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By Root 1311 0

arguments, it helps to look back once again at E. coli. Thirty years ago, engineering E. coli was considered an affront to nature, even to God. It defied billions of years of evolution by sporting a gene from a human. Now no one seems to care about it. E. coli sits neglected in its fermenting tanks and laboratory flasks, loaded with imported genes from hundreds of other species, including our own. E. coli starves and suffers as it churns out alien proteins. And yet it no longer offends the wisdom of our repugnance. There are no campaigns to respect the integrity of E. coli as a species, to fight the degradation of human nature that comes from putting human genes into bacteria. It’s hard to imagine someone turning down a prescription for blood thinner because it is the product of the unholy union of human and microbe.

How can our fear of crossing species boundaries be so strong and yet so mutable? It does not arise from an objective perception of some deep, incontrovertible fact of life. It is a habit of mind. We are all intuitive biologists from childhood. Babies quickly come to expect differences between living things and nonliving ones. Rocks tumble under the force of gravity, for example, but an ant crawls by its own agency. As children grow, they come to recognize different kinds of living things—animals and plants, for example, or cats and dogs. Each kind has its own essence, an invisible force that produces its actions. This intuitive biology comes easily to children, without elaborate training. And it becomes the habitual way in which adults think about life.

Intuitive biology may have evolved as an adaptation of the human mind, like language and color vision. It may have helped our ancestors organize their understanding of the natural world. The more knowledge our ancestors could gain about animals and plants, the more likely they were to find food and survive. They could predict where to find wildebeests at a certain time of the year, when to look for tubers in the ground, which kinds of fruit were poisonous and which were sweet. Our ancestors became keen connoisseurs of subtle differences between species, such as colors and coat patterns. Those differences could mean the difference between life and death, between eating a poisonous berry and escaping starvation.

The notion of the integrity of species emerges from our intuitive biology. Even to dream of breaking the species barrier can stir up strong emotions. It’s striking that some of the earliest artwork made by our species includes chimeras. Some 30,000 years ago, for example, a sculptor in Germany carved a piece of ivory into the form of a lion-headed woman. The image, perhaps seen in a dream or a trance, must have had a profound mystical meaning to the sculptor and to all who looked at it. It blurred the essences of species. By violating the rules of intuitive biology, it became magical. Magical hybrids—including the original Chimera, a monster from Greek mythology, part goat, part lion, part snake—turn up again and again throughout history.

Now modern biology has challenged our intuitive biology. Species are no longer immutable essences but the products of evolution. Darwin argued that humans descended from apes, which descended from older mammals, all the way back to blind, jawless fish. For breaking the rules of intuitive biology, Darwin was punished by being turned into a chimera. Cartoonists drew him with the bearded head of a man and the hairy body of a monkey.

In 1896, H. G. Wells played on this anxiety with his novel The Island of Dr. Moreau. Dr. Moreau, his sense of morality lost in the lust for scientific knowledge, surgically combines different animals into humanlike monsters.

“The thing is an abomination,” the narrator declares to Moreau. The evil doctor replies, “To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter…. The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.”

Wells punishes Moreau for his transgression with an uprising of the monsters. The Island of Dr. Moreau is a prophetic book, especially given that