Star Trek Hunter
Episode 10:
The Philosopher
Scene 3:
The Morality of Hybridizing Intelligent Species
10.3
The Morality of Hybridizing Intelligent Species
“I don’t suppose I need to give a long introduction to my guest. In a civilization of tens of billions of people, his is a household name and a very familiar face – beloved, berated, but impossible to ignore. At Subspace Radio Ivonovic, we have simply been inundated with requests for me to interview Dr. Kenny Dolphin, author of
The Morality of Hybridizing Intelligent Species – which has to be the most readable doctoral dissertation in – ever – well, come on, dissertations tend to be rather dry. Dr. Dolphin also authored
The Impact of Humanity on Pon Farr, the Vulcan Mating Cycle – which, in addition to the majority of polite Federation society already put off by his dissertation, made Dr. Dolphin especially unpopular in vulcan circles. And he is also the author of
Fundamentals of Federation Ethics, which might well have ruined him with our constituency, if anyone had bothered to read it thoroughly. In preparation for this interview, I went back and re-read all three books. And it felt like I was reading this material for the first time, which makes me even more curious, Dr. Dolphin, what got into you that made you want to study and write all this stuff?”
Dolphin looked up, surprised. “Well, that’s a question I wasn’t expecting. I’d have to say I first got interested in interspecies relations and particularly the status of hybrids in human culture because of all the hate crimes toward non-humans that I worked for the New York City District Attorney’s office. I suppose that interspecies violence in large population centers is kind of inevitable, but it seemed to me that the most virulent hatred was reserved for hybrids – I even saw it on the police force – and there were hybrids in police uniform, out there every day protecting the children and families of the people who just utterly reviled them. So after I left the DA’s office…”
“I heard you were fired…”
“After I was fired from the DA’s office…”
Emory Ivonovic laughed. “Now you have to tell us, in just a few words, why.”
Dolphin sighed. “Performance. I took too long investigating cases, had a low conviction rate. I got interested in cases that weren’t assigned to me… I really wasn’t cut out for the job. But I took what I learned back to Harvard with me and just kept bringing in every line of inquiry to try to get at where all this anger was coming from. I tried bringing this topic to several different departments – law, criminal justice, sociology, statistics, history, biology… Ultimately, it seemed to me to fundamentally be an ethical problem that encompassed all of those disciplines, which brought me to the Philosophy department. What I found - and this is primarily what my work is known for - was there is some justification for all this anger about hybrids. It isn’t their fault or the fault of their parents - or even the doctors who provide the genetic engineering that makes these children possible. It is incumbent within the rules that those doctors have to operate by.”
“I have quoted your summation of those rules many times on this program,” Ivonovic said. “The doctors are required to ‘preserve the genetic distinctiveness of each parent species to the greatest extent possible’.”
“That language actually comes directly from Federation law. And it can so easily be taken as a directive to give hybrid children what are thought to be the best attributes of each species,” Dolphin replied. “So a hybrid human/vulcan child might be given not intelligence in the average range of vulcans, but deliberately given the highest intelligence possible for vulcans, the longest lifespan possible for vulcans, the best in human adaptability and emotional stability, the human reproductive cycle – all of these characteristics enhanced to the greatest extent possible. Parents of, if you will, naturalborn children, have a legitimate concern that their children may not have a reasonable expectation of competing against genetically engineered hybrids. Hybrids are still a very small minority of the population, but those kinds of demographics have a way of changing in a surprisingly short amount of time.”
“And I have also seen what this policy can do at its extremes,” Dolphin continued. “We recently encountered a serial killer who was hybrid betazoid and vulcan - and had the telepathic abilities of both. Not just what might be average for either a betazoid or a vulcan - she had the telepathic abilities of the strongest betazoid and the strongest vulcan - abilities that would occur in less than one in one billion of either species if she had gotten a natural throw of the dice.”
Ivonovic leaned forward. “But those observations weren’t what estranged you from polite society throughout the Federation, were they? It was the eugenic implications that really stirred up the hornet’s nest.”
