Crossing Perspectival Chasms about Species

People often react with incredulity, annoyance, or even disdain to the suggestion that there might be something wrong (not just mistaken) with crossing species boundaries. And, as Chakrabarty observes (2003), "people often react with horror, disgust, or simply indifference" when asked about the advisability of chimera creation. Projects are conceived with good intentions: promoting biotechnological progress, whether for increased crop yields or new therapies for currently incurable diseases. Because some attempts have not yielded the positive results desired [Rollin suggests the Beltsville Pig (2003)], the question arises: "but if we could create this combination entity and improve a dread condition with no ill effects, how could that be wrong?" Granting the assumption that an act will have only good effects makes it difficult to find reasons for reticence, but there is no more reason to grant that optimistic assumption than its pessimistic complement. Both are hypotheses.

In a thought-provoking article Jason Scott Robert and Françoise Baylis (2003) suggest that the definitional complexity of species partially accounts for the opinion that species ought not to be regarded as uncrossable boundaries (related to the first type of response noted above). They note that concerns raised in opposition to chimera creation—concerns that appear to stem from species boundaries—might in fact be about something else. Robert and Baylis also offer an interesting discussion of the persistence of the idea of species boundaries (related to the second type of response noted above) and suggest quite plausibly that this persistence might have a socially stabilizing effect.

The multiplicity of definitions of species, each of which is illuminating in some ways and inadequate in others, is itself an important phenomenon. It might not completely explain the reticent response to the possibility of crossing species boundaries, although definitional complexity is surely part of the explanation. Robert and Baylis suggest a possible reason why some react with disdain to this notion: the focus on humanity. The mixing of human and nonhuman animals is a special focus of attention for Robert and Baylis, as it is for many [although, as Thompson (2003) notes, some do strongly object to transgenic plants and animals]. A human chimera raises questions of what we take humanity to be, how and why we might choose to change it, and how to do so in ways that will ensure good, and avoid bad, effects. It is not even clear that we have settled on what effects would count as "good" or "bad" or whether it would always be possible to decide. Robert and Baylis summarize several explanations for disquiet, including playing God and visceral repugnance. Perhaps an additional reason is that we have in our society some fundamentally different views as to whether human nature is perfectible by human design. If so, then this difference might be described as a contrast between a view of the human condition as tragic (not entirely sad but including aspects of inevitability calling from conscious beings stoicism or faith) and an engineering view (not all triumphalist but interpreting the human condition as a set of problems amenable to solutions that human beings are capable of devising). Certainly an individual holding the first view need not be fatalistic; he or she might believe that a great many human ills are solvable problems. However, the conviction that some ills have no solution could lead to diametrically opposite positions in cases that touch on basic aspects of what we recognize as making us human. The contrasting view of human ills as intelligible, humanly-solvable problems would make the refusal to try a proposed solution almost intolerably frustrating.

I wonder if there might be another alternative. I suggest this, in part, because I share Charland's (2003) concern about methodology. First, the caveats: the theoretical result and supporting observations that recognizable species are nevertheless mutable is a good starting point. Mutable on what scale? Some species have changed quite rapidly; for example, laboratory-isolated populations. The species of...