Posthuman Blues

Scientists to make 'Stuart Little' mouse with the brain of a human





"In a recent article for the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, Wesley Smith, a consultant for the Centre for Bioethics and Culture warned that 'biotechnology is becoming dangerously close to raging out of control'.

"He wrote: 'Scientists are engaging in increasingly macabre experiments that threaten to mutate nature and the human condition.'"

He says this like it's a bad thing, failing to note that we've been altering "nature and the human condition" since prehistoric times. I'll concede that
genetic engineering comes with a decided "gee-whiz" factor. But, in essence, we're not doing anything we haven't done since the first human ancestor snapped a branch off a tree to use as a tool; it's simply a matter of degree.

Like fellow biotech pessimist Francis Fukuyama, Smith lives in stark fear of the prospect of an evolutionary upgrade, in which individuals cease to be discreet genetic entities and become inextricably part of the biosphere's deoxyribonucleic tapestry. As anthropologist Richard Grossinger so acutely pointed out -- in the original introduction to Richard Hoagland's "The Monuments of Mars" (!) -- genetic engineering is really nothing more than a highly intensified version of natural selection.

We can rip the branch off the biotech tree and use it to hasten our advance or we can cling to it in self-denial and fear.