A Glimpse Of Things To Come: Reprogenetic Technology and Human Destiny

[Fade the Butcher]

A Glimpse of Things to Come

Dateline Boston: June 1, 2010

Sometime in the not-so-distant future, you may visit the maternity ward at a major university hospital to see the newborn child or grandchild of a close friend. The new mother, let's call her Barbara, seems very much at peace with the world, sitting in a chair quietly nursing her baby, Max. Her labor was -- in the parlance of her doctor -- "uneventful," and she is looking forward to raising her first child. You decide to make pleasant conversation by asking Barbara whether she knew in advance that her baby was going to be a boy. In your mind, it seems like a perfectly reasonable question since doctors have long given prospective parents the option of learning the sex of their child-to-be many months before the predicted date of birth. But Barbara seems taken aback by the question. "Of course I knew Max would be a boy," she tells you. "My husband Dan and I chose him from the embryos we made. And when I'm ready to go through this again, I'll choose a girl to be my second child. An older son and a younger daughter -- the perfect family."

Now, it's your turn to be taken aback. "You made a conscious choice to have a boy rather than a girl?" you ask.

"Absolutely!" Barbara answers. "And while I was at it, I made sure that Max wouldn't turn out to be fat like my brother Tom or addicted to alcohol like Dan's sister Karen. It's not that I am personally biased or anything," Barbara continues defensively. "I just wanted to make sure that Max would have the greatest chance for achieving success. Being overweight or alcoholic would clearly be a handicap."

You look down in wonderment at the little baby boy destined to be moderate in both size and drinking habits.

Max has fallen asleep in Barbara's arms, and she places him gently in his bassinet. He wears a contented smile, which evokes a similar smile from his mother. Barbara feels the urge to stretch her legs and asks whether you'd like to meet some of the new friends she's made during her brief stay at the hospital. You nod, and the two of you walk into the room next door where a thirty-five-year old woman named Cheryl is resting after giving birth to a nine-pound baby girl named Rebecca.

Barbara introduces you to Cheryl as well as a second woman named Madelaine, who stands by the bed holding Cheryl's hand. Little Rebecca is lying under the gaze of both Cheryl and Madelaine. "She really does look like both her mothers doesn't she?" Barbara asks you.

Barbara asks you to explain. "Yes. You see Cheryl and Madelaine have been living together for eight years. They got married in Hawaii soon after it became legal there, and like most married couples, they wanted to bring a child into the world with a combination of both their bloodlines. With the reproductive technologies available today, they were able to fulfill their dreams."

You look across the room at the happy little nuclear family -- Cheryl, Madelaine, and baby Rebecca -- and wonder how the hospital plans to fill out the birth certificate.

Dateline Seattle: March 15, 2050

You are now forty years old and much wiser to the ways of the modern world. Once again, you journey to the maternity ward. This time, it's your own granddaughter Melissa who is in labor. Melissa is determined to experience natural childbirth and has refused all anesthetics or painkillers. But she needs something to lift her spirits so that she can continue on through the waves of pain. "Let me see her picture again," she implores her husband Curtis as the latest contraction sweeps through her body. Curtis picks up the photo album off the table and opens it to face his wife. She looks up at the computer generated picture of a five-year-old girl with wavy brown hair, hazel eyes, and a round face. Curtis turns the page, and Melissa gazes at an older woman of the same child: a smiling sixteen year old who is 5 feet, 5 inches tall with a pretty face. Melissa smiles back at the future picture of her yet-to-be-born child for another contraction.

There is something unseen in the picture of their child-to-be that provides even greater comfort to Michael and Curtis. It is the submicroscopic piece of DNA -- an extra gene -- that will be present in every cell of her body. This special gene will provide her with lifelong resistance to infection by the virus that causes AIDS, a virus that has evolved to be ever more virulent since its explosion across the landscape of humanity seventy years earlier. After years of research by thousands of scientists, no cure for the awful disease has been found, and the only absolute protection comes from the insertion of a resistance gene into the single-cell embryo within twenty-four hours after conception. Ensconced in its chromosomal home, the AIDS resistance gene will be copied over and over again into every one of the trillions of cells that make up the human body, each of which will have its own personal barrier to infection by the AIDS-causing virus HIV. Melissa and Curtis feel lucky indeed to have the financial wherewithal needed to endow all of their children with this protective agent. Other, less well-off American families cannot afford this luxury.

Outside Melissa's room, Jennifer, another expectant mother, is anxiously pacing the hall. She has just arrived at the hospital and her contractions are still far apart. But, unlike Melissa, Jennifer has no need for a computer printout to show her what her child-to-be will look like as a young girl or teenager. She already has thousands of pictures that show her future daugher's likeness, and they're all real, not virtual. For the fetus inside Jennifer is her identical twin sister -- her clone -- who will be born thirty-six years after she and Jennifer were both conceived within the same single-cell embryo. As Jennifer's daughter grows up, she will constantly behold a glimpse of her future simply by looking at her mother's photo album and her mother."

[Fade the Butcher]

Dateline USA: May 15, 2350

It is now three hundred years later and although you are long since gone, a number of your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren are now alive, mostly unbeknownst to one another. The United States of America still exists, but it is a different place from the one familiar to you. The most striking difference is that the extreme polarization of society that began during the 1980s has now reached its logical conclusion, with all people belonging to one of two classes. The people of one class are referred to as Naturals, while those in the second class are called the Gene-enriched or simply the GenRich.

These new classes of society cut across what used to be traditional racial and ethnic lines. In fact, so much mixing has occurred during the last three hundred years that sharp divisions according to race -- black versus white versus Asian -- no longer exist. Instead, the American populace has finally become the racial melting pot that earlier leaders had long hoped for. The skin color of Americans comes in all shades from African brown to Scandinavian pink, and traditional Asian facial features are present to a greater or lesser extent in a large percentage of Americans as well.

The GenRich -- who account for 10 percent of the American population -- all carry synthetic genes. Genes that were created in the laboratory and did not exist within the human species until twenty-first century reproductive geneticists began to put them there. The GenRich are a modern day hereditary class of genetic aristocrats.

