The reviewer didn’t find anything inherently wrong with my arguments, she just advised I could maybe expand on some of the evidence I used to support my claims. I took her advice and tried to elaborate on my ideas in hopes of better supporting my essay.
Essay 2
Margaret Atwood uses Oryx and Crake to illustrate the horrifying future of what society can turn into if we continue to ignore the planet’s need for global sustainability, ignore clear signs of environmental distress, and misuse or abuse science.
Oryx and Crake present themes of synthetic evolution vs. natural evolution in a way that appears to come off as brutal and scary while still drawing …show more content…
The book starts out describing the post-apocalyptic living conditions of the protagonist, Snowflake, once called Jimmy, after the world’s human population is wiped out due to disease.
Atwood presents an environmentally degraded, dystopian society as the product of failed capitalism poisoned by human’s need for consumerism and greed for profit regardless of ethics or morality. Of the main characters in Oryx & Crake, we see just how this failing capitalist society puts a rift between Jimmy’s parents. Jimmy’s father was always a top employee working as a genetic engineer of sorts while his mother spent her time, depressed, as a stay-at-home mother. The companies Jimmy’s father worked for got into genetic mutations and experimentation that in today’s world could be considered sacrilegious. Jimmy’s mother acted as the voice of unwavering morality arguing his father once had ideals of making life better for people and not just people who could generate profit (Atwood, 2004).
The pharmaceutical companies in the novel went far beyond creating medicines to combat disease. More times than not the diseases humans contracted were administered by the …show more content…
The advancements in genetic modification achieved today are eerily similar to that achieved in
Oryx and Crake. Scientists reported that they had “successfully edited harmful mutations out of genes in human embryos (Murphy, 2017). This is the latest in a series of gene editing firsts generated by a system called Crispr-Cas9, which has enabled scientists and entrepreneurs alike to drastically alter genetic material with unprecedented precision and ease (Murphy, 2017). On the path science hand in hand with a capitalist society seems to be going, I would not be surprised if pigoons and other genetically mutated animals used for human’s benefit becomes the norm.
Though Oryx and Crake is written as a fictional dystopian novel, it’s themes provoke thought on the similarities between what is presently happening with real world advancements in science, environmental or climate concerns, and economics. It provokes thought on exactly what is going on environmentally and what we as a global society can do to address these issues. Ultimately it provokes thought on how to view science and how humans can responsibly use science to develop a sustainable