Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human

by Joel Garreau

  Inventors fundamentally misunderstood human behavior: It’s also why we have so few watches with digital readouts. There is something esthetically compelling about the recurring cycle of time displayed by the sweep of the hands of an analog watch.

  “a really bad sign for people who expect a real-soon-now Singularity”: Eamoun Kelly, Peter Leyden and members of Global Business Network, What’s Next: Exploring the New Terrain for Business (New York: Perseus Publishing, 2002). ISBN: 0-7382-0760-8, page 178.

  software . . . still an exponential increase: Ray Kurzweil, “One Half of an Argument: A Counterpoint to Jaron Lanier’s Dystopian Visions of Runaway Technology Cataclysm in ‘One Half of a Manifesto,’” KurzweilAI.net, July 31, 2001. http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0236.html

  If they can write the software, they can prove I’m wrong: Lanier interview, May 9–11, 2003.

  This altercation goes around and around: See, for example, the responses of George Dyson, Freeman Dyson, Cliff Barney, Bruce Sterling, Rodney Brooks, Henry Warwick, Kevin Kelly, Margaret Wertheim, John Baez, Lee Smolin, Stewart Brand, Rodney Brooks, Daniel C. Dennett, and Philip W. Anderson to “One Half of a Manifesto” at Edge.org. http://www.edge.org/discourse/jaron_manifesto.html See also Lanier’s responses to them. http://www.edge.org/discourse/jaron_answer.html

  “I want to believe that moral progress has been real”: Jaron Lanier, “Postscript Re: Ray Kurzweil,” Edge.org. http://www.edge.org/discourse/jaron_answer.html It is also available at KurzweilAI.net. http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0233.html

  “exponential rate of expansion of the ‘circle of empathy,’”: Ibid.

  “want to draw the circle pretty large”: Lanier interview, May 9–11, 2003.

  at the University of St. Andrews: Garreau, Joel. “Cell Biology: Like the Bee, This Evolving Species Buzzes and Swarms,” Washington Post, July 31, 2002, Page C1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23395-2002Jul30?language=printer

  “A quite sophisticated text messaging network has sprung up”: “Girls Hot on Will’s Trail: Girls Chase Prince by Phone,” Scottish Daily Record, November 5, 2001, page 9.

  He helped pioneer virtual communities: Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, revised edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). ISBN: 0262681218.

  Rheingold . . . author of: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2002). ISBN: 0738208612.

  “There go the people”: Attributed to Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, during the revolution of 1848 in France by, among others, Dan Baum, “Annals of War: Battle Lessons: What the Generals Don’t Know,” The New Yorker, January 17, 2005. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050117fa_fact

  “You can get a rally in 30 minutes”: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Philippine Activism, at Push of a Button: Technology Used to Spur Political Change,” Washington Post, December 10, 2000, page A44.

  John Arquilla co-authored: John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Swarming and The Future of Conflict (Santa Monica: RAND: National Defense Research Institute, 2000). ISBN: 0-8330-2885-5.

  “That wouldn’t even be funny once”: I am indebted to Evangeline Reed Garreau for noting that she would find it equally useless to encounter eighth-grade boy classmates with such wings; she is certain they would use them only to project dirty words.

  A local sternly lectures: I am indebted to Pamela McCorduck of Santa Fe for this insight. Personal communication, December 20, 2003.

  behind the counter is: I am indebted to Dave Sment, publisher of the Hatch Citizen, for helping me track down Felipe Mendoza after I left Hatch.

  Chapter Seven TRANSCEND

  “Transcendence is the belief”: Personal communication, December 6, 2002. Shirky, who thinks about the behavior of networks, notes that his formulation borrows from restatements of the laws of thermodynamics as in, for example, John D. Barrow, The World Within the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). ASIN: 0192861085.

  The precautionary principle is just a way to block research: Ronald Bailey, “Making the Future Safe,” Reason, July 2, 2003. http://reason.com/rb/rb070203.shtml

  try this on twenty generations of primates first: Ibid.

  the precautionary principle . . . to prevent future calamities: Ibid.

  “like arguing in favor of the plow”: Erik Baard, “Cyborg Liberation Front: Inside the Movement for Posthuman Rights,” Village Voice, July 30, 2003. http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0331/baard.php

  “It is realism”: Ibid.

  “these issues are on the table today”: Ibid.

  The colors are striking: Judith Ann Schiff, “Old Yale: That Wonderful Window,” Yale Magazine, March 1993, page 15. I am indebted to Nancy Lyon of the Yale archives for unearthing this document.