Some of the synthetic genes carried by present-day members of the GenRich class were already carried by their parents. These genes were transmitted to today's GenRich the old-fashioned way, from parent to child through sperm or egg. These were placed into GenRich embryos through the application of genetic engineering techniques shortly after conception.

The GenRich class is anything but homogenous. There are many types of GenRich families, and many subtypes within each type. For example, there are GenRich athletes who can trace their descent back to professional sports players from the twenty-first century. One subtype of GenRich athlete is the GenRich football player, and a sub-subtype is the GenRich running back. Embryo selection techniques have been used to make sure that a GenRich running back has received all of the natural genes that made his unenhanced foundation ancestor excel at the position. But in addition, at each generation beyond the foundation ancestor, sophisticated genetic enhancements have accumulated so that the modern-day GenRich running back can perform in a way not conceivable for any unenhanced Natural. Of course, all professional baseball, football, and basketball players are special GenRich subtypes. After three hundred years of selection and enhancement, these GenRich individuals all have athletic skills that are clearly "nonhuman" in the traditional sense. It would be impossible for any Natural to compete.

Another GenRich type is the GenRich scientist. Many of the synthetic genes carried by the GenRich scientist are the same as those carried by all other members of the GenRich class, including some that enhance a variety of physical and mental attributes, as well as others that provide resistance to all known forms of human disease. But in addition, the present-day GenRich scientist has accumulated a set of particular synthetic genes that work together with his "natural" heritage to produce an enhanced scientific mind. Although the GenRich scientist may appear to be different from the GenRich athlete, both GenRich types have evolved by a similar process. The foundation ancestor for the modern GenRich scientist was a bright twenty-first century scientist who could produce even more brilliant children. There are numerous other GenRich types including GenRich businessmen, GenRich musicians, GenRich artists, and even GenRich intellectual generalists who all evolved in the same way.

Not all present-day GenRich individuals can trace their foundation ancestors back to the twenty-first century, when genetic enhancement was first perfected. During the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries, some Natural families garnered the financial wherewithal required to place their children in the GenRich class. But with the passage of time, the genetic distance between the Naturals and the GenRich has become greater and greater, and now there is little movement up from the Natural to GenRich class. It seems fair to say that society is on the verge of reaching the final point of complete polarization.

All aspects of the economy, the media, the entertainment industry, and the knowledge industry are controlled by the members of the GenRich class. GenRich parents can afford to send their children to private schools rich in the resources required for them to take advantage of their enhanced genetic potential. In contrast, Naturals work as low-paid service providers or as laborers, and their children go to public schools. But twenty-fourth century public schols have little in common with their predecessors from the twentieth century. Funds for public education have declined steadily since the beginning of the twenty-first century, and now Natural children are only taught the basic skills they need to perform the kinds of tasks they'll encounter in the jobs available to members of their class.

There is still some intermarriage as well as sexual intermingling between a few GenRich individuals and Naturals. But, as one might imagine, GenRich parents put intense pressure on their children not to dilute their expensive genetic endowment in this way. And as time passes, the mixing of the classes will become less and less frequent for reasons of both environment and genetics.

The environmental reason is clear enough: GenRich and Natural children grow up and live in segregated social worlds where there is little chance for contact between them. The genetic reason, however, was unanticipated.

It is obvious to everyone that with each generation of genetic enhancement, the genetic distance separating the GenRich and Naturals is growing larger and larger. But a startling consequence of the expanding genetic distance has just come to light. In a nationwide survey of the few interclass GenRich-Natural couples that could be identified, sociologists have discovered an astounding 90 percent level of infertility. Reproductive geneticists have examined these couples and come to the conclusion that the infertility is caused primarily by the incompatibility between the genetic makeup of each member.

Evolutionary biologists have long observed instances in which otherwise fertile individuals taken from two separate populations prove infertile when mated to each other. And they tell the sociologists and reproductive geneticists what is going on: the process of species separation between the GenRich and Naturals has already begun. Together, the sociologists, the reproductive geneticists, and the evolutionary biologists are willing to make the following prediction: If the accumulation of genetic knowledge and advances in genetic enhancement technology continue at the present rate, then by the end of the third millennium, the GenRich class and the Natural class will become the GenRich humans and the Natural humans -- entirely separate species with no ability to cross-breed, and with as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee.

[Fade the Butcher]

Dateline Washington, D.C.: May 15, 2350

The commission of leading academics — established by Dr. Albert Varship six months earlier — had come to Washington, in secrecy, to present their final report. One representative from each of the relevant fields — the reprogeneticist, the evolutionary biologist, the demographer, the sociologist, and the psychologist — sat around the table in the conference room at the Department of Health and Human Services. One by one, they took turns presenting a portion of the report to the HHS Secretary.

Their findings were grim; their predictions were surreal. Yet, Dr. Varship could find no flaw in their logic, no reason to challenge the central conclusion in their final joint summary statement: "If the accumulation of genetic knowledge and advances in genetic enhancement technology continue at the present rate, then by the end of the third millennium, the GenRich class and the Natural class will become the GenRich-humans and the Natural-humans—entirely separate species with no ability to cross-breed, and with as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee."

The presentation took just over two hours. Throughout, Dr. Varship sat in silence. It was too horrific to comprehend. Unbelievable, and yet, entirely predictable. Indeed, predicted long, long ago.

Dr. Varship's mind wandered back to his teenage years, when he had been an avid reader of science fiction, including stories written by one of the fathers of the field — H.G. Wells — at the end of the nineteenth century. So much of what Wells had prophesied — television, intercontinetal air travel, space stations, motion pictures, air-conditioned cities, and much more — had become real early on. And now this as well — "the splitting of the human species." Wells had written, "the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Laborer was the key to the whole position," in the antiquated political language of that era. Now it was all coming true.

