora and fauna began. So if humanity flourishes in the distant future, how will nature change? How could these genetic manipulations change our own biology and evolutionary trajectory? Short answer: it will be weird, perhaps beautiful and unlike anything else.
It's funny that we still consider everything that has not been selectively bred or intentionally altered genetically, natural and "primordial". However, there is very little nature left that does not have human fingerprints. Since our ancient ancestors left Africa 50-70 thousand years ago, sweeping away all the megafauna in their path and radically changing the landscape, our species has been transforming and changing nature.
About 10,000 years ago, we began to selectively breed the organisms that seemed most desirable to us, thereby changing the genetic makeup of species. Today technology has only accelerated this practice. Bull sperm can be collected and inseminated by thousands of cows from one male - in nature this is impossible even for the most resolute horned Casanova. We breed bulls and dogs, we distribute these bred organisms around the world, creating a huge biomass that would not exist without us, and we breed elite species for physiological, aesthetic and agricultural benefits.
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Over the millennia, our influence on many taxonomic groups has been profound. Our food requirements mean that 70% of all living birds are chicken and other poultry, enough to create our own geological stratum. Meanwhile, according to paleobiologist Felisa Smith of the University of New Mexico, hunting, competition, and habitat destruction by humans have killed so much fauna that the average size of mammals has shrunk. Biodiversity and species have already suffered irreversible losses.
And yet, our influence on nature can only be at the very beginning. New genetic tools hold the promise of dramatically changing our ability to manipulate organisms. We are moving into the future, where the selection of positive features of the crop or animals from the natural population, rather laborious and time-consuming processes, will no longer be needed. With more precise genome editing techniques like CRISPR / Cas9, we can move gene sets between species, deliberately produce specific genes during natural growth, and even create completely artificial organisms. Bioengineering is a new form of transmission, creation and inheritance of genetic information.
This modification of organisms also extends to the irreversible extermination of certain species. Although people have fought against anopheles mosquitoes for hundreds of years, using chemical, mechanical and other methods, they remain one of the main natural enemies of mankind. Biotechnology has allowed the creation and release of clouds of sterile males that should reduce mosquito populations by mating with females in the wild, and now mosquitoes have been developed with "gene drives" that accelerate the transmission of the sterility mutation to the next generation.
In the face of rapid climate change, scientists and policymakers have begun to prioritize the “ecosystem services” needed by humans, such as pollination and replenishment of fish stocks, and have pondered how bioengineered organisms or mechanical agents can be released into the wild.
For example, as corals on the Great Barrier Reef are gradually dying, research is under way to release heat-resistant zooxanthellae, a photosynthetic symbiote of coral polyps, into the ocean. Walmart has patented mechanical pollinator drones, apparently hoping for future use. DARPA recently gave grants to develop genetically modified insects that carry viruses to edit plant genes, ostensibly to alter crops in the field, but the technology could be extended to entire ecosystems.
If we try to see the distant future, how will these technologies change our relationship with the rest of life on Earth? Before us are various trajectories, from logical to really strange.
Nature and man: the distant future
For starters, perhaps we will decide to reduce our manipulation of wildlife. After all, there are very predictable fears about what might go wrong: for example, unplanned genetic damage, where molecular scissors designed to cut and paste pieces of DNA create unpredictable effects or destabilize the recipient and its ecosystem.
On this potential trajectory of the future, humans can collectively decide to restore wildlife and create space for all non-human beings to exist on a well-functioning planet. They will realize that the biosphere (albeit greatly modified by humans) is still a relatively billion-year-old form of adaptive complexity.
This will probably be the most effective way to protect ecosystems and ensure human survival on planet Earth in the long term. We can restore wildlife across a large swath of the planet and focus food production in multi-story urban centers. Life will surely appreciate such a respectful step towards all forms of life. Ultimately, everything will evolve and develop without significant outside influence.
However, there is no certainty that such a trajectory of the future is highly probable. There will surely be a national and economic race to develop and deploy technologies that will continue to kill nature, not only because of the ever-growing need for defense, but also because human strength and curiosity, especially in manipulating the raw materials of life, are constantly expanding and growing. Meanwhile, we ourselves are becoming more and more separated from other organisms and ecosystems. In such a detached state, it is easier to imagine a radical change in the fabric of nature, which will fully support the interests of people.
