All Hail James

Last night, in Madison Square Garden, Dr. Robert A. Indeglia picked James, an English Springer Spaniel, as "America's Top Dog."  The Westminster Kennel Club selects a new genetically modified dog each year for the title, and this year's is pretty damn cute.

We Americans usually focus on celebrating genetic modification in the summer, what with all the dog and horse racing going on and the county fairs, so this award pretty much stands on its own. We hold it, too, in what's as unnatural a setting as we can find, but I never hear of any protests by the hippies.

This year's winner was one of my favorites, but that's not hard when two of the competitors are poodles. Now, don't get me wrong: I like poodles fine enough, just not when they're shaped with clippers.

The dogs in the show are as unnatural as the setting. There isn't much talk about genetic modification, but we all know it's there. Nature never built any English Springer Spaniels, or Dachshunds, or even Dalmatians, we humans did that. We're rather fond of pushing together different things together to see what we get, and it doesn't much matter if it's done in a breeding pen or a scientific lab.

For some reason, though, if some kindly old farm woman in a calico apron is grafting a branch of one plant onto another, or her husband chews on a weed while wearing overalls and watches his favorite rooster mount his fattest hen, we're fine with that. In each case they're trying to manipulate nature to produce a better result, but we get in a tizzy if a geneticist does the modifying directly inside the cells.

There's a difference, sure, but not a difference in kind.

We humans can build mules out of an unholy alliance between horses and donkeys, and everyone's cool with that. We've made so many hybrids, someone's come up with a top ten list of them. When we're not content with seeing what happens when we mix different species, we go up a level and see what we can come up with members of different genera. You can buy one of the results of this, triticale, at Whole Foods.

Humans just can't leave well enough alone. Nor, should we. We have fancier tools now and better ways of using them, but once we stopped our nomadic ways we began genetically manipulating our environment. Doing it with a pipette is no different than doing it with branch and twine or a penis, only more efficient.

It may seem horrifying to move some DNA from a trout to a tomato, but they share over half the same genes, anyway. Every living thing on this planet does, which either argues for a common ancestor or a lazy god. Also, it makes discovering life on other planets even more interesting.

Someone, and I'm looking at you, Teresa Patton and Ruth Dehmel, did a great job constructing James. Congratulations!