The only thing that Wells got wrong was how long it would take. Space travel to other worlds was one thing, but the notion that humans might someday be able to manipulate their own genes was clearly too ludicrous to consider during the first half of the twentieth century, even by visionaries like Wells, Verne, Huxley, and Asimov. And yet here we were on th cusp of an incredible evolutionary event. Not in the way Wells had imagined — as the result of natural evolution, 800,000 years hence, but in less than a millennium as a result of self-evolution.

It had been three hundred years since genetic enhancement began in earnest. During this time, twelve generations of GenRich individuals had lived and reproduced. With each generation, it became possible to start with an already-enhanced genome that could be enhanced even further. And with each generation, an increase in biomedical understanding and genetic technology, an increase in biomedical understanding and genetic technology allowed reprogeneticists to make ever more complex enhancements, with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of added genes.

Although the initial focus was on physical and mental health, it shifted quickly to personality traits and talents in the cognitive, athletic, and artistic realms. In these areas, different enhancements were chosen for different GenRich children. But these differences sat on top of an ever-expanding genetically enhanced framework that was shared by all members of the GenRich class.

Varship was frightened by what he heard, and searched for the right response. Genetic enhancement clinics — GE centers, as they were popularly known — were spread across North America. They were all run as private enterprises without any government assistance. Indeed, long-existing laws prohibited the use of federal funds for what was euphemistically called "research" on human embryos. Elected officials and GE executives both found this prohibition convenient for political cover, and it provided the basis for the "hands-off" approach that the government had consistently taken toward GE. It was for this reason that Varship had formed his commission in secrecy. But now that their final report was in his hands, what could he do with it?

The problem was that GE represented a multi-billion-dollar industry that served not only American citizens, but many foreigners as well. Indeed, the American GE industry benefited enormously from restrictive laws that limited its practice in many other countries, and as a consequence, this single industry had a major impact on reducing the balance of trade on the side favorable to the American economy. Not surprisingly, politicians and their supporters from the business community were loath to go anywhere near it. Of course, over the years, common citizens had occasionally expressed their concern about the long-term societal impact of GE. Rights to privacy; individual liberties; the folly of governmental intrusion into the free market — these were the talking points that politicians focused on in response to such concerns.

Varship and all other presenters in the room with him that morning were themselves GenRich. If they had been born otherwise, they would never had attained the positions they held. All members of Congress, all entrepreneuers, all other professionals, all atheletes, all artists, and all entertainers were members of the GenRich class. There was no longer any way that even the most talented Natural could advance into any of these realms.

What could be done? What was possible? Put a stop to the whole thing, there and then? Outlaw the practice of Genetic Enhancement? There would be an outcry from all the GenRich. A Congress filled with GenRich legislators would never allow it to happen. And even if it did come to pass, in the end, it would make no difference. Sure, it might slow things down in the short term — perhaps a few months — but GE centers would simply move to offshore islands, and to underdeveloped countries eager for added tax revenue. The prospective GenRich parents would all follow them abroad.

If legal restrictions erected in one country or another were useless, was there another way to stop the practice of GE? Varship considered the moral argument. Perhaps he could convince the President — who underneath his tough political skin showed twinges of humanity — to bring his enormous influence to bear on the problem and preach the sins of GE. Perhaps a campaign could be undertaken to explain to all GenRich people the frightening moral consequences for humanity as a whole.

Unconsciously, Varship shook his head as he realized the elimination of GE was hopeless. All prospective parents wanted to provide their children with the greatest possible advantages in life. It had been that way for hundreds of thousands of years. How could you convince parents to forsake this instinctive personal desire for the good of society? Each individual parent would say, "The genetic enhancement of just my child has no impact on society at all. Why is it immortal for me to want the best for my children? I'm not harming anyone else by my actions."

So much had changed, and so much would have to change again to get back to the way things once were (if ever they were so). The gap between the GenRich and Naturals lay not just in genes, but in every other aspect of their lives and communities and, most important, in their monetary resources. Stopping the practice of GE cold, at this point in history, would not bring the classes back together again.

If there was no way that GE could be halted, was there a way to stop it from breaking humankind into two? Varship imagined a utopian society in which GE was freely available to all, and where all Naturals were raised to the level of the GenRich. It brought a moment's smile to his face, but just a moment and not more. Santa Claus existed only in the minds of children, and there was no way a society could afford to provide this expensive service to all of its citizens, even if it wanted to.

Where had we gone wrong? Was there any time in the past when a different course might have been pursued? Varship was well-versed in the early history of GE. The original practicioners drew a moral line between preventing disease and enhancing characteristics. How could anyone argue against preventing childhood disease? But soon it became clear that the moral line was an imaginary one. It was all genetic enhancement. It was all done to provide a child with an advantage of one kind or another that she would not have had otherwise. And what was wrong with that? What was wrong with helping children to live better lives?

The history books made it clear that early twenty-first-century scientists had failed to see the cumulative impact of GE. Even as scientific understanding and technology continued to explode exponentially around them, they continued to assume that the future world would be the same as the present, and that complex physical and cognitive traits would always be beyond reach. With a shock that opened his eyes wide, Varship realized that most present-day scientists had the same mental block as their predecessors.

It was late, by Varship's reckoning. Too late to do anything at all, he concluded helplessly. We were on a journey into a rapidly evolving future that no man, no woman, could stop. And where it might lead, no one could tell.

[il ragno]

Wells might not have seen it [GenRich-humans and Natural-humans—entirely separate species with no ability to cross-breed], but Bruce Sterling has been writing about this for 20+ years - only he refers to these species-subdivisions as Shapers and Mechanists.

[Hugh Jorgen]

Isn't this exactly what the film Gattaca (1997) was all about?

[Petr]

So far mere sci-fi fantasy - and from a book written in 1998. I'll believe it when I see it.

(Inproportionate numbers of transhumanists seem to originate from California. Those hipsters have been watching too many Hollywood movies.)


Petr

[il ragno]

The New Eugenics: The Case Against Genetically Modified Humans

By Marcy Darnovsky

At the cusp of dot-com frenzy and the biotech century, a group of influential scientists and pundits has begun zealously promoting a new bio-engineered utopia. In the world of their visionary fervor, parents will strive to afford the latest genetic "improvements" for their children. According to the advocates of this human future (or, as some term it, "post-human" future), the exercise of consumer preferences for offspring options will be the prelude to a grand achievement: the technological control of human evolution.

