Why do Augments have to be evil?

[John Vasiliou]

In Star Trek if you are genetically enhanced you have no other option but to turn evil.

Kind of a paranoid view in my book.

I'd like to think if somehow I became enhanced I wouldn't become a homicidal maniac.

 

[Jono]

Being genetically enhanced in itself doesn't make you evil in Star Trek.

It does seem that the group of genetically engineered humans from the 20th century that are called augments seem to be more susceptible to being evil. In ENT Soong theorises that this is due to a genetic defect in this particular group, rather than purely "superior abilities breed superior ambition" or whatever the saying was from "Space Seed".

We have seen quite a few genetically enhanced people who are fine, primarily Julian Bashir in DS9. Plus there was a human colony that was full of genetically enhanced people and it was working out fine.

 

[Jack Bauer]

I think that part of the problem with Khan and his fellow Augments is that they were most likely created by evil people. They were taught to feel superior to normal humans and thus acted like they were. They probably viewed normals as less than human maybe slightly better than humans. They were taught they were the Master Race.

 

[USS Excelsior]

And the Augments in ENT wouldn't necessarily have acted evil if it wasn't for that troublesome one.

 

[Anticitizen]

Well, remember the group of augments in DS9 - Julian Bashir was the only normal, well-adjusted one. While the others were certainly highly intelligent, their engineering led to rather obvious deficiencies. In light of the success rate (or lack thereof), genetic engineering seems pretty unethical if you can't guarantee your results, and even in the 24th century, they obviously can't. Maybe, for instance, Khan's batch of augments all possessed diminished frontal lobe activity, which (in our real world) is a trait shared by certified psychopaths who have been subjected to EEG scans. In trying to improve humanity, scientists accidentally created a slew of superhuman psychopaths. Whoops!

(Challenge: say 'Scientists synthesized slew of superhuman psychopaths' without launching spittle all over the place.)

 

[Red Ranger]

I'm thinking that perhaps by the 24th century, the genetic augmentation process may not have been as flawed as the 20th and 21st century treatments. Although it did produce mostly unstable folks, Bashir was the exception as it may have been a different, or even better, treatment. The earlier versions caused those superhumans to be more susceptible to anti-social behavior -- hence, psychotic superhumans. A dangerous mix to have superior powers but be psychopaths. Therefore, Bashir was the only one we know of that was relatively normal, aside from his enhanced intelligence and reflexes. Who knows -- maybe there are other well-adjusted augments running aroung in the 24th century who, like Bashir, have successfully hidden their abilities.

 

[indolover]

Bashir wasn't evil. neither were his patients in the Season 6 episode.

I think most Augments in Trek were bred for specific and not necessarily ethical purposes, hence things going awry. Julian simply had a learning difficulty in youth, and his parents corrected that. They weren't out to create a super-human bent on galatic conquest lol..

 

[Anticitizen]

Bashir wasn't evil. neither were his patients in the Season 6 episode.

But his patients were deficient in a number of ways, even in important functional aspects. They literally couldn't work alongside 'normal' people in a meaningful way. One guy was arrogant, sneaky, and rebellious; another had the emotional capacity of a child; a hyper-sexualized woman; and the girl that didn't 'sync' with time as normals do and resembled the pre-treatment patients in the short literary documentary by Oliver Sacks (and later fictionalized movie treatment) 'Awakenings'.

The 'lab rats' in these experiments don't have to be 'EEEEVIL' in order for the experiment to be deemed highly unethical. Clearly, in the Trek universe, genetic engineering is a risky business, and not one to be exacted upon unwilling patients.

There could be more dire consequences that we didn't see, after all. All the babies born with seventeen heads or whatever. We only have witnessed the superbabies that lived beyond puberty.

 

[Myasishchev]

Bashir and Khan weren't made the same way, though. This is important regarding results, since somatic genetic engineering is considered vastly more difficult than the engineering of a fertilized egg. It's a lot easier to mess somebody up with somatic therapy, since you're dealing with trillions of cells that need to be changed, and (I would suppose) a possible immune response.

