From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Tue Dec 26 2000 - 21:03:16 MST
Damien Broderick <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au> wrote,
> >GATTACA
>
>I refuse to be flexible in this case. The damned movie was stupidly
>wrong-headed to the core, as far as I could make out. The notion it argued
>seemed to be (1) in the near future genomic engineering *really does work*,
>you actually can optimize your offspring to produce phenotypically superior
>beings, but (2) if a non-optimized human (limitations emblematized by poor
>vision) is sufficiently motivated, s/he can best one of those damned brave
>new world horrors *by sheer grit*. Yeah, right. Just like a house cat can
>beat a cheetah in a race *given the right spiritual attitude*.
I agree with your general assessment of this stupid movie, but let me
carry this observation to a logical extreme. As far as I could tell,
the genomic engineering *did*not* really work. There was no
detectable difference between the enhanced humans and the
non-enhanced humans. Except for an unsubstantiated feeling of
superiority, and a unsupported prejudice against the unenhanced, no
one could tell the difference without a genetic test. For all we
know, the enhancement was simply a "Microsoft" signature tacked on
the end of the genome.
The enhanced humans were not really superior. They didn't learn more
or faster than the unenhanced human did. They didn't perform
physical feats that the unenhanced human could not. There was no
reason to exclude unenhanced humans from the space program. The
message of the movie seemed to be that if all the tests to keep out
unenhanced humans were bypassed, no one would really would notice the
difference. The unenhanced human would perform just as well as the
unenhanced human.
Therefore, I am not sure that human spirit beats out genetic
enhancements in this movie. I think the real story was that people
claim superiority even when no actual enhancements were evident. I
thought this movie was really about a self-appointed master race that
claimed genetic superiority where none existed.
-- Harvey Newstrom <HarveyNewstrom.com>
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