My first close encounter with this techno-eugenic enthusiasm was in a 1997 book written for an unconverted lay audience by Princeton geneticist Lee M. Silver. In Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World (New York: Avon Books), Silver spins out scenarios of a future in which affluent parents are as likely to arrange genetic enhancements for their children as to send them to private school.

Silver confidently predicts that upscale baby-making will soon take place in fertility clinics, where prospective parents will undergo an IVF procedure to create an embryo, then select the physical, cognitive, and behavioral traits they desire for their child-to-be. Technicians will insert the genes said to produce those traits into the embryo, and implant the embryo in the mother's womb. Nine months later, a designer baby will be born. After a few centuries of these practices, Silver believes, humanity will bifurcate into genetic ubermenschen and untermenschen--and not long thereafter into different species. Here is Silver's prediction for the year 2350:

"The GenRich--who account for 10 percent of the American population--all carry synthetic genes. Genes that were created in the laboratory....The GenRich are a modern-day hereditary class of genetic aristocrats....All aspects of the economy, the media, the entertainment industry, and the knowledge industry are controlled by members of the GenRich class."

How do the other 90 percent live? Silver is quite blunt on this point as well: "Naturals work as low-paid service providers or as laborers."

That rich and poor already live in biologically disparate worlds can be argued on the basis of any number of statistical measures: life expectancy, infant mortality, access to health care. Of course, medical resources and social priorities could be assigned to narrowing those gaps. But if Silver and his cohort of designer-baby advocates have their way, precious medical talent and funds will be devoted instead to a technically dubious project whose success will be measured by the extent to which it can inscribe inequality onto the human genome. Silver pushes his vision still further:

"[A]s time passes,...the GenRich class and the Natural class will become the GenRich humans and the Natural humans--entirely separate species with no ability to cross-breed, and with as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee."

Silver understands that such scenarios are disconcerting. He counsels realism. In other words, he celebrates the free reign of the market and perpetuates the myth that private choices have no public consequences:

"Anyone who accepts the right of affluent parents to provide their children with an expensive private school education cannot use `unfairness' as a reason for rejecting the use of reprogenetic technologies....There is no doubt about it...whether we like it or not, the global marketplace will reign supreme."

When I first read Silver's book, I imagined that these sorts of bizarre prognostications must be the musings of a lab researcher indulging in mad-scientist mode. I soon learned differently. They are not ravings from the margins of modern science, but emanations from its prestigious and respected core. Silver vividly and accurately represents a technical and political agenda for the human future that is shared by a disturbing number of Nobel laureate scientists, biotech entrepreneurs, social theorists, bioethicists, and journalists.

Since the late 1990s, this loose alliance has been publicly and energetically promoting the genetic technology known as "human germline engineering"-- modifying the genes passed to our children by manipulating embryos at their earliest stages of development. Such genetic modifications would be replicated in all subsequent generations, providing supporters with the basis to claim that "we" are on the brink of "seizing control of human evolution." Frank about their commitments to control and "enhancement," advocates of human germline engineering claim that the voluntary parental participation they foresee refutes any characterization of their project as "eugenic." With public conferences, popular books, scholarly articles, websites, and mainstream media appearances, they are waging an all-out campaign to win public acceptance of their techno-eugenic vision.

The promoters of a designer-baby future believe that the new human genetic and reproductive technologies are both inevitable and a boon to humanity. They exuberantly describe near-term genetic manipulations--within a generation--that may increase resistance to diseases, "optimize" height and weight, and boost intelligence. Further off, but within the lifetimes of today's children, they foresee the ability to adjust personality, design new body forms, extend life expectancy, and endow hyper-intelligence. Some even predict splicing traits from other species into children: In late 1999, for example, an ABC Nightline special on human cloning speculated that genetic engineers would learn to design children with "night vision from an owl" and "supersensitive hearing cloned from a dog."

How plausible are such scenarios? Because human beings are far more than the product of genes--because DNA is one of many factors in human development--the feats of genetic manipulation eventually accomplished will almost certainly turn out to be much more modest than what the designer-baby advocates predict. But we cannot dismiss the possibility that scientists will achieve enough mastery over the human genome to wreak enormous damage--biologically and politically.

Promoting a future of genetically engineered inequality legitimizes the vast existing injustices that are socially arranged and enforced. Marketing the ability to specify our children's appearance and abilities encourages a grotesque consumerist mentality toward children and all human life. Fostering the notion that only a "perfect baby" is worthy of life threatens our solidarity with and support for people with disabilities, and perpetuates standards of perfection set by a market system that caters to political, economic, and cultural elites. Channeling hopes for human betterment into preoccupation with genetic fixes shrinks our already withered commitments to improving social conditions and enriching cultural and community life.

Germline engineering is now common in laboratory animals, though it remains at best an imprecise technology, requiring hundreds of attempts before a viable engineered animal is produced. Human germline manipulation has not been attempted: The only kind of human genetic procedures currently practiced involve efforts to "fix" or substitute for the genes of somatic (body) cells in people with health problems that in some way reflect the functions of genes.

In about five hundred "gene therapy" clinical trials since the early 1990s, doctors have tried to introduce genetic modifications to patients' lungs, nerves, muscles, and other tissues. These efforts have been largely unsuccessful. In late 1999, their safety was also called starkly into question by the death of an 18-year-old enrolled in a clinical trial, and by ensuing revelations of almost 700 other "serious adverse effects" that researchers and doctors had somehow failed to report to the proper regulatory authorities. Some observers have commented that gene therapy would more accurately be called "genetic experiments on human subjects."

Many people are reluctant to oppose human germline engineering because they believe that "genetics" will deliver medical cures or treatments. But there is no reason that we cannot forgo germline engineering and still support other genetic technologies that do in fact hold promising medical potential. In fact, the medical justifications for human germline engineering are strained, while its ethical and political risks are profound.

