Genomicon

		       CHAOS - - - - - - - -[or some]- - - - - - - - - -GOD
			ALPHA - - - - - - - - - -[invoking] - - - - - - -TELOS
		         GRAVITY- - - - - - - [yielding]- - - - - - - - -COMPLEXITY
                            TEMPORALITY- - - - [permitting]- - - - - -ALGORITHM 
		           AUTOPOIESIS- - - -[through]- - - - - - - - - TECHNOLOGY
			    GENESIS- - - - - - - - - -[unfolding]- - - - - -CONTINUUM	

       
GENUS EX MACHINA

A most humble birth/a crazy soup of basic structures/spontaneously self-organized blob of protenaceous precursers/percolated through replicable silicate crystals/and 5 billion trips 'round the sun/now become duplicable/through silicon chips/machine modulated morphogenesis/pre-calculated chemo-synthesis/the enzymatic auto-catalysis/of directed molecular recombinations/polymerase chain reactions/nuclear transplantations/oocytic micro-manipulations…

Behold! -- The most marvelous creation -- to become the Creator!

Only sixty million years ago/the ape ghost first shimmered/the 'primatus potential'/first materialized/in the theatre of genetic memory/its name and form: tetonius homunculus/the first of our primal kind/once content with fruits and coitus/now you dream of profits and circuits/of uncertainty and probability/you've come a long way monkey/a long, long way…

Have we yet learned how to make ourselves anew?

If ever ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny/as bio-alchemy perpetuates our wanton progeny/At what far off point do we break/intentionally mutate/from our blind primate path?/The grasping foot of the orangutan/has long since clambered through the tree tops/found itself positioned there/aware of self and other/had it a fragile moment of mind/the nano-second capability to see/a momentary abstract glimpse/of what monkey business lay ahead/its simple trek long-diverged from the evolutive path of its cousin ape?/If we now harness the molecular machinery that recipes our inevitability/If we have counted and calculated/and marked and mapped/every last unit of geno-typal data/at what point/do we stop and ponder/dare to speak the question/that must surely be thinking itself:

What sort of people should there be?

What favored family tree?
Whose cherished traits
do we call forth from the database/of waiting DNA?/ What progeny set loose upon the genetic landscape/the complex field of living forms?

As we storm the embryonic sanctuary/we near the bifurcation point/the unstable branching/of being and becoming/{two chreods diverged in a womb}/do we take the one least traveled?/what strange destiny from such instability?
										M. Anthony Ricciardi
Or, do we open up the genome?/a de-oxy-democracy/all-night supermarket of favorable geno-types/{with on-site insurance estimates}/each selecting according to his or her own/expressing this/inhibiting that/designer offspring for everyone!/{with the money, of course}/cash or credit/paper or plastic….

How quickly will personal tastes diverge from one another/or converge onto one another?/In geno-consumerism/will our apparent differences/amount to distinct existences?/Or is choice operant only within limits/predefined by primate programming?

Nurture is just Nature playing the Other

Phenotype is fickle/The Gene is selfish/ you are only its strategy for getting more of its kind/Its laws are its own

Herein lies the tension/the dialectical apprehension/between present necessity and future desirability/between humane therapy/and in-group socio-biology/between genetic schemes/and cultural dreams/And herein will the true nature of human hierarchy reveal itself!/then you will know where you really stand…

I met a learned geneticist/sounding disappointed and humbled/by most recent genomic accounting/only fifteen thousand genes it seems/between 'drosophila' and 'homo sapien'/you would have thought more/to account for such complexity/having ignored half the human journey/never considering/what is most precious in us/is perhaps not found in genetic code/found only on the solitary road/traversed by the psyche/no more pinned down/than the essence of a once animate imago/the arcane sum/that is greater than  aggregate of atoms/mnemonic proteins cast into form/by chance and necessity/and time/ of course, always time…

In us
nature has nurtured genius
emergent consciousness
logos in meta-awareness
autopoiesis unbound

Through a most natural selection
Nature is Blind Watchmaker no longer
we are become its second sight
Nature's way to oppose itself:
opposable thumbs in hand
tool makers and self re-creators
gods making after our likenesses

Will we demand that our creations not likewise evolve?

Evolution is an irreversible process
the polymerase once captured
cannot but chain react
the genome once decrypted
cannot but be enlisted
in the reproductive drive
and there is world enough and time;
mutations of mutations							M. Anthony Ricciardi
clones making clones

What roads taken then? 
	
Pausing now at the altar of science/the plaintive voice of theology is heard: What of the soul?/Do clones have souls?/Can the soul be cloned?/Do we leave the vital spark/the idea of an essence divine/so far behind?/an unnecessary ingredient in a hand-me-down recipe/and by such means/might we also be left behind/one day?/what's good for the begotten is good for the beget-er …

{News Flash! Jan.21, 2002}

Bio-technologists have just devised/a technique to revolutionize/the old gene mix trick called sex/cut out the middle-man/through artificial sperm packets/infused with female genes/fertilizing host mum's ovum/fatherless from the zygote/The Patriarchy will be outraged/if not replaced/Now Heather really can have two mommies…..

…ah, but none too soon…the artificial womb!/Gender becomes encumbrance to engendering beings/Sexual dimorphism/only an analogue mechanism/for ova population/Or perhaps, at best/a quaint alternative/like the life-long pair-bond itself…

{And now, a public service announcement…}

There is an invisible, esoteric community
come together through the world-wide-web.
They call themselves Extropians--undoers of human hubris
They, though human ilk, have left behind all hope in human kind 
their thoughts move outside
beyond the homo sapien sphere 
conjecturing the next great form
at some late future date
that will emerge and multiply 
the truly new paragon of animals
but a hybrid it seems
of genetic systems and organic machines
some thing quite other
some path never before taken
for humans, they say, are a Darwinian dead end
From humble origins
to a humbling destiny 
we, an evolutionary tangent
weighed and found wanting…

But wait!/Might we yet forestall this callous demise?/Has not science teased a glimmer of immortality/from the nucleic matrix of being?/The gene of longevity!/finally cornered in the humblest of bugs/A fruit fly no less/dub this: 'I'm not dead yet'/the gene of human dreaming/the mythic hope of ego/only recently revealed/switched on/might it prolong our separate lives another fifty or a hundred years?/just think of the potential/the tax revenue!/think of ...the pollution/the profit class becoming priest caste/the sacrifices demanded/yes, the sacrifices/For not all can be permitted to live so long/ in a world that cannot sacrifice/ advantage of the few/for equality of the many…
										M. Anthony Ricciardi
{last thoughts before we evolve}						
									
Make no mistake. 
There will be a winnowing. 							
On which side of the bio-techno guillotine will your gene pool fall?
Will you now leave the question to the future to be asked? 
The answer may have already been put forth 
May already have passed from theory to praxis
Before you have even understood its meaning

In the Procreator's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes: You may have already lost

We do not know what seeds of tomorrow we plant
Or where or when lies the break barrier of biological equilibrium
Or what escape to which higher order will restructure us into other
The path leading not to us, but through us…

Oh brave new world…what rough beast…?

Let us ask again

What sort of people should there be?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

M. Anthony Ricciardi