Should we take over where the Blind Watchmaker leaves off?

In his 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins sets forth an argument for the gene-centric theory or evolution. He shows that while life has all the complexity of a watch and then quite some more, it doesn’t need an intelligent designer in the same way that a watch does. The watchmaker of life could indeed be quite blind, developing marvels of incredibly superb, complex engineering such as the optics of an eagle’s eyes or the olfactory sense of a bear’s nose or the echolocation sense of a bat’s ears without ever being able to see the blueprints being laid out or the results achieved when they were built.

This engineer is the cold-hearted, slow but incredibly precise mechanism of natural selection. Over billions of years, life, the first automatic replicator, keeps occasionally misfiring in replication and creating some new trait. Most such mutations are disasters that doom their possessor to early death in the competition for resources, mates, and thus replication. But every now and then, one comes along that enhances survival. And as it replicates, its progeny, being slightly better suited to survive, win out over the earlier, less efficient design.

It’s a clumsy, sometimes brutal process. Whole species and even families of life arise only to be wiped out by better types that popped up somewhere else and moved in to take over. At times, mass extinctions occur through chance, when there is a cataclysmic event such as an asteroid strike or the eruption of a super volcano. In such instances, superior forms may loose out to inferior ones who had the good fortune of being further from ground zero or less reliant on the part of the ecology the cataclysmic event changed. But given 4.5 billion years, we humans have emerged as the first fully sentient life forms.

But our very sentience, the current pinnacle of evolutionary achievement, alters the game. We no longer let the weaker humans just die. We invent machines when necessary to keep them alive. Is this OK? Should we just assume we have evolved quite enough and, so far as we are able, should shut down natural selection’s operation on humanity? Should we question our egalitarian emotions and decide to go back to allowing survival of the fittest for the good of humanity? Or should we dare to think that we are ready to take over the job from the blind watchmaker now that “he” has given us the eyes and brains to do genetic engineering in a deliberate way? What do you think?