Fortunately, the distinction between human germline engineering and other genetic technologies (including somatic genetic engineering) is a reasonably clear technical demarcation. In many countries, this demarcation is being drawn as law. Legislation that would ban human germline engineering and reproductive cloning is making its way through the Canadian parliament. Germany's Embryo Protection Act of 1990 makes human cloning and germline engineering criminal acts, and the Japanese legislature is considering establishing prison terms for human cloning. A number of other European countries forbid cloning and germline engineering indirectly by outlawing non-therapeutic research on human embryos. Twenty-two European countries have signed a Council of Europe bioethics convention that includes similar restrictions. In the United States, however, neither federal law nor policy forbids human germline engineering or cloning, though federal funds cannot be used for any kinds of human cloning experiments.

In order to bring the new human genetic technologies under social governance, strong political pressure and a broad social movement will be necessary. Though no such movement currently exists, efforts to alert and engage a variety of constituencies are getting underway.

The movement that this work aims to catalyze will need to draw in a wide range of constituencies, and encompass a variety of motivations. Some participants will base their opposition to a techno-eugenic future on their commitments to equality and justice, and to human improvement through social change rather than technical fix. Others will be moved by the threats to human dignity and human rights, and the horror of treating children as custom-made commodities, that germline engineering and cloning entail. Still others will find their primary inspiration in the precautionary principle, or their wariness of techno-scientific hubris and a reductionist world view, or their objections to corporate ownership of life at the molecular level, or their skepticism about the drastic technological manipulation of the natural world.

It will be far easier to prevent a techno-eugenic future if we act before human germline manipulation develops further, either as technology or ideology. This is a crucial juncture: a window that the campaign for human germline engineering is trying to slam shut. Your participation is urgently needed.

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(This article is appearing as a Different Takes issue paper from the Hampshire College Population and Development Program. A longer version is forthcoming as "The Case Against Designer Babies: The Politics of Genetic Enhancement," in Brian Tokar, ed. Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering, Zed Books.)

RESOURCES

The Exploratory Initiative on the New Human Genetic Technologies (466 Green Street, San Francisco, CA 94133, USA, phone: 415-434-1403) is working to oppose genetic technologies especially human germline engineering and reproductive cloning, that foster eugenic ideologies and objectify and commodify human life. To subscribe to its free on-line newsletter, or for other inquiries about becoming involved, please e-mail Marcy Darnovsky at <teel@adax.com>.

Books opposing techno-eugenics

Andrews, Lori. The Clone Age: Adventures in the New World of Reproductive Technology. New York: Henry Holt, 1999.
Appleyard, Bryan. Brave New Worlds: Staying Human in the Genetic Future. New York: Viking, 1998.
Hubbard, Ruth and Elijah Wald. Exploding the Gene Myth. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. Kimbrell, Andrew. The Human Body Shop: The Engineering and Marketing of Life. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
Rifkin, Jeremy. The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam, 1998.

Books supporting techno-eugenics:

Pence, Gregory E. Who's Afraid of Human Cloning? Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Silver, Lee. Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World. New York: Avon, 1997.

Web sites opposing techno-eugenics:

Council for Responsible Genetics <http://www.gene-watch.org> Campaign Against Human Genetic Engineering <http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~cahge> Genetic Engineering and its Dangers <http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/gedanger.htm>

Web sites supporting techno-eugenics:

UCLA Program on Medicine, Technology and Society (Gregory Stock, director) <http://research.mednet.ucla.edu/pmts/germline> Extropy Institute <http://www.extropy.org>

Marcy Darnovsky works with the Exploratory Initiative on the New Human Genetic Technologies, and teaches courses in the politics of science, technology, and the environment in the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State University, California.

[Fade the Butcher]

Dateline The Milky Way: June 1, 2997

Just as Dr. Varship had suspected 647 years ealier, his scientific colleagues had been woefully conservative in their predictions of where GE would lead humankind. It was all because they had failed to appreciate the power of exponential advancement — not just in technology but in the essence of human species itself.

Even simple cumulative processes had a way of taking early scientists by surprise. By the end of the nineteenth century, evolutionary biologists knew that their species could trace its ancestry back along a direct line to an apelike mother who had lived 5 million years earlier, and whose children had gone on to generate both human beings and chimpanzees. Nowhere along those lines of a million generations did any child appear to be very different from its parents. And yet at the beginning there was an ape; at the end of one line, there was a human being.

Spectacular changes occurred even more rapidly when early humans consciously intervened in ther cumulative process. Within a hundred generations, they took individuals from a single species of gray wolves and bred them down different pathways into French poodles and Saint Bernards, into hounds and sheep herders, and into so many other breeds that look and behave so differently it's hard to believe they are all distant cousins of one another.

All of this was known by the end of the twentieth century. Furthermore, significant progress had already been made, at that time, in the major scientific areas that together formed the basis for GE. Scientists were well on their way toward an understanding of how each gene in the human genome functioned. Genetic engineering had already been accomplished with other mammalian species. A prototype of the artificial human chromosome had already been invented. Surely, those who watched these advances take place must have realized where it would all lead. How could the biologists themselves be so blind as to not understand that changes in their own species — predetermined at every step — would occur even more rapidly than the random changes imposed on domesticated animals and plants by earlier people.

But instead, conservative naysaying scientists ruled the day. Yes, the biologists admitted, we will soon identify every human gene. But, we'll never truly understand how all these genes interact with one another during the development of a human life. Although the human genome provides a blueprint, the blueprint is indirect and impossible to read in the context other than the developing human embryo and fetus. This is because each of the billions of cells in the fetus acts as its own little computer in interpreting the genetic instructions present in its DNA in the context of its own little microenvironment. As a consequence, the biologists said, it would be impossible for even the most powerful computer to simulate the development of a human being starting with just the information present in a one-cell embryo. And because of this, they went on, big changes to the human genome would never been attempted since reprogeneticists would hae no way of knowing ahead of time how these changes would really affect the child who was born with them.