Presumably no one does germ-line because it's illegal, not because it's risky inherently (Khan was an asshole, but totally functional). The legal regime in the Fed would tend to force parents to "wait and see," and when they have children who are just broken enough to never get anywhere, but not broken enough to fall under the "severe defects" exception Bashir mentions, the parents then only have the option of somatic engineering. Which, as noted, is a sort of crap-shoot.

On the other hand, I think it's worth pointing out that only half of the Jack Pack were obviously messed up, Patrick and Sarina. Jack and Laura were jerks, and weird, but it's really hard to say whether they should have been confined, and how much of their problems flowed directly from their confinement, as opposed to their respective gene therapies.

And, on a final note, what's really strange is Star Trek's assumption that genetically engineered people will be antisocial. They're genetically engineered. You can make them be what you want them to be.*

*Unless you mess up. In which case it's a lot better to do so with a zygote, because you can start over with a lot fewer legal complications.

 

[sbk1234]

It was an important plot complication.

 

[Anticitizen]

assumption that genetically engineered people will be antisocial. They're genetically engineered. You can make them be what you want them to be.*

*Unless you mess up. In which case it's a lot better to do so with a zygote, because you can start over with a lot fewer legal complications.

Well, personality defects aren't apparent at -8.99 months of age...

 

[Myasishchev]

If you have a serious enough knowledge of the genome, many of them would. In any event, if you missed part of the code for "strong heart valves," you should probably start over.

 

[Red Ranger]

However, Jack and the rest of the genetic brat pack wanted the Federation to surrender to the Dominion, which indicates (a) a lack of faith in the Federation's abilities, and (b) a cerrtain misguided attitude. So certainly they were a bit misguided as the augmentation process left them maladjusted. But I agree they weren't evil, any more than Bashir was evil. (BTW, I wonder if Bashir had decided to join Starfleet and study on the command track, whether his intelligence and reflexes would have mad him an uncommon commander.)

BTW, the augments we saw in ENT were basically Khan stand-ins, and poor ones at that. They also seemed to be the shortest genetic superpeople I've ever seen -- on reason I found them unbelievable. I guess that was because, as I recall, they were basically teenagers or had just become mature adults, and thus could have grown in height a bit more.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

They're not evil, they're just at the top of the food chain.

 

[USS Excelsior]

Why do Augments have to be evil?


Well that's a stupid question!

 

[JustKate]

I guess I always assumed - perhaps wrongly - that not all augments are as odd as the Jack Pack. I thought that the members of that group are simply augments who didn't turn out well, and that meanwhile, there are other augments that were more like Bashir, being quietly and inconspicuously brilliant with most people of the people around them being unaware that they had been augmented. It doesn't seem likely that Bashir was the only really successful augment, does it?

But if this is specifically addressed somewhere, I do hope someone can enlighten me.

 

[Anticitizen]

I guess I always assumed - perhaps wrongly - that not all augments are as odd as the Jack Pack. I thought that the members of group are simply the augments that didn't turn out well, and that meanwhile, there are other augments that were more like Bashir, being quietly and inconspicuously brilliant with most people of the people around them being unaware that they had been augmented. It doesn't seem likely that Bashir was the only really successful augment, does it?

But if this is specifically addressed somewhere, I do hope someone can enlighten me.

There could be successful augments all over the place. We have no way of knowing. There may also be many more 'defective' augments out there that simply aren't known to the authorities as being augments - everyone may just think these people are naturally 'off'.

However, the success vs. failure rate isn't why the Feds would outlaw it. ANY 'failed experiments' would demonstrate the entire affair to be unethical in the UFP's eyes - mucking around with a child's DNA without their consent, etc. I wonder what the UFP's stance/law would be concerning adults who choose to augment themselves (a cyberpunk literature mainstay)? They're not hurting anyone else...

