The recently over-hyped news about self-replicating xenobots created in a laboratory reminds me of the story about a competition promoted by a group of scientists that challenged God regarding their claimed abilities to create life. Inevitably, when reaching for a handful of dirt to begin his demonstration, one of the scientists is interrupted by the Creator when He says, “Oh no, that’s my dirt, you get your own dirt.”
A more sober assessment of the research is provided by John Timmer in his article “Interesting research, but no, we don’t have living, reproducing robots”:
“It’s not seen in any organisms because it’s not actually a form of perpetuation, since it doesn’t work for more than two generations, much less in perpetuity.”
“On its own, some aspects of this work are nifty. The researchers used an algorithm to identify a way they could transform a set of odd biological phenomena into the equivalent of an assembly line robot with a finite lifespan. Which is pretty clever.”
There seems to be a whole lot of this self-important thinking in the world today, in which human beings continually put themselves in the position of God Almighty by either claiming scientifically generated miracles in test tubes or by dictating to others how they should be living their own lives.
Humility is a feature of the human psyche that seems to be sorely missing of late.
This is especially true when we are relentlessly-faced with the specter of Karen, who insists that we inject ourselves and cover our faces with a virtue signaling cotton shroud because of her claims that our very existence threatens her life. I am appalled at the hubris exuded by my fellow man, and I long for my youthful days in which such claims of creation and dominion over others were only attributed o the one who created me. However, I was an innocent then, and I was ignorant of the fact that humanity has been making such claims since its emergence from the soil.