But these late twentieth-century scientists made the same mistake as so many of their predecessors. Understanding the true nature of the gene "is beyond the capabilities of mortal man," they said in 1935; it is impossible to determine the sequence of the complete human genome, they said in 1974; it is impossible to alter specific genes within the embryo, they said in 1984; it is impossible to read the genetic information present in single embryonic cells, they said in 1985; it is impossible to clone people from adult cells, they said in 1996. And all these impossibilities not only became possible but were accomplished while the early naysayers were still alive.

It is hard to believe they couldn't see that not only would all genetic interactions be uncovered, but that computers would become powerful enough to simulate the effects of any imagined genetic alteration or addition to the genome. (Now, of course, no GE engineer would ever dream of adding a new gene-pack to an embryo without first testing its effects by computer simulation.)

TBC

[il ragno]

But the issue is not whether or not they could; but whether or not they should.

[Fade the Butcher]

When I first read Silver's book, I imagined that these sorts of bizarre prognostications must be the musings of a lab researcher indulging in mad-scientist mode. I soon learned differently. They are not ravings from the margins of modern science, but emanations from its prestigious and respected core. Silver vividly and accurately represents a technical and political agenda for the human future that is shared by a disturbing number of Nobel laureate scientists, biotech entrepreneurs, social theorists, bioethicists, and journalists.

I have tried to explain this in several threads now, but it doesn't seem to be sinking in. The eugenics movement of the early twentieth century never died. It went underground. The Second World War and the backlash against Nazi Germany that followed was an enormous public relations disaster for the movement. It was widely recognized at the time that lobbying for eugenic legislation had been grossly premature and that political efforts to advance eugenics had been setback at least a generation.

The old guard of the eugenics movement -- Davenport, Laughlin, Grant -- were retiring or dying off around this time. The pivotal leader of the eugenics movement in America during the postwar period was Frederick Osborn, who served as the second president of the Pioneer Fund from 1941 to 1958 and as president of the American Eugenics Society from 1946 to 1952. Osborn and the remnants of the movement had a problem. How do you advance eugenics in such an inhospitable political climate in a liberal egalitarian democracy? The solution he came up with was brilliant.

1.) The movement depoliticized itself and shifted its focus from lobbying for eugenic legislation to removing the taint of Nazism and establishing genetics as a credible science. Eugenicists no longer sought out the attention of the public. It was around this time that you see organization after organization abandoning the label "eugenics" and adopting the label "genetics." The Eugenics Record Office, for example, quietly became the Genetics Record Office.

The reason for this was obvious. The science of genetics was still in its infancy at the time and any attempt to promote eugenic ends must invariably draw upon knowledge of human genetics. This is why the top priority of postwar eugenicists has always been to ensure that research progresses unimpeded and receives both public support and funding. That research is laying the foundation for the political revival of the eugenics movement. Osborn and eugenicists worked tirelessly during the postwar period to establish human genetics programs at major American universities and were successful in their efforts.

2.) The second major change was the shift from lobbying openly for eugenic legislation to crypto-eugenics due to political circumstances. This is similar to an idea that I have discussed before on The Phora, but it seems Osborn and his colleagues hit up the notion back in the 1950s. This involves working through ostensibly unrelated organizations like the Population Council or Planned Parenthood to indirectly achieve eugenic ends.

This is something that the anti-eugenicists continually fail to realize. You don't have to herd people into gas chambers or shoot them to practice eugenics. You don't even have to sterilize them. You just have to convice the unfit, in some way, not to reproduce themselves, or prevent them from doing so. The effect is the same. There are all sorts of ways you can go about doing this. You can promote abstinence amongst the lower classes, but if you really want to be effective, then you would encourage them to have abortions and use birth control. Eugenicists, as it turns out, were instrumental in the development of modern birth control methods during the fifties and sixties and the pro-choice movement from the seventies until the present. You could also work for tougher anti-crime legislation in order to snare the unfit into prison in the guise of fighting a "War on Drugs." This would have been called "eugenic segregation" during the twenties because that is essentially what it is. You could also work to pass strong environmental laws in order to further depress replication amongst the unfit.

3.) The third major imperative was to work to build a new eugenics and to bring the critics of eugenics in the academic world on board this effort. And this is exactly what happened. J.B.S. Haldane, Hermann J. Muller, and Julian Huxley had been critics eugenics before the war (they were anti-fascists), but were eventually themselves won over in the postwar period, as eugenics is essentially a socialist concept. The term "cloning" comes from J.B.S. Haldane. The Repository for Germinal Choice was Hermann J. Muller's idea. The term "sperm bank" entered the popular lexicon long ago. Muller himself wrote passionately in the postwar period about the menace of "genetic load" and advocated eugenic measures to fight the threat of genetic deterioration.

The new eugenics is packaged as nice, kind, humane, and progressive; something even a good liberal can find irresistably appealing. There is no more need for T4 or Auschwitz. A few fertility clinics will suffice. We now have the technology to detect the unfit at the embryonic level and eliminate them. And this presents an incredible moral dilemma to the modern liberal. If we can screen embryos for hundreds of genetic disorders, we can prevent a child with cystic fibrosis from ever being born. Who would object to that? What is wrong with eliminating such horrendous diseases?

Consider. If Nazi Germany had won the Second World War, then it would have taken the Nazis hundreds of years to breed their master race through the techniques of classical eugenics. This would have required nothing short of totalitarian control over marriage and reproduction for generations. The unfit would have had to be eliminated in some fashion; probably through coercive euthanasia, sterilization, or eugenic segregation in concentration camps. That was decades ago though. The new technologies of embryo selection, germline genetic engineering, gene therapy, germinal choice, birth control, and eugenic abortion have rendered all of that obsolete. It won't be long before hundreds of years shortens to decades without the bloody mess that would have previously been necessary.

