In mypre-showreflections, I tried to isolate what exactly was being claimed by those who worry about tinkering too much with the Wisdom of Nature. What that argument really comes down to, I think, is the claim that we ought to have a certain reverence for what I called the given order of things. I didn't say whether I thought that claim was true or false. We began to talk about it a bit on the air, but we barely scratched the surface. In thispost-showpost, I want to delve a little more deeply -- though I don't pretend to get to the bottom of things here.

First, let me mention that a pretty powerful argument against the wisdom of nature was given a long time ago byJohn Stuart Millin his essay "On Nature."It is a brilliant essay. Here's how Mill sums up his case against the so-called wisdom of nature:

It will be useful to sum up in a few words the leading conclusions of this Essay.

The word Nature has two principal meanings: it either denotes the entire system of things, with the aggregate of all their properties, or it denotes things as they would be, apart from human intervention.

In the first of these senses, the doctrine that man ought to follow nature is unmeaning; since man has no power to do anything else than follow nature; all his actions are done through, and in obedience to some one or many of nature's physical or mental laws.

In the other sense of the term, the doctrine that man ought to follow nature, or in other words, ought to make the spontaneous course of things the model of his voluntary actions, is equally irrational and immoral.

Irrational, because all human action whatever, consists in altering, and all useful action in improving, the spontaneous course of nature:

Immoral, because the course of natural phenomena being replete with everything which when committed by human beings is most worthy of abhorrence, any one who endeavored in his actions to imitate the natural course of things would be universally seen and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men.

就整个范围而言，大自然的设计不可能以人类或其他有知觉的生物的利益为其唯一或甚至主要的目标。它给他们带来的好处，大多是他们自己努力的结果。凡是在自然界中表示仁慈意图的东西，都证明这种仁慈只是用有限的力量来武装的;人类的责任是与善良的力量合作，不是模仿，而是永远努力修正自然的进程，使我们可以控制的那部分更接近于正义和善的高标准。

If there's anything about Mill's argument that gives me pause, it's his apparent confidence that by "perpetually striving to amend the course of nature" we can bring it "more nearly in conformity with a high standard of justice and goodness." I am much more of a pessimist than Mill seems to have been. If you look around at our interventions in the course of nature, it's clear that they have done a great deal of good. Electric gadgets of a dizzying variety, modern medicine, modern means of communication, modern means of transportation -- all are due to man's relentless attempts to exploit and improve on that which is merely given. Where would we be without these? But the benefits have often been purchased with many costs to both the non-human and human worlds. Next season, we're planning an episode on the very idea of progress. It is no doubt a non-trivial question whether the substantial benefits that modernity has brought compensate for the costs.

The words of Wordsworth come to mind:

The World is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,—
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn..

I don't think I'd go quite as far as Wordsworth does here. I would rathernotbe a pagan raised in an outmoded creed -- even if it did mean living more in "harmony with nature." Still, I do see his point and it paints a cautionary counterweight to Millian enthusiasm for restless intervention in the course of the antecedently given. Unless we can have some degree of confidence that our relentless drive to improve upon that which we merely come across will, on balance, promote a just and life-affirming human order and leave us with a non-human world that is beautiful, bountiful, and varied, then better, perhaps, not to intervene at all.

我们是否有足够的信心相信我们的干预和剥削会让我们的处境变得更好而不是更糟?我不会假装知道那个问题的答案。我更想集中讨论问题本身的性质。我想强调的是，这个问题不仅仅是科学家一个人的问题，甚至不仅仅是科学家的问题。尼采曾经说过，科学家应该掌握在比自己更强大的人手中。我认为他的部分意思是，科学本身无法创造新的文化和社会形态。我认为他是对的。科学只有通过哲学、艺术、政治、生产力等因素的介入才能促进文化的形成。事实上，科学对文化最直接的影响往往是破坏性的，而根本不是建设性的。我的意思是，科学经常破坏现有文化形成的基础，使我们不可能像过去那样继续下去。 It puts questions to us, sometimes quite urgent questions, but it hardly ever tells us how to answer the questions. Even if we focus just on technology and not on basic science, it is not the thing in itself that brings about cultural change, but the social practices, institutions and arrangements that grow up around the thing that really matter for the pursuit of justice and happiness. The rapid rise of cosmetic neurology and psycho-pharmacology raises, I think, many culturally and socially urgent questions. John Perry points some of them out in his pre-show posthere. We cannot look to the practitioners of cosmetic neurology to provide the answers for us. Forming a new culture based on our new found power to tinker with the fine structure of our own neurochemistry is a collective task in which the scientist plays a role, to be sure, but only one role among many.

但现在我们需要问的是，在我们试图阻止科学和技术的进步或试图创造新的文化形态时，对特定文化的崇敬应该发挥什么作用，如果有作用的话。我个人的倾向——目前也只是如此——是认为他们不应该在基础科学的指导中扮演任何角色。让基础科学以一种不受约束和无情的方式进行。On the other hand, when it comes toexploiting基础科学的成果以技术创新的形式出现，一定程度上是需要谦虚的。解决人类生活中的问题不仅仅是技术问题。解决问题的不是机器或药物，而是人类部署的机器或药物。我们不应该给自己提供我们无法明智和明智地部署的工具。尤其是如果这些仪器有像神经药理学产品一样的潜力来重塑我们既定的生物特性。我并不是建议我们停止技术创新。我的意思是，我们要学会把技术创新、社会创新和文化创新看作是不可分割地交织在一起的。我认为，一种尊重既定事物的态度——这种态度规定，当我们在人类和非人类世界中打乱既定安排时，我们要小心翼翼、谨慎行事，不带任何傲慢——实际上是必要的，即使在道德上不是强制性的。

Such an attitude provides something of a check on our restless and over-anxious drive to master nature, to channel it to our ends. But I believe that drive to be ultimately unstoppable. It can be slowed, perhaps, at the margins, but it cannot be extinguished, at least as long as we remain the kind of beings that we are, with the kinds of cultures in which we now find ourselves. I doubt even that the drive should be extinguished even if it could be extinguished. The deep problem is that there is a mismatch between the pace of cultural formation and the pace of scientific and technological innovation. Cultural formation is a slow cumbersome, highly fallible and dispersed process. Scientific discovery and technological innovation happen, at this stage of human history, at a pace that far outstrips the capacity of culture to respond. If we cannot and should not slow the pace of scientific and technological innovation, can we increase the pace at which cultures are reformed? Ought we?