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Mosquitoes are annoying. What is more, they carry, and infect humans with, infectious diseases — dengue, malaria, Zika and the like. Humans would be infinitely better off if all the mosquitoes were wiped out. We’ve agreed on that, and have been trying to accomplish that, for a hundred years or more. Now, at last, high technology has arrived to save us from this evil.
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the Garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it.
A commercial company in Brazil (no doubt awash in grant money and dizzy with prospects for future profits) genetically altered a strain of mosquitoes with a gene they said would kill the mosquito’s offspring immediately after hatching. Released into the wild to breed with the pesky, disease-laden mosquitoes — you know,. the evil ones — the genetically mutilated insects would cause the mosquito population to plummet, and cases of Zika and dengue to virtually disappear. What could possibly go wrong?
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
For over two years, the company released 450,000 of the good mosquitoes every week into the environs of the city of Jacobina, in Brazil. For a time, everything went according to the godlike plan, and the estimated population of evil mosquitoes in Jacobina declined sharply.
Then things stopped going according to the human plan. After 18 months, the mosquito population came roaring back, and now included a vigorous hybrid strain that did not die in infancy, as was planned, and that was apparently immune to the blandishments of the “good” mosquitoes, had increased resistance to more traditional means of mosquito control than the evil mosquitoes, and is now on its way to outnumbering them all.
And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.
So humans were ejected — or more accurately, ejected themselves — from the permaculture forest garden in which they arose, and took unto themselves the knowledge of good and evil — what should live because it’s useful, what should be wiped out because it’s annoying. They took on the power of gods, without having the ability of gods, and they put their hands on the tree of life itself, and for ten thousand years, since the advent of agriculture and the story of the Fall, they have been screwing it up.
Humans who know what they want have inflicted on the world industrial agriculture, the oil industry, the car culture, smog, tainted water, and a planet that is simultaneously, increasingly, on fire and under water. Undeterred by endless failures, the engineers of life everlasting are reaching now for the unbelievably complex genetic source codes of life itself and saying, “Hold my beer, I got this.”
The accidental creation of the plague of teenage mutant ninja mosquitoes in Brazil is just the latest example of unjustified scientific hubris. One of the mosquito engineers, Jeffrey Powell of Yale University, after the whole thing blew up in their faces, made one of the classic understatements of all time: “It is the unanticipated outcome that is concerning.”
We are experiencing a new kind of Fall — in which we are not ejected from the garden, we destroy it, and we get to stay. The people who get through this one are not going to be the genetic engineers and the artificial-intelligence geeks. They are going to be the ones who right now are practicing permaculture and growing food forests and rediscovering what it was to live in Eden.
“mosquito-1550” by Wanderin’ Weeta is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
When will we learn?
We won’t learn, is the answer.
I can’t wait to see what we come up with next.
Life is connected on a deep, genetic, molecular level that we can only glimpse. It’ll go on without us.
You hit the nail on the head, Tom. The second and third chapters of Genesis present the human dilemma in the starkest of terms. No anthropologist, historian or psychologist has done it better…How does the Clever Ape escape the pitfalls of his own cleverness?
In subsequent chapters, God attempts to rehabilitate humanity in various ways. His last great hope is Abram, whom God favors due to Abram’s total rejection of civilization and all its trappings. But generations later, the Prophet Samuel – a manifestly corrupt individual – begs God to let the Children of Isis-Ra-El establish a bona fide civilization, complete with cities, armed forces, bistros, a king – the works!
God relents, “OK, you can have your bloody kingdom, but you’ll regret it!”*
They did.
*I paraphrase liberally.
And for those (likeyself) living in an area with Lyme carrying ticks, it looks as if we may be able to thank the US government and their brilliant thinkers for weaponizing that fine little disease (which is often incurable). Read recently that Congress had planned to hold hearings on this very subject.
Thanks for all your work Tom, I appreciate it. I keep thinking the next pandemic (natural or created) will be the tipping point for humanity. Meh, more great stuff to look forward to…
You’ve all read the MaddAddam trilogy, I presume? Margaret Atwood’s fantasies are always prescient.
“unjustified scientific hubris” TL
Aye, there’s the rub!
Hubris cannot be justified.
here is a related podcast from radiolab. well worth a listen:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/kill-em-all
These “unforeseeable” results are entirely foreseeable using the simple cautionary logic of Murphy’s Law. But in an era when every problem from mundane to apocalyptic is turned into an engineering challenge for some intrepid visioneer, we lack the restraint and humility necessary to stop tinkering with fundamental forces of nature we understand far too imperfectly to harness and control. The argument that progress is made only through gradual refinement and experimentation (waiving away the catastrophes those failed experiments engender, e.g., nuclear energy) does not convince me in the slighted that we should plunge forward and accept whatever consequences and collateral damage occur on our way to Utopia.
…”teenage mutant ninja mosquitoes…”
Classic.
“And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us … ”
How many Gods up there? We need a head count pronto.
Hell’s Bells how I hate ambiguity.
OK, head count. After the death of Abram (later renamed Abraham – ‘Abram of God’) the Hebrews ventured into Egypt where they picked up a heavy dose of polytheism. Isis and the sun god Ra were primary. They retained their Mesopotamian sky god, El, who became more prominent when they returned to their ancestral stomping grounds some 1,500 years BCE. However, they had little use for El’s son, Ba-El. The whole son-of-god concept never caught on with the Hebrews.
So I guess the answer is three….though there are a number of also-rans that could easily be listed.
Well, they might have had three (or more) when Edward G. Robinson was running the show, but once Charlton came down from the mountain they were back to one right quick.
True. As they say in Hollywood, “don’t f–k with Chuck!”
So, the mozzies just got an evolutionary jump on us and will now do to us what we have tried to do to them. Hybrid humans will probably be the geek solution but, nature will do it in her own way as she alwasy does and just as she did with the mozzies.
Cheers.
Like I said.
https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/dna-based-vaccines-are-in-our-future-they-will-literally-change-your-dna_10092019
This is actually a better-case scenario. The worst would have been if they’d successfully eradicated mosquitoes, and then the animals for whom they’re a major food source–fish, amphibians, birds, and bats–had died off. How stupid do you have to be to try to eliminate a basic food species? Oh, right, you have to have a PhD in genetics…
Vivaldi and Couperin were commiserating about their musical careers one night – drunk as hell, of course.
Couperin asked, “do you like Bach?”
“Not bad” replied Vivaldi, “but I prefer pilsner.”