Brendan Shea

Charles Darwin famously argued that that life on earth was not the product of intelligent design, and that it instead had arisen through the entirely natural of process of evolution via natural selection. Darwin’s theory of evolution (together with Mendel’s theory of genetics) now forms the foundation of all the biological sciences. Jurassic Park, however, raises an interesting question: just how does Darwin’s theory apply to lifeforms that are the products of explicit, intelligent design? In this essay, I examine cluster of issues in the philosophy of biology that turn out to be central in figuring out the answer to this question. Among other things, I discuss the difficulties in drawing sharp boundaries biological systems and non-biological systems, and between the products of natural selection and those of artificial selection. I also consider more generally how the process of evolution via natural selection is changed when intelligent agents begin to directly manipulate genetic material.