The Biotech Century

Jeremy Rifkin is very well informed and what really matters here is that this book is an excellent source of information to raise awareness of what is going on in this field, about the irresponsible work that is been conducted by big corporations playing with genes and doing dangerous things that can affect the present and future life in our little world. Rifkin also outlines that everyone has to be responsible for his own actions.

I have read also his other book "Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture" (5 Stars)


A must read for all Christians   May 29, 2001
Jason Weir (Eastern Liberal Haven)
18 out of 38 found this review helpful

I read this book cover-to-cover in one weekend, and I have rarely encountered a work that challenges the imagination and expands the boundaries of thought as thoroughly as this book. Rifkin's book falls somewhere between economics, biology, futurism, sociology, and theology - and it's a masterful blend.

Rifkin lays out the potential of the new genetic science (curing diseases, ending our dependence on environmentally-destructive technologies) and underlines the risks (genetic warfare, eugenics, genetic contamination of natural species). But I was the most impressed by his analysis of how the new science offers a new paradigm for understanding nature, humanity, and our place in the universe. I have read similar treatments from a number of scientists, but Rifkin's was by far the most accessible and compact. The new paradigm is a shift away from Darwinism, which holds that life evolved through a random process of natural selection, toward a view that life is the driving force of its own evolution, changing its shape through the way it interracts with the environment - the upswing of this is that life is an evolution of consciousness. Life evolves based on how it chooses to evolve. Our deliberate control of genetics is seen as an extension of life's evolution toward greater conscious control of its own destiny. (If I fail to adequately convey the substance of the new paradigm, my apologies.) The new view of evolution is in sync with "process theology" proposed by A. Whitehead and championed by figures like Salvador Dali, among others, and chaos theory. Rifkin doesn't use this term, but on the popular level, I think many people will immediately recognize this line of pantheistic thinking as "New Age." I couldn't help but be reminded of the "evolutionary messiah" motif of films like the Matrix, Dune, and Dark City.

According to Rifkin, societies always invent a cosmological understanding of how nature works that mirrors the way their society is organized. Darwinism came about from 19th-century Englishmen reading Capitalism - with its emphasis on competition and survival of the fittest - into nature. As a result, western society was able to assure itself that laissez-faire capitalism, despite its brutality, was the way the world was supposed to work, because it was exhibited in nature itself. In the process, Darwinism overthrew theism as the reigning ideology among society's elite and substituted atheism.

Now society is creating a new cosmology - a form of pantheism that makes humankind the ultimate manifestation and guiding agent of cosmic Mind. This cosmology mirrors the networked, nodal existence of our computerized world, where "survival of the fittest" has been replaced by the survival of those best able to acquire, adapt, and manipulate information.

Rifkin points out that if we are to challenge the indiscriminate use of genetic engineering, we must fight the new paradigm before it becomes taken for granted in society. Once people accept the assumption that nature is inherently mutable and re-shapes itself according to its will, then those who argue against genetic tampering will be viewed much the way Young Earth Creationists are viewed today. To most people's minds, genetic engineering will be right and natural - and to protest it will be ridiculous.

The unanswered question is this: how do we fight the new paradigm? If Darwinism was simply the result an English botanist reading Capitalism into nature, then what is the truth about how nature works? Rifkin doesn't offer any suggestions.

I personally think that the Intelligent Design movement led by Phillip Johnson, William Dembeski, and Michael Behe stands the best chance to proposing an alternative vision of how nature works - and restraining indiscriminate use of genetic engineering. Intelligent Design is a Christian ideology. It explains genetics as the result of a transcendent God who designed the nature of each living thing (with some potential for adaptive change). As such, the genetic differences between species are part of the Creator's design, and not something to be tampered with lightly. Darwinism will fall - and with it, the last fortress of Modernism. Freud and Marx have both fallen, kicking out two legs of the Modernist troika. Once Darwinism falls - and the sheer implausibility of natural selection and the incompatibility of natural selection with molecular biology assures us that it will - western society will plunge headlong into a postmodern era. The battle for the postmodern mind might easily be a battle between Intelligent Design and pantheistic process evolution. One theory holds that life is a creation of God - the other holds that life is evolving to become God.

(I think the growing influence of the new cosmology is behind the unfounded attacks on this author and this book, especially from the "post-human" disciples of utopian secular humanists like Julian Simon and Gregg Easterbook. Rifkin has come much too close to hitting the nail on the head.)

That's why the Biotech Century, although not an expressly Christian book, is required reading for all modern Christians.


Jeremy Rifkin is a freaking Bozo...   September 23, 2000
W Kenneth Stager (Boulder, CO)
18 out of 46 found this review helpful

I skimmed through this piece of gibberish produced by this "person" since I have an interest and a fair amount of experince in the topic at hand. The little blurb about Somatogen making transgenic pigs is what really caught my eye. I worked for Somatogen (later Baxter Hemoglobin Theraputics) for ten years. The only way any pigs got onto the company grounds was dressed out and roasted to be eaten with lots of beans and cold beer. This fool who thinks he knows what the heck he's talking about should take himself back to grammer school and learn how to do some research into a subject he intends to write about before he commits ink to paper. Don't waste your hard earned cash on this bundle tripe.


Chicken Little Strikes Again   June 13, 2000
David A. Kekich (Los Angeles)
11 out of 25 found this review helpful

Rifkin is unqualified to write a book of this nature. His writing style is excruciatingly painful to read and he does not understand the key issues or the industry he writes about. His past predictions have NEVER come true, usually just the opposite in fact. This book adds nothing to an intelligent discussion of biotechnology and its impact.