You cannot improve on nature

Sunday 9th October 

Growing up I was always in love with nature, not as some reflection of God’s creative powers I hasten to add, for we were quite irreligious in our household, but rather for the sheer beauty of it. I can remember nature rambles as a junior girl at St. Marys’ where the whole class would decamp, usually onto Barnes Common or sometimes to Richmond Park – and we would observe “Nature”, you know the flora and fauna along the riverbank, that sort of thing. I think the teacher was always more interested in cataloguing and counting different species rather than just watching in amazement as an iridescent blue dragonfly manages to stay exactly still hovering above the water, it’s wings a blur as they spin so fast, and wondering just how on earth they  do it. Or the reflections on the water itself, the duplication of the trees above, and the shadow of the fish gliding under the surface, and the water boatman’s legs splayed wide, carefully reading any fluctuations in the surface tension, and all of it totally oblivious of me, the observer. And the thrilling secret knowledge that all of this existed eons before we, mankind, ever stooped to observe it, and will continue long after we are gone.

And then we got the television and I started watching all those nature documentaries, with David Attenborough my own personal guide showing me how diverse and spectacular nature was.  As I started to learn about Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection it all started to fall into place; how we must have evolved from apes, and they from monkeys, and so on right back to those one-celled creatures in the soupy sea.  And I came to the conclusion that you simply cannot improve on nature, nature was perfection, the result of millions of years of evolving, of perfecting such mechanisms as eyesight or the sonar which whales and dolphins use, or the incredible complexity of the chemical reactions going on in each and every living thing.  I preferred to think of this as a series of chance improvements, each one building on earlier improvements, rather than any intelligent hand guiding it all, my rational mind rejecting any suggestion of “God’s plan” of the creationists.

And then along comes Genetic Engineering, the manipulation of DNA itself, to produce better yields or disease resistance in crops, and beyond that to grow drugs in living organisms, or to learn how to make human stem cells grow into new bits of ourselves.  The more you think of it, the more incredible it seems, but at the same time, the more possible.  And one part of me says, well, why not?  We have been selectively breeding dogs and horses for generations, and the cows and sheep we see romping in the fields are a far cry from those depicted by Artists only a couple of hundred years ago.  I can appreciate the arguments for bio-diversity, but that is maybe more a problem of the way farming has become so globalised and would be happening whether the crops being sown were changed scientifically or just by the older fashioned methods of selective hand pollination.  So the old idea that you cannot improve on nature is seriously being challenged, but is it; are not all of these merely modifications on earlier designs?  It will be a long time before we actually create a new form of life altogether, and I wonder if it will ever come close to the beauty of nature as we know it.