If we're not going to give the snake credit for evolving and using its rattle, we can hardly give the engineer much credit for evolving and using her brain.

And no matter what our engineer does, she is still a plaything in the hands of the fates, and the still larger hands of evolution. She's still just an experiment, a trial run.

Even though she stands at the doorway of being able to reengineer her own genes, and perhaps make an engineer twice as smart and longlived, she remains a pawn of evolution. It's the genes that will live on for thousands of generations, if successful -- not her.

I enjoyed your thought-provoking references here to God. The world is of course the way it really is, and a sound religion claiming a Creator of the world should have recognized in the real world the thought-prints of that Creator.

I find transcendence (an experience of the infinite) in science, art, and nature. (I'm a Spinoza Monist.) Religion seems to concretize experiences of transcendence into dogma about God and the world. Science embraces the transcendence of ever-greater transcendence.

Hey. I just work here. I mean, I'm just doing what my genes tell me to do. Soon, I will stop. But they're going places.

Thinking about your various metaphors (some implied, some explicit), I noticed the echo here. My genes are really just ideas about me, whereas I'm a concretized realization of those ideas (a unique and particular instantiation) that can't change any more than a religion can. I'm unimportant. The ideas about me in my genes, are transcendent. I sometimes feel we've got it backwards when we think they are about us. We are about them. We are certainly in service to them. We think our minds are disembodied and ride around in our bodies. Perhaps more accurately, our genes are disembodied and ride around in us.

/ehj2

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