The artists wondered what it would be like. Vincent Fournier, for example, envisioned chimeric organisms we could create, some to stimulate rainfall, others to fight pollution.
In Blade Runner, the writers portrayed a world with artificial humanoids and animals belonging to the corporations that created them. This dystopian future may be somewhat true, given that even today, engineering organisms - like the BioSteel goat we talked about in the beginning - are owned by someone with intellectual property rights. Perhaps entire ecosystem services - such as pollination - will be owned by individual corporations.
These bioengineering agents are likely to be more “suitable” than their predecessors and compete because they are deliberately designed to either satisfy human ambition (and be under our protection, in that case) or to survive in a human-changed world. Thus, modified organisms are likely to either replace nature as it is, or corporations could overtly or covertly eliminate relatively unreliable species and replace them with synthesized agents. This future is likely to be fragile and complicated, not to mention the fact that nature does not deserve such treatment.
Looking very far ahead, nature's biotechnological trajectory may even change our understanding of what it means to be human.
Man and Nature: Convergence or Divergence?
Over the past few decades, many have speculated about how we could merge with silicon technology. This technophilic transhumanist view suggests that we can eventually integrate with artificial intelligence in order to enhance human sensory or intellectual abilities, or upload ourselves to the digital world after death, achieving a kind of immortality.
But what if instead our path is to merge with nature? Perhaps the real benefit of artificial intelligence lies in reprogramming genes and organisms into "sympoiesis" - a mutually beneficial hybrid of man and nature.
The post-natural future may not please everyone. In Jeff Vandermeer's short story "Annihilation," which Netflix directed in a movie starring Natalie Portman (beautiful, by the way), a mysterious shimmering region appears over the US countryside that alters and fuses the DNA of organisms within its confines, including soldiers and scientists. sent for research. While the elements of the film and story are filled with concepts of embracing this fundamental fusion with other life forms, the destruction and proliferation of genetic material is often presented as horror, and the motivation for volunteers entering this area is self-destructive. A radical change in the genome is due to the fact that human integrity completely disappears, for which we are not yet ready, even if the results of this merger are undoubtedly excellent.
In the distant future, those who go for such a symbiosis could acquire useful additions like photosynthetic organisms under our skin, which will fit there like lichen, instead of transferring information about how to do it into their genome. Or we could include the genetic information of endangered species in our pedigree indefinitely, thus acting as a protector and guardian of nature.
All of these potential genetic changes can seem uncomfortable and strange these days. Philosophers, however, have proposed two approaches to communicating information that will cover these future trajectories. They will become more and more important in the post-natural age.
Dark ecology
Philosopher Timothy Morton of Rice University argues that we must face not only beauty, but also the dark strangeness of nature - an approach he calls "dark ecology." He opposes separating people from nature, exalting its beauty and thus alienating from it. Because of this, the ecosystem is in the process of constant change, and climate change is considered to be something like a "global perversion" that destroys and mutates nature. Dark ecology is an approach to exploring and embracing the beauty and horror of human manipulation of the natural world, similar to what Vandermeer showed in Annihilation.
Similarly, “process philosophy” assumes that there are no real boundaries between people and the environment, the concept of an individual does not exist, and everything around, including gene flows into the future and their routes, is in a constant state of flow. For example, the cells in our own bodies are the result of the symbiosis of two separate microbial lineages in the deep past - an important evolutionary transition discovered by evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis. Moreover, our genome is littered with genetic and extracellular residues of viruses and other parasites, and in the process of growing up we acquire a large number of cells in the body that belong to different (mainly bacterial) species than our own. Process philosophy indicates that we inevitably mix with everything and are in the process of constantly exchanging material and information.
In the distant future, when biotechnology matures and restrictions on gene transfer are removed, we will see a radical change in evolutionary processes in terms of process philosophy or dark ecology. A new form of transmission of genetic information will appear, similar to serious evolutionary transitions in the past.
Wildlife restoration, while unlikely, remains the safest and most righteous human path into the future. But assuming that biotechnology will continue to spread, it is not entirely clear how we will exist in the post-nature era. Much will depend on how we cope with climate change, but human manipulation with nature is not going anywhere. The future will definitely be strange.