4.) The fourth imperative is to use wedge issues to open the door to full blown eugenics. A good example of this is focusing at first upon incurable diseases that could be wiped out of the gene pool through embryo selection and germline genetic engineering. This is precisely what the classical eugenicists did in the twenties with traits like blindness. Who would force a mother to have a retarded child? What cruel person would force a child to live a life not worth living? A second example is crime. Just look at the explosion of DNA fingerprinting and the use that has been made of it by law enforcement. What reasonable person would object to a defendent using DNA evidence to establish his innocence? What reasonable person would prevent the use of DNA evidence to bring criminals to justice who would have previously gotten away?

[Fade the Butcher]

5.) Just look around you. What has been going on over the last several decades? Consider. Those DNA fingerprints that contain a million times more genetic information than the old ERO record cards keep piling up. They are constantly being fed into CODIS which was established in 1990, the FBI's central database that contains all genetic information accumulated by law enforcement, and every state now has its own database. The same phenomena is going on in virtually all other Western countries. These central databases are spreading and have already become interlinked through Interpol. Some countries like Iceland have gone so far as to database complete genetic profiles of all of their citizens.

That's some pretty useful information when you think about it. Those DNA profiles can tell professional geneticists working for private corporations all sorts of things about who you are; like whether or not you suffer from various genetic disorders or whether you are likely to become a criminal. You know, the insurance industry, for example, would probably like to get its hands on such information in order to adjust the rates they offer in light of what your genetic profile has to say about your health.

See, the foundation is already being laid, sort of like "Skynet" in the Terminator movies. The Human Genome Project was completed in 2003. We learn more about human genetics every year. All that knowledge keeps accumulating, but surely, we will never make use of it. We cloned that sheep back in 1997. Since then, we have cloned many other animals, and there are plenty of people who want to clone the first human. We have been manipulating embryos and using in vitro fertilization for several decades now. We had gene therapy by the nineties. We are perfecting these techniques and developing new ones. They are not completely safe right now, but it stands to reason that they probably will be in the near future. And so, the genetic counseling centers begin to spread, genetic information becomes available to private corporations that start discriminating not on the basis of race, but on the basis of your DNA, and we finally have this enormous weapon in our hands, the science of reprogenetics and the potential to radically accelerate human evolution, and we are asking ourselves, what are we going to do with it?

6.) In a few years, private biotech corporations will start opening up the first genetic enhancement centers. Wait a minute. They are already starting to appear. I posted an article about just such a center opening up in the UK the other day. These corporations will start marketing genetic enhancement technology to affluent couples who are starting their families. "It's still you. Just the best of you." "Do you want to give your child the ultimate edge?" That will be the slogan. Should we do this? I don't think that is a reasonable question. It is simply inconceivable, given what we know about human nature, to think that we won't. How many millions of dollars do couples spend every year on college education or plastic surgery or any number of ways trying to enhance their appearance? How many people go to the gym after work?

7.) Some people will certainly jump at the chance. They will go to the genetic enhancement centers, conceive artificially in such clinics, and the first generation of GenRich will be born. These children will be innately privileged over others. The "keeping up with the Joneses" effect will catch on, and soon, before you know it, everyone who can afford to do so will be doing it. The GenRich children will come of age and rise naturally to the top of society. Eugenics will explode everywhere, in country after country, and those who refuse to use such technology will be left behind in the dust.

[il ragno]

I think you're the one who's not getting it. When I asked you, in another thread

What is there inherent in eugenics that could resist co-optation by political forces towards a purely-political agenda?

You responded,

Virtually everything we know about the demographics of the people who become eugenicists.

and you added

people who are extremely intelligent are overwhelmingly far less interested in mundane politics than helping people. They are without a doubt the most altruistic people on earth.

Yet you launch this thread (and incidentally, you might've noted somewhere that the first three posts are from Lee Silver's REMAKING EDEN) showcasing a scenario in which the sole arbiter dividing fit from unfit is money.

In other words, the future - not some fixed point on a future timeline, but the entirety of future human history is to be ceded to the highest bidder, with 90% of the rest of us (and all our progeny, for all time) relegated to something lesser even than a slave caste.

My goodness: if this constitutes 'altruism' and 'helping people', I shudder at what you'd classify as 'sociopathy'.

Look: as you nevertire of reiterating, you have no interest in reaching or rallying the common man. Likely because the one constant in all of your various positions over the years is that of someone who became convinced very early in life that other people are a nuisance best relegated to subhuman status as worker-drones and slaves (if you can't edit them entirely out of the gene pool). Yet you stupefyingly refuse to understand that it is the elect and the moneyed elite who have always represented the dissolute and debauched and first to die out....that traditionally the progeny of aristocrats, particularly once unmoored from tradition and religion, crumble into aimlessnmess and self-obsolescence; it's the poor who tend to do most of the fucking and all of the fighting. So this bright shiny biotech future, this genetically-modified plum you're licking your lips and reaching for, is corrupt from the outset - innately corrupt - because it perverts the very concept of fit and unfit by jerry-rigging these terms to connote wealth, or its absence.

What sort of society would this augur? Better yet, how short a future do you intend to sentence mankind to? Because based on your declaration of principles, no one is going to be around by 2350 to take the planet back from the cockroaches, who will long since have inherited it.

[Fade the Butcher]

I think you're the one who's not getting it. When I asked you, in another thread What is there inherent in eugenics that could resist co-optation by political forces towards a purely-political agenda? You responded, Virtually everything we know about the demographics of the people who become eugenicists. and you added people who are extremely intelligent are overwhelmingly far less interested in mundane politics than helping people. They are without a doubt the most altruistic people on earth.

Yes, I did say that. You seem to be forgetting that I am not of the view that human behavior is as malleable as you believe it is. I believe that our behavior is the effect of gene-environment interaction, that is, we ultimately act the way we do because we are driven by impulses from within that are strongly hereditary.

Yet you launch this thread (and incidentally, you might've noted somewhere that the first three posts are from Lee Silver's REMAKING EDEN) showcasing a scenario in which the sole arbiter dividing fit from unfit is money.

1.) I have made that clear in previous threads and thought it would be common knowledge here by now. As for this thread, I wasn't finished posted excerpts, so I deferred citing the source and page numbers until I was done.