Dolphin took a deep breath. “This is where the understanding of what I was doing went horribly off course. I offered a few thought experiments and even some of the most disciplined philosophers I knew mistook them for reasoned arguments against allowing hybrid children to be conceived at all. That wasn’t anywhere near my point.”
“What was your point? What is your point?” Ivonovic queried. “Pull this together for us.”
“The biggest problem in ethics is a failure to think things through,” Dolphin said. “A failure to consider all the implications, all the potential consequences of our actions, our policies, our institutions. People want to glom onto simple rules. Simple answers. And they are always inadequate. People who had a gut dislike for hybrids have mined my writings for everything that supports their position and they take things out of context. Just so they can say ‘I’m right’ and try to impose their own selfish, homespun rules on society.”
“What I’ve been pleading for, really all my life, is for people to just slow down and think everything through rather than standing on their prejudices,” Dolphin continued. “The prevailing prejudice in the Federation – or so it seemed to me at the time – was that the advent of hybrids was a wonderful thing to be encouraged and supported without introspection. The policies that came from this attitude are just not a product of careful thinking. I illustrated this with a thought experiment that has probably become the most notorious thing I have ever written.”
“Take us through that thought experiment,” Ivonovic said.
“Let me preface that by saying I did not exhaustively research this hypothesis and it should be taken as an example of things we need to think about, not settled science,” said Dolphin. “Okay, we know that the descendants of hybrids also need genetic manipulation – for several generations – often several interventions to maintain equilibrium among their genetic heritage from different species – often throughout their lifetimes. What happens when, perhaps a few thousand years from now, the vast majority of humanity has this requirement? Could we be setting our species up for complete dependence on a lifetime of genetic intervention for the majority of individuals?”
“Another consideration is that with all this engineering, not enough of their genetic heritage is left to chance. Doctors are not gods, yet this requirement for doctors to provide genetic engineering puts them in the driver’s seat – selecting genetic traits and leaving little or nothing to chance. We know that it was chance – the mindless, brutal experimentation of nature – that made each of our species possible and successful. Are we really ready to replace that natural filter with our own under-informed prejudices?”
“That sounds like an argument against allowing the human species – or for that matter the vulcan, the bajoran, the andorian – any of these species to become hybridized…” Ivonovic said.
“But that is not what I was arguing. I was only offering these as things we need to think about – and only as examples, not an exhaustive list.” Dolphin was quite animated, speaking passionately, emphasizing his words with his hands. “I didn’t spend as much time listing the many benefits of hybridization because at the time the audience I thought I was addressing were touting those benefits at the top of their lungs. But it is worth saying to everyone else – by adding the unique genetic material of vulcans into the human species, we benefit from the potential improvements in human intelligence, lifespan and physical strength. And that’s just vulcans. Each species that has born or sired partially human children has added potentials to the human genome that might never arise within humanity otherwise. And that’s just the genetic contributions – not to mention the broader cultural benefits of bringing our diverse peoples closer together into tight-knit families.”
“I never said, ‘do not allow non-humans to mate with humans’,” Dolphin continued. “Nor did I ever advocate any sort of moratorium. Ethically, that would be unsupportable – to tell an interspecies couple who have the real potential for children that they are not allowed to have children just because it is inconvenient for the state of the science? What I was pleading for, what I am pleading for is careful study – what are the implications? What are the potential consequences? What policies could we introduce to improve the potential outcomes and avoid potential negative consequences both near- and long-term? I just want people to think all these issues through.” Dolphin raised his hands, then dropped them with a thump onto the arms of his chair in frustration.
“What we got instead is a lot of people wanting to stop hybridization altogether and others wanting to open the floodgates and never think about the issue again. Even vulcans, andorians, trills – they all seem to succumb to extremism rather than just stopping and thinking things through for themselves. As a result, we see not only humans, but vulcans, andorians, trills, bajorans and every other species lining up on both sides of the issue and none of them with any better justification for their hardened opinions than the most transparently half-baked rationalizations. Even the vulcans seemed unwilling to think these things through rigorously, logically – instead of fixating on illogical assumptions, traditions and prejudices. Even the vulcans. I found that particularly astonishing – and frustrating.”
Ivonovic relaxed back into his chair, steepled his fingers. “Let’s talk about those vulcans…”