  Transhumanism is a loosely defined movement that started in the 1970s: “The Transhumanist Movement,” Transhumanist Arts and Culture World Center, 2003. http://www.extropic-art.com/history.htm

  “posthumans,” defined: Nick Bostrom, “Introduction to Transhumanism,” talk delivered at Yale University, June 26, 2003. http://www.nickbostrom.com/ppt/introduction.ppt

  Transhumanists view human nature as “a work-in-progress”: Nick Bostrom, “Transhumanist Values,” Department of Philosophy, Yale University, April 2001. http://www.nickbostrom.com/tra/values.html

  Natasha Vita-More, the artist formerly known as Nancie Clark: “The Transhumanist Movement.”

  She offers a conceptual model of an optimized human: Erik Baard, “Cyborg Liberation Front.”

  Critics of The Singularity: “The Rapture of the nerds” is a phrase coined by Ken MacLeod, of Scotland, in his 1998 pulp novel, The Cassini Division (New York: Tor, 2000). ISBN: 0812568583. MacLeod’s characters transcend their mortal limits by uploading their consciousnesses into android bodies or virtual environments, a process that one character describes as “the Rapture of the nerds.” Jeremy Smith describes the plot in “Engines of Light: The Gnostic Potboilers of Ken MacLeod,” Strange Horizons, January 2003. http://www.strangehorizons.com/2003/20030113/macleod.shtml

  One such group of post-humans set themselves up as false gods seeking to dominate the solar system, only to be destroyed in a cometary bombardment orchestrated by a soldier named Ellen May Ngewthu. Ellen May’s hatred of the post-humans extends to all artificial and digitized intelligence, until she is forced to transfer her consciousness from her body to an electronic environment and back again, displacing her original consciousness with a copy.

  “Something happened then,” says the character Ellen May. “In that brief, eternal moment when I sparked across the gap between [the computer] and the skull. . . . I saw a galaxy of green and gold, its starlight filtered through endless, countless habitats; the federation of our dreams. And behind it all, in the walls of all our worlds, an immense but finite benevolence, a great engine of protection and survival; a god on our side, a terror to our enemies and a friend to us, worlds without end.”

  “Rapture of the nerds” is a play on words. The Rapture refers to the belief of some fundamentalist Christians that in the final days, the just will be assumed bodily into heaven—perhaps even as they are driving down the road. John Nelson Darby, a 19th century Irish lawyer turned Anglican preacher, was “the father of the rapture doctrine,” according to “History of the Rapture Theory.” http://www.rusearching.com/leftbehind/leftrapturehistory.htm He was the first to develop a full-blown theology that incorporated the teaching that Jesus would return secretly (his Second Coming) to Rapture his true followers, leaving the rest behind to be ruled by an evil Antichrist for seven years, and then return again (his Third Coming) in a visible, glorious coming to destroy the Antichrist, save those who were converted during the seven-year tribulation, and establish his own kingdom.

  The jibe is that The Heaven Scenario is merely transcendentalism for people who have replaced a faith in God with a faith in technology, and is no more based in reason.

  Indeed, the gathering will be wr
itten up: Carl Elliott, “Humanity 2.0,” The Wilson Quarterly, autumn 2003. http://www.tc.umn.edu/~ellio023/documents/humanity.pdf Elliott is the author of Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003). ISBN: 0-393-05201-X (hardcover).

  Reason magazine: Bailey, “Making the Future Safe.”

  Village Voice: Baard, “Cyborg Liberation Front.”

  “we are called to be architects of the future”: BrainyQuote. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/rbuckmins153435.html

  warlike surplus of frustrated young males: Leon R. Kass, chairman, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, Report of the President’s Council on Bioethics, pre-publication version, page 61. http://www.bioethics.gov/reports/beyondtherapy

  If a child is created: Ibid., page 55.

  If a child is created: My daughter Evangeline, at the age of thirteen, expressed her view that if parents genetically select for an Olympic athlete or a Yale valedictorian and that’s not what they get, they won’t hate the kid; they’ll sue the genetic engineering company. I think she’s right.

  Suppose our desire for [high-performance] children . . . is fulfilled by drugs: “Beyond Therapy,” page 73.

  Kass is a medical doctor: Ibid., page xi.

  “Life is not just behaving, performing, achieving”: Ibid., page 94.

  light out for the Territory: Twain, Huckleberry Finn, page 375.

  “What is a man?”: David Zindell, The Broken God (Amherst, MA: Acacia Press, 1994). ISBN: 0586211896.

  nasty, brutish and short: Leslie Stevenson, The Study of Human Nature: A Reader, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). ISBN: 0-19-512715-3, page 90; and Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, John Plamenatz, ed. (London: Fontana, 1962), excerpted pages 91–97 in Stevenson’s work.

  embryos should be recognized as humans: Felipe Fernández-Armesto, So You Think You’re Human? A Brief History of Humankind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). ISBN: 0192804170, page 148.

  “We have to face challenges to our concept of humankind”: Ibid., page 168.

  He likes the dynamic view: Justin Stagl, “Anthropological Universality: On the Validity of Generalisations About Human Nature,” pages 25–46 in Neil Roughley, ed., Being Humans: Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000). ISBN: 3110169746.

