upgraded Humans
Technological/scientific evolution is
an extension of biological human evolution. Evolution moved biology
from the single celled micro-organisms with very little complexity,
to the massively complex, tool reliant, human species. Humans then
used their biological ability to make tools to allowed them to
achieve things that they would be unable to do biologically, which
made them a them to be a successful species. Just as evolution had
been doing for billions of years, the usage of tools allowed for the
creation of increasingly complex tools, built by the previous
generation of tools. This in-turn helped the human species to become
more successful. Now here we are a hundred thousand years later (or
more) with instant global communication, global trade-economy,
computers capable of incredible computational power, relatively
high-speed global transportation, GPS, scientific information on
just about every aspect of living in the universe, and still the
evolution of technology and science is still gaining momentum.
As a tool dependent species it is in our nature to
upgrade our tools which then directly relates to our ability to be a
successful species. So by upgrading our tools we are upgrading
ourselves. This has been the reality since the very beginning of
human life. Only now, we have reached a point where we can create
tools that directly upgrade our biology through genetic alteration
and manipulation. This result has been a long time coming and is
simply the newest step to be taken in our evolution.
Our newest evolutionary step
may very well be changing what it means to be
human. Dramatic shifts in various technologies and sciences
including what is commonly refereed to as the bio-tech revolution, are going to have enormous effects
on individuals as well as, on
our civilization as a whole. Because of this, there have been a ton
of negative responses that have risen from the public.
Much of this uniformed emotional response has formed around misconceptions
about biological engineering technologies. (This
same type of uninformed 'gut' reaction will occur when other
technologies such as nanorobotic implants, come around.) This is
unfortunate. The information must first be gathered and understood
before one can consider the ethical issues related to a particular
science or technology. Otherwise any ethical conclusions made are
completely irrelevant.
This sort of widespread misunderstanding of a
particular science often then opens the door to the 'postmodernist'
to use pseudoscientific ramblings of misinformation to sway people's
opinions. This can be very deconstructive. ...But here I am getting
a little off topic, as my frustration mounts. The metaphysical,
pseudoscientific observation, will be the topic of another article.
-This post features a video of
Gregory Stock speaking at a TED conference about the current and
future of genetic engineering and the ethical concerns surrounding
it.
-For full screen there is a little button on the top right of the video box.