I think an interesting episode premise would be an entire planet of people who abandoned the Federation and decided to go hog-wild with augmentation-ism, and what the consequences were, what issues are raised, etc. Maybe it has been done in Trek, I can't recall. There were the Angosians from TNG's 'The Hunted' which featured 'super-soldiers' that were cast out from society because, due to their enhancement, they were considered unable to coexist with normals - but that was a case of people specifically being engineered to be soldiers, not a more general enhancement of intelligence, memory, and what-have-you. (And arguably, creating the perfect soldier doesn't include intelligence enhancements - you want them to follow orders, after all, not be so clever that they dare to think for themselves!)

I'm going to throw out a recommendation for an excellent, excellent trilogy of novels by Richard K. Morgan - Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies (should be read in that order). The stories take place in which every person has something called a 'cortical stack' - something the size of a pencil eraser - implanted in the base of their skull at birth. The stack backs up their entire consciousness, all the time, in real time. When you die in that universe, your stack can be downloaded into a new 'sleeve' - AKA, body. People don't travel through space in ships; they 'needlecast' (aka transmit) their minds between planets (the planets were first colonized by slower-than-light ships carrying terraforming robots and stored embryos with cortical stacks of the 'colonists' who left and were 'reborn' on the new world in new bodies).

Due to the fact that minds can be 'downloaded' into new bodies, there are many types of custom bodies ('sleeves') available on the market for a variety of purposes, ranging from genetically engineered, cybernetic, or completely synthetic sleeves. The three books follow one character, on three different worlds, in a variety of different sleeves, and each one is very different. In the first book, he occupies a body that was previously occupied by a smoker - so during the story he's struggling to quit a smoking habit that he didn't possess in the first place!

Anyway, let me get to why all this is relevant to the discussion - in the second book, the main character is fighting as a mercenary among a platoon of other mercenaries-for-hire, and they're all wearing the same 'brand' of 'sleeves'. These bodies have been engineered with something called the 'Wolf Gene', which gives them a near-psychopathic ability to wage war and do damage without feeling much empathy for the opposition, but also gives them a wolf-pack like mentality as far as each other is concerned, so they're a very tight group as soldiers. When another member of the 'pack' is killed or wounded, the main character has to suppress a wolf-like keening in his throat due to the overwhelming emotions he's feeling.

Part of what makes these books so great is the questions it raises about personal identity that one possesses (or doesn't) under these conditions. The main character is special because he's been specifically mentally trained/disciplined to operate in whatever body he's given. He's a soldier whose consciousness might be 'beamed' to another planet, where he'll find himself in a strange body on a strange world, and must maintain his discipline and training in whatever body he's dumped in - but even he, being one of the 'mentally elite' (physical training is worthless when one won't have the same body!) faces challenges and identity issues when put in a strange sleeve and has to face a stranger in the mirror and deal with the baggage that an old sleeve carries.

I feel that the UFP's stance on augmentation is for similar reasons. When someone is 'augmented', they're not necessarily just the same guy or gal on the inside with new and different abilities - you're fundamentally changing who they are, in wild and unexpected ways. Bashir may have been a successful doctor and an all-around good guy in the end, but the moment his parents decided to augment him, they more or less sold him into slavery. There's no promise that augmenting his abilities simply left him as the same Julian Bashir and added more capability. His ambitions, desires, dreams... his entire consciousness would have been unavoidably altered to the degree that he wasn't the same man that his parents gave birth to. It's easy to say that it's okay, because everything worked out because he was successful, but that's tantamount to endorsing the horrid real-life forced lobotomies and the like of mental patients of the early 20th century because they were 'more well-behaved' in the end - or, to introduce a more contemporary/topical issue, the administration of Ritalin (and the like) to arguably intelligent but so-called 'hyperactive' children, which may make them 'better', more well-behaved students but simultaneously excise a genius, multi-tasking capacity that would be damned useful in maturity. Who's to say the original, unaltered Julian Bashir wouldn't have had a successful, happy life, even if it was as a hover-truck driver on Alpha Centauri, rather than a physician with a longing to practice frontier medicine?

