Designer animals: scary science or superb satire?
|
Version 0 of 1. The internet has broken my sense of humour. Designer Kathryn Fleming has proposed biologically engineering hybrid animals that bred to resist extinction. Beasts include a beaked porcupine that can lay eggs, and the superbivore, a kind of souped-up deer/giraffe that can tightrope walk. Then there’s the cat-dog mix with reflective fur that wards off prey. I can’t tell if she’s joking. But if Fleming’s designs for the animals of the future are a parody of some nutty cultural fringe where biology meets art in an ignorant, misguided modelling of the natural world, it’s a witty art project. Like Leonardo da Vinci’s alleged monster made from bits of insects and snakes, Fleming has created models of some of her synthetic animals using taxidermy for her project Modern Naturalism. On the other hand if, as this report by design website Dezeen seems to suggest, it is in any way a serious idea, it is manifestly wicked. Of course, human beings have been remodelling nature ever since we bred wolves into dogs and tinkered with cereal crops. The dog, you could argue, is as synthetic a human creation as any of Fleming’s bizarre prototypes. What about extreme breeds of cats and dogs? Are those not totally “unnatural”? Charles Darwin begins The Origin of Species by examining how humans have changed nature. If we can breed new creatures and crops in a few generations, he asks, what can nature do over millions of years? The ease with which humans have changed other species is his first piece of evidence for the existence of evolution. So it is possible to enjoy Modern Naturalism as an art work that comically comments on the human impact on the natural world and ironically celebrates our power to replicate evolution. But if it’s a joke, it packs the nasty punch of Jonathan Swift’s “modest proposal” that the poor sell their children as a luxury food. For there could hardly be a more monumental image of human stupidity and arrogance than the proposition that instead of trying to save species from extinction, we simply preserve aspects of those species within fantastical new post-natural forms. This is an absurd illustration of the scary place we have reached in the history of the world. Nature is ours to destroy or preserve. Why not remake it, as Fleming suggests? Why not re-create the natural world according to our wildest fantasies? Perhaps we could. But we definitely shouldn’t. Respect for nature means respecting animals that are different from us. The autonomy of all creatures is what makes them our wondrous neighbours on the planet. A human replica of the planet’s abundance would just be a grisly mirror of ourselves. Surely Kathryn Fleming knows this. Designer animals are a joke, right? And what a superb satire on a time when humanity threatens to obliterate the rest of nature. |