  “There is still no agreement about what ‘human nature’ is”: Fernández-Armesto, So You Think You’re Human, pages 169–170.

  Mead, author of: Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation, originally published in 1928 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001). ISBN: 0688050336.

  Each is free to shape who he or she is going to be: Leslie Stevenson and David L. Haberman, Ten Theories of Human Nature: Confucianism, Hinduism, The Bible, Plato, Kant, Marx, Freud, Sartre, Skinner, Lorenz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). ISBN: 0-19-512040-X (hardcover), pages 3–10.

  Edward O. Wilson in his book: Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). ISBN: 0-674-63442-X (paperback), pages 3–4.

  the human species . . . is indeed quite new: Melvin Konner, “Why We Did It: An Account of the Driving Forces Behind the Unfolding of Human Civilisation,” a review of Michael Cook, A Brief History of the Human Race (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003). ISBN: 0393052311, in Nature, March 11, 2004.

  We share 98 percent of our genome with chimpanzees: See, for example, Jared M. Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York: Perennial, 1992). ISBN: 0060984031 (paperback).

  The genetic difference that makes us human is barely significant: Fernández-Armesto, So You Think You’re Human, page 147.

  Humans respond with shared tendencies: See, for example, Jared M. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). ISBN: 0393317552.

  thousands of human universals: See, for example, George Peter Murdock, “The Common Denominator of Cultures,” in Ralph Linton, ed., The Science of Man in the World Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), pages 123–142. Cited in Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1991). ISBN: 007008209X, pages 69–70.

  “The future always comes too fast”: Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam, 1984). ISBN: 0553277375, page 4.

  He was born in Helsingborg: Bostrom interview, June 28, 2003.

  It was Thus Spake Zarathustra: Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999). ISBN: 0486406636.

  “God is dead”: The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1995). ISBN: 0877790426.

  Bostrom read Zarathustra: Bostrom interview, June 28, 2003.

  In 1948, T. S. Eliot . . . as he was writing the play: “The Cocktail Party,” in T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909–1950 (New York; Harcourt, 1952). ISBN: 015121185X, cited in “The Transhumanist Movement.” See also “The Cocktail Party: Introduction,” Enotes.com. http://www.enotes.com/cocktail-party/12787

  in which he coined the term transhuman: Eliot referred to the human journey as a “process by which the human is Transhumanised.”

  “we might actually change the human nature”: Personal communication, May 7, 2004.

  “Mother Nature . . . in jail for child abuse”: Nick Bostrom, “In Defense of Posthuman Dignity,” 2003, accepted for publication in Bioethics. http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/dignity.html

  human, but it is not humane: Bostrom, “Transhumanist Values.”

  Pence, who presented: Gregory E. Pence, Classic Cases in Medical Ethics: Accounts of Cases That Have Shaped Medical Ethics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999). ISBN: 0073039861. See also Gregory E. Pence, Brave New Bioethics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). ISBN: 0742514366.

  more talent in the visual and performing arts: By 2004, classical musicians were already arguing about the Enhanced in their midst. Those who used anti-fear beta blocking drugs to overcome their paralyzing stage fright were compared to baseball players on steroids. Blair Tindall, “Better Playing Through Chemistry,” New York Times, October 17, 2004. http://www.listproc.ucdavis.edu/archives/mlist/log0410/0003.html

  triple the remaining life span: At the University of Michigan Medical School in 2004 there already was a genetically engineered dwarf mouse named Yoda who was the human equivalent of 136 years old and described as still sexually active and “looking good.” “Genetically Modified Mouse Celebrates Fourth Birthday, Human Equivalent of 130 Plus,” Associated Press, April 12, 2004. http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/science/20040412-1544-geriatricmouse.html

  Some fear that The Enhanced will see those at the bottom: See, for example, Michael J. Sandel, “The Case Against Perfection: What’s Wrong With Designer Children, Bionic Athletes, and Genetic Engineering,” Atlantic Monthly, April 2004. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/04/sandel.htm

  Life is unfair: Lee M. Silver, “The Inevitability of Human Genetic Enhancement and Its Impact on Humanity,” presented at “The Future of Human Nature: A Symposium on the Promises and Challenges of the Revolutions in Genomics and Computer Science,” Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, April 10, 2003. http://www.bu.edu/pardee/conferences/sprg03.Silver.htm

  He is the author of: Lee M. Silver, Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family (New York: Avon, 1997). ISBN: 0-380-79243-5.

  “A flourishing human life is not a life lived with an ageless body”: Beyond Therapy, page 299.

  compete . . . it usually ends badly: The common wisdom in paleoanthropology is that ecological niche competition, or the lack thereof, is the reason chimpanzees still exist, while Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals do not. The chimpanzees that survived stayed up in the trees in their own niche and didn’t compete with the humans. William Calvin, University of Washington, personal communication, October 11, 2004.