Beyond Biotechnology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering by Craig Holdrege & Steve Talbott

Author:Craig Holdrege & Steve Talbott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky

Chapter 12

What Does It Mean to Be a Sloth?

One more defect and they could not have existed.

—George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

Hence we conceive of the individual animal as a small world, existing for its own sake, by its own means. Every creature is its own reason to be. All its parts have a direct effect on one another, a relationship to one another, thereby constantly renewing the circle of life; thus we are justified in considering every animal physiologically perfect.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We are losing animals. Not only numerically through the extinction of species, but we also are losing them in our understanding. Perhaps it might be better to say we've rarely taken animals as whole, integrated beings seriously, and therefore they have never really come into view for us. For that reason our scientific and technological culture can so casually manipulate what it does not know. The moment we get to know something more intimately, the less likely we are to treat it in a purely utilitarian fashion.

Imagine a biotechnologist wondering what causes the sloth to be slow and pondering whether the animal could be mined for “slothful” genes that might be put to therapeutic use in hyperactive children. Or another who wonders whether the sloth might be a good research model for testing the efficacy of genes from other organisms that enhance metabolic activity. As far as we know, no such research projects are in progress or being planned. But how easy it is to come up with ideas that hover in splendid isolation above any deeper concern with the animal itself! As human beings, we are intrigued and motivated by the seemingly boundless limits of doing the doable and do not feel limited by ignorance of what we're dealing with.

This chapter is an attempt to show how we can take steps to overcome some of that ignorance—of which we should nonetheless always be mindful—by beginning to grasp something of the organic lawfulness inherent in one animal, the sloth. With all its unique and unusual features, the sloth almost seemed to be prodding us to understand it in an integrated, holistic way. The poet and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose approach is described further in chapter 14, set the stage for a sound holistic approach to studying animals, and others have developed his method further.* Their work has influenced and inspired this study.

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