Hood, Bruce - Supersense

An essence is not to be confused with any unique property. For example, humans are the only mammals that have opposable thumbs. Thumbs may be unique to humans, but they are not essential. You would still be human if you were born without thumbs. Rather human essence is some invisible property that distinguishes us from non-humans. Like the pod-people in the sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers , alien replicants might be identical to us in every physical way, but they would lack the essential quality that makes us human. 15

As comforting a notion as human essence might be – that even though our bodies wither and decay there is some enduring stuff inside us – this philosophical position is a logical nonstarter. That’s because there is more than one way to define any object, including a human. The same individual human can simultaneously be a male, an adolescent, a prince, a neurotic, an artist, an athlete, an atheist, and so on. An object can be a stone, a paperweight, an ashtray, a weapon, a counterweight, or even a sculpture. And if there is more than one way to define an individual, you can’t have a unique essence of that individual. Aristotle was Plato’s student, but he realized that his teacher had been mistaken as far as essences were concerned. So the idea that there is only one true individual essence is nonsense.

When art critics and gallery owners talk about the essence of a piece of art, they are talking essential nonsense. However, just because something is nonsense doesn’t stop people believing in it. People can still hold a psychological essentialism. 16It helps us to think about uniqueness as a tangible property. This is my cup. This is my Picasso. This is my body. Psychological essentialism is the belief that some individual things, such as other people or works of art, are defined by a unique essence; as we will see in the coming chapters, such a belief would explain many of our attitudes when we think essences have been violated, manipulated, duplicated, exchanged, or generally mucked about with. Humans like to think that special things are unique by virtue of something deep and irreplaceable. When we chop nature up into all its different groups of living things, we are assuming that these are groups of things that are essentially different.

THE ESSENTIAL CHILD

Children’s essentialist thinking is amazing. 17Before they reach school age, they know that baby joeys raised by goats grow up into adult kangaroos, not adult goats. They know that apple seeds grown in flowerpots become apple trees, not flowers. 18They even know that a light-skinned baby switched at birth with a dark-skinned baby remains the original colour despite being raised by the new family. 19A leaf insect may look more like a leaf than an insect, but four-year-olds know it shares properties with other bugs, not with leaves. 20When they are slightly older, they understand that if an evil scientist takes a raccoon and performs an operation to turn it into a skunk by attaching a furry tail, painting a white line down its back, and putting a bag of foul-smelling stuff between its legs, it is still a raccoon even though it looks like Pepé Le Pew. 21Essential thinking allows children to understand that the leopard literally can’t change its spots. And no one needs to teach children this. It’s part of their intuitive biological understanding.

Children’s essentialism is truly surprising, as pre-schoolers can often be fooled by outward appearances. 22However, once they understand what can and can’t be changed by environment, they are committed essentialists who see core properties everywhere. They think that there is something inside that cannot be changed. They don’t know what it is, and they would be hard-pressed to describe it. When it comes to understanding living things, they really seem to grasp that there is something deep inside that makes animals and plants what they are. It’s a universal beliefs shared by different cultures, suggesting that essentialism is a natural way of viewing the world.

Although children and most adults can’t describe exactly what an essence is, they can tell you where it is, if only indirectly. In one study, children were told about an ancient block of ice that had different animals frozen in it. 23Scientists wanted to determine what the different animals were by doing tests on small samples taken from the things inside the block. Children were asked whether it made a difference where the sample was taken from. By ten years of age, children reasoned like adults that it did not matter where the sample was taken because whatever defines an animal is spread throughout the body. In contrast, four-year-olds, the youngest children in the study, insisted that the true identity of an animal is found in only one spot and not spread out. When questioned further, these children seemed to think that the correct spot to choose was from the centre of the body. What starts out as a very localized notion of essence in young children develops into a belief about something that spreads throughout the body, even though these children never mentioned scientific concepts such as DNA.

POLAR MICE AND FISHY POTATOES

Essential thinking is increasingly shaping our attitudes towards the modern world. For example, by the time the leaves on a potato plant start to wilt, the potatoes underground are already stunted in size as the plant tries to compensate for lack of water. What if the plant could tell you that it needs watering before the leaves begin to wilt? There is one such potato plant whose leaves start to glow fluorescent green when they require water. It can warn you in advance that it needs water before the underground potatoes shrivel. The plant can do this because a gene from a jellyfish has been inserted into its genetic makeup. It’s a genetically modified plant. When water levels reach the critical level, the gene in the plant’s physiology turns on the fluorescent response. A potato that can communicate its needs is truly remarkable – almost sociable. But would you eat such a fishy potato? 24

Or what about a supermouse that can survive freezing temperatures? The Alaskan flounder produces a protein that effectively produces an antifreeze in its blood to enable it to survive in subfreezing waters. Last year mice were bred with this gene that protected them from hypothermia. 25What’s more, the mice passed this gene on to their babies, demonstrating the potential to create new species of animals that cross the traditional taxonomic boundaries. In other words, these supermice were genetic freaks.

Those biological boundaries that we use to chop up the world are increasingly open to breech by new genetic engineering. There are real concerns about this technology, as it is not easy to predict exactly what unforeseen negative consequences may arise from artificially combining genetic material that would not normally occur in nature. In the remake of the sci-fi classic The Fly , the scientist Seth Brundle builds a machine that decomposes the body down into its constituent DNA particles and transports them from one pod to another where they are reassembled. 26By chance during one of his early experiments, a common housefly enters the pod with Seth. At first he notices nothing when he re-emerges from the other pod, but over the course of the movie Seth is gradually transformed into a human fly hybrid, with all the disgusting dining habits that flies exhibit (and you know what I think about flies). In most people’s minds, genetic engineering has brought us to the point where Seth Brundle’s predicament is no longer a fanciful tale of the dangers of tinkering with nature.

It’s not the fact that we can do genetic manipulation that is so worrying. After all, from the very beginnings of farming and animal rearing, we have been manipulating genes through selected breeding. All modern dogs are descendants of a fifteen-thousand-year-old programme of selective breeding of wolves. 27The problem is that gene insertion rapidly bypasses natural selection. There is no time to evaluate combinations that could be harmful. The potential for unforeseen consequences arising from unconstrained combinations worries the experts.