And, most importantly, who could claim, with certainty, that he would not have become a better doctor (or whatever) without the augmentations? For all anyone could've known, he could've been the future President of the UFP. He was never given the chance.

 

[Myasishchev]

The original Bashir was borderline retarded. Actually, maybe more than borderline, there are some lines that indicate he could not tell cats from dogs at age three or so. One can claim with relative certainty that a total idiot is not likely to become a super-doctor. But he might have been happy, I suppose; everybody's potentially happy, especially if they have low expectations of themselves--it's the Federation.

But there's a problem here in singling out gene therapy as a kind of verboten tampering, when "tampering" with a child is exactly what parents do, and what we require parents to do. The cognitive development of a child is tremendously dependent on their environmental stimuli, and the primary stimulus is going to be their parents. We demand that parents tamper with their child profoundly by merely helping them learn to speak--completely rewiring their brains in the process. With that in mind, how is rewiring their brain through more advanced methods inherently worse?

The adjective that describes a human being that is not "fundamentally changed" by their parents is "feral." And it's not generally considered a good thing to be.

This is distinct, of course, from the practical application of the technology, just as the concept of medicating a child for cognitive problems is very distinct from actually diagnosing and, if necessary, treating those problems effectively.

In the case of germ-line engineering, there's not even the spectre of a human being's possible life to be considered. The alternative is nonexistence, and the Federation probably has special Starfleet Abortion Squads to root out the unborn Augment babies, gestating in defiance of the law, before they reach personhood status.*

Anyway, those books sound pretty cool. Reminds me of Stross' Glasshouse and Accelerando. In Glasshouse, the main character was, for a while, to quote Mark Wahlberg, a fucking tank. Really cool.

*(I wonder what abortion law is like in the Fed? They never mention it, except maybe obliquely in that episode where Troi was raped by the energy alien, in almost exactly the same cluelessly misogynist manner Jim Shooter et al. accidentally raped Ms. Marvel in Avengers 200, which preceded it. Bizarre, stupid stuff.)

 

[Anticitizen]

Well, regarding early signs of intelligence at 'age three or so': by all accounts, including his own, that's roughly the age in which Albert Einstein started speaking.

You have a point that anyone teaching a child is 'tampering' with them, but that's true of any and all learning processes, or any experiences, that take place at any age, at any time.

The distinction/difference with the augment/Bashir situation versus natural or traditional learning processes is that his parents weren't just educating him as most do, they were mucking about with his very ability to learn. That's a fundamental re-creation of his cognitive processes, which is no less than a complete replacement of whatever we'd call his... 'him-ness', his 'self', whatever makes him who and what he is. Whatever the original Bashir was ('borderline retarded'), and the resulting Bashir-augment was (super doctor), is immaterial to the ethics argument, which is that they effectively (and pardon the hyperbole here) slaughtered their son and created a new, better son to take his place.

I would have liked to have seen DS9 address this more closely - Bashir struggling seriously over these questions; there'd be an Extra Irony quotient involved, given Bashir's rather strict Hippocratic-derived ethical system concerning medicine. The guy refused to keep replacing a dying patient's brain elements with artificial implants due to ethical concerns in regards to the patient not 'being the same man' he was (or whatever the argument was). That's actually a pretty close-to-home parallel of Bashir's own baggage.

 

[Myasishchev]

I thought the positronic replacement thing for Vedek Bareil (or was it some other Bajoran?) was abandoned because it didn't work, not because of ethics considerations. But my memory of that is really fuzzy.

Anyway, that "him-ness" does not exist in any real form. They didn't slaughter Li'l Julian; the specific state he had been in would have ceased to exist in any event, they merely chose between successors, and chose (rightly) the one which would increase his options and opportunities and (one supposes) likely increase his capacity for happiness.

This is why I say it's a practical question. At what point do you stop improving someone? Certainly at the limits of your knowledge (which, if we assume is not very well-established, is a good reason why the practice is outlawed); certainly when you reach diminishing returns, or when you begin to reduce other functions; and then at reasonable boundaries, which generally should be left to the person, or, in the case of children, their guardians.