Abstract
When Craig Venter announced, in 2010, the production of a bacterium with a synthetic genome, the reaction in the media was typically hyperbolic. Headlines screamed that scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute had created “synthetic life”,1 a “synthetic life form”,2 “artificial life”,3 with the use of the word “creation” sprinkled liberally across the front pages. The prize for compacting as much hyperbole as possible into the shortest space went, as so often, to the Daily Mail: “Scientist accused of playing God after creating artificial life by making designer microbe from scratch — but could it wipe out humanity?”
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Oderberg, D.S. (2013). Synthetic Life and the Bruteness of Immanent Causation. In: Feser, E. (eds) Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137367907_11
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