The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution

摘要

The dust jacket of this book shows a pair of adult identical twins curled up together in a ball, representing the single ovum from which they both developed. According to Pierre Baldi, professor of information and computer science and of biological chemistry at the University of California (Irvine), this image delivers a minor shock to our traditional conception of the individual self. But, Baldi argues, if the natural phenomenon of two individuals sharing the same genome challenges our notion of selfhood, then the possibilities opened up by genetic manipulation, human cloning, and computer technology will leave it shattered. The information corresponding to an individual human's genome can already be easily stored on a computer hard drive, and within the next 25 years Baldi expects the capacity of an ordinary personal computer to be sufficient to store the information content of a lifetime's human experience. If we are the product of two components, our genome and our personal history, and if these components are both reducible to "bits" of information, then the capacity to store and manipulate all the information corresponding to these components would amount to an ability to experiment with unlimited variations of our actual self. Combine this with technology that would allow us to clone individuals using genomes compiled on a computer, and we can see why Baldi envisages that the small amount of "information space" that has so far been haphazardly explored by natural evolution could be eclipsed by a systematic artificial exploration of life's possibilities.