In the contest for oddest pronouncement in a State of the Union address, high marks should go to President Bush’s call last January for a national ban on “creating human-animal hybrids.” Fortunately, the modern biotech laboratory does not yet resemble H.G. Wells’s island of Dr. Moreau, that fictional place where an exiled scientist blends man and beast by vivisection. Not even our most skillful, least scrupulous genetic engineers can manufacture humanzees to provide spare parts or serve as semi-skilled labor. We are not yet so talented or so depraved.

Yet the President’s call to action did not come out of nowhere. If it seemed strange, that is only because we live in genuinely strange times. In China and Britain, scientists are creating cloned man-animal embryos using rabbit eggs and human DNA. In the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, human neural stem cells are being inserted into monkey brains. At the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, researchers have produced pigs with hybrid pig-human blood cells, demonstrating the possibility of genetic fusion between man and the lower animals.

So far, no one has produced a hybrid embryo using human sperm and animal eggs or animal sperm and human eggs. But this, too, is probably only a matter of time. Many of these man-animal experiments hold out the promise of useful results, like therapies for Parkinson’s disease or the possibility of mass-producing designer stem cells. Some elicit a visceral negative reaction, a Levitical sense of a sacred boundary being violated. All of them should leave us wondering: just how interchangeable is man with the other animals? Could scientists one day recreate one of our extinct, not-quite human ancestors? Or produce creatures, as Wells imagined in 1896, that are “human in shape, and yet human beings with the strangest air about them of some familiar animal”?

Even the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has been sufficiently concerned to distribute a set of guidelines regarding man-animal chimeras. It recommends that institutional review boards ask the following questions before approving experiments involving the insertion of human embryonic stem cells into non-human animals:

Might the cell transfer result in the animal’s acquiring characteristics that are valued as distinctly human? . . . If visible human-like characteristics might arise, have all those involved in these experiments, including animal-care staff, been informed and educated about this?

True, the most remarkable possibilities—the creation of monkeys with complex language, or men with working wings—are scientifically unlikely. But, the NAS seems to be saying, what about animals with human organs? Or man-animal hybrids that develop for a few weeks or months in an animal uterus before spontaneously aborting? Better get the review boards ready just in case.


It is only fitting that modern biotechnology should be raising anew ancient questions about man’s standing among the animals. The trouble is, however, that modern biology has also left us bewildered about how to think through such questions, precisely because it has left us bewildered about man himself. At the very moment when our technological cleverness is increasingly enabling us to blur the boundary between man and the other animals, we lack the clarity of the ancients about what sets man apart.

According to Aristotle, man is the only rational animal, the only being capable of choosing his own path or contemplating the cosmos in which he lives. According to the Hebrew Bible, man is the only being created “in the image of God”; capable of sin, aware of death, with longings for immortality, he is also ruler of the other animals. While the philosophy of Athens and the revelations of Jerusalem differ greatly on what elevates man, they agree that humans beings are, or are meant to be, superior to everything else on earth.

Modern science, by contrast, is not so certain. Its radical ambivalence about man is traceable to the mixed marriage that gave it birth. First came Descartes, who treated the whole material world, including the human body, as a collection of aimless stuff to be mastered and manipulated by the human mind, which stands high above it all. Then came Darwin, who assimilated the whole of man, both mind and body, to the rest of biological life in a seamless continuum. Taken together, modern science treats man as both radically similar to and radically different from everything else in nature.

Thus, as theoreticians, modern biologists aim to convince us that man is just another animal; as practitioners, they conduct ruthless experiments on other animals for the sake of improving human life. Modern sociobiology declares human pride to be chauvinistic, yet modern biotechnology progresses only through such unapologetic human chauvinism. The scientist’s pride in his biological discoveries is humbled only by his belief that pride and shame and everything else are just Darwinian survival mechanisms repackaged in human form.

It is the Darwinian side of science that most worries those who think about man’s standing in the universe. The theory of evolution is less a single theory than a maze of agreements and disagreements, but most Darwinians make three claims about the mechanisms of man’s descent. First, man and the other animals share a primitive, common ancestry. Second, man came into being through a process of genetic mutation and natural selection, with new biological powers emerging inexplicably, persisting genealogically, and accumulating sufficiently to form a new species. Finally, coming into being as he did through the chance unfolding of matter’s aimless history, man might never have existed at all. It is therefore quite possible that the universe could have persisted without containing any such rational being, or without becoming truly conscious of itself.

On the evidence provided by nature, Darwin’s claim of common descent seems undeniably compelling; man’s emergence via genetic mutation and natural selection seems likely; and the possibility of man’s never emerging seems all too possible. Yet for all its insights into the development of complex life, the theory of evolution ends before the most interesting questions begin. Where did matter come from in the first place, and with it the latent possibility of man? What is the source of nature’s fixed laws, by which the chance process of evolution plays itself out? Why do animals seek to survive and reproduce at all, hungering for life even with its manifold sufferings?

To these questions, modern Darwinian theory has no compelling answer, and its methods are poorly equipped even to initiate the right sort of inquiry. Evolution may explain the mechanisms of man’s descent, but not the mystery of his ascent, including the wonder he exhibits about the origins and destiny of the cosmos—a wonder that serves no useful animal function. A theory of man’s origins is not yet a theory of man, let alone a theory about why there is something rather than nothing.

What is especially striking is the zeal with which contemporary scientists defend the theory of evolution against its skeptics and detractors even as they often fail to acknowledge or understand its limitations. They see polls showing that a high percentage of Americans disbelieve in evolution, and they cringe, feeling, in the words of the Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, “under siege.” By contrast, in the conversion of each new child in Pennsylvania or Kansas to a belief in evolution, they see an intellectual and moral victory. For radical neo-Darwinians like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, evolution is indeed a kind of liberation: proof that God is dead, proof that we are free to make our own gods, proof that we can impose our own moral order on a world governed only by amoral chance. With this absolute licence comes, in the scientists’ perception, an absolute and exclusive responsibility to ameliorate the physical misery of humankind, heeding the cry of the sick that falls on heaven’s deaf ears.

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