2.) That's unfortunate. It should be noted that Silver doesn't himself advocate this. That's not his position and he makes that clear in the book. He isn't saying what he thinks should happen. He is simply pointing out, as one of the leading molecular biologists in the world, what he thinks will happen.

In other words, the future - not some fixed point on a future timeline, but the entirety of future human history is to be ceded to the highest bidder, with 90% of the rest of us (and all our progeny, for all time) relegated to something lesser even than a slave caste.

Again, I don't advocate this myself, and neither does Silver. You have missed the point. This is a forecast, not a policy position. It is hardly our fault that heredity is such a strong determinant of social outcomes in the United States. It is not our fault that there is such a cult of individual liberty in America that elevates individual freedom above all else. It is not our fault that religious fanatics will do everything within their power to tie the hands of the government and relegate such technology to the private sector as a consequence.

My goodness: if this constitutes 'altruism' and 'helping people', I shudder at what you'd classify as 'sociopathy'.

Such technology has enormous potential to help people. If we could make better human beings, why should we refrain from doing so? If we could cure cancer and eliminate cystic fibrosis, why shouldn't we?

Look: as you nevertire of reiterating, you have no interest in reaching or rallying the common man.

This is false. You are jumping to the wrong conclusions and this isn't the first time you have done so. I made my own position on this issue clear in previous debates. The government should socialize such technology and make it available to everyone. The government should maintain public reprogenetic clinics just as the government maintains public schools or hospitals. I think we could put taxpayer dollars to much better use in such a way than by maintaining such a ridiculous unnecessary military apparatus. Unfortunately, I don't see this happening, because moralists and religious fanatics will successfully thwart any attempt of the state to provide such services. These are the same nutjobs who blow up abortion clinics.

Likely because the one constant in all of your various positions over the years is that of someone who became convinced very early in life that other people are a nuisance best relegated to subhuman status as worker-drones and slaves (if you can't edit them entirely out of the gene pool).

This is an irresponsible distortion of my views. If I were truly of that point of view, then I would without a doubt be a supporter of the status quo of neoliberal capitalism, which reduces working people to helots, but I have been quite vocal in criticizing people who advocate such policies.

Yet you stupefyingly refuse to understand that it is the elect and the moneyed elite who have always represented the dissolute and debauched and first to die out....that traditionally the progeny of aristocrats, particularly once unmoored from tradition and religion, crumble into aimlessnmess and self-obsolescence; it's the poor who tend to do most of the fucking and all of the fighting.

I entirely agree. It is certainly true that traditional aristocrats have become incompetant parasites in the past, but what you are ignoring is that this was largely the result of heredity and can be explained in terms of reduction to the mean. Tradition is bunk though. The sort of genetic aristocracy that Silver sees arising in the United States is going to be totally different. This genetically privileged aristocracy will tower over the common man just as the average white towers over the average nigger in the United States.

So this bright shiny biotech future, this genetically-modified plum you're licking your lips and reaching for, is corrupt from the outset - innately corrupt - because it perverts the very concept of fit and unfit by jerry-rigging these terms to connote wealth, or its absence.

No, I think you have misunderstood what Silver and others are actually saying about reprogenetics. Silver himself actually considers such a future absolutely horrific, and I do too, but that is what we would expect to happen in a quasi-libertarian/religious fundamentalist society like the United States where such technology is going to be relegated to the private sphere.

What sort of society would this augur?

That depends. If the technology is used responsibly, as it should be, then it certainly has the potential to radically enhance all of our lives. OTOH, if such technology is relegated to the black market because of moralists and religious fanatics, then the result will be the sort of bifurcated society that Silver has described above.

Better yet, how short a future do you intend to sentence mankind to?

See, that's the thing. The people who are likely to use this technology are individual couples interested in enhancing the lives of their own children, not in improving the lot of mankind, and the result will be a bifurcated society that will come about, not as a matter of social policy, but through the private actions of thousands of individual couples.

Because based on your declaration of principles, no one is going to be around by 2350 to take the planet back from the cockroaches, who will long since have inherited it.

I don't think that will be the case. I think ordinary humans will still be around in 2350, just like the Aboriginies in Australia are around today, but the civilized world will be controlled by a new human species that has long since self-evolved passed them.

[Professor John Frink]

Again, I don't advocate this myself, and neither does Silver. You have missed the point. This is a forecast, not a policy position.

I'm afraid that this is a realistic scenario. Anyone denying this is just fooling himself.

[Petr]

I'm afraid that this is a realistic scenario. Anyone denying this is just fooling himself.
You are taking these futuristic daydreams too seriously. Once the fossil fuels run out, the entire modern consumerist society is going to mutate into an unrecognizable form.


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

You are taking these futuristic daydreams too seriously. Once the fossil fuels run out, the entire modern consumerist society is going to mutate into an unrecognizable form.

Silver has a different view. :p

"There is no longer any doubt among molecular geneticists that the technology to perform genetic engineering on human embryos in a safe and efficient manner will be developed . . .

Not all scientists are as myopic as Lord Winston. For example, my colleague Professor Thomas Shenk, chairman of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, asked me why I put my story of accelerating genetic enhancement 350 years in the future. He is convinced that it will happen much sooner. And in March 1998 a group of eminent geneticists and molecular biologists, including the Nobelist James Watson and several members of the National Academy of Sciences, came together at UCLA to discuss the details of how genetic engineering would surely occur."

Silver, pp.297-298

[Fade the Butcher]

Haha. This is hilarious.

"On a cold wet January day in 1998, I stood shivering in a Scottish animal pen with a handful of food pellets, which I offered to the most famous barnyard animal in the world. So anxious was Dolly to get to the food I held that she raced up and nearly knocked me off my feet."

Ibid, p.299

[Petr]

I entirely agree. It is certainly true that traditional aristocrats have become incompetant parasites in the past, but what you are ignoring is that this was largely the result of heredity and can be explained in terms of reduction to the mean. Tradition is bunk though. The sort of genetic aristocracy that Silver sees arising in the United States is going to be totally different.
"I'm telling you, this time it'll be entirely different!"


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

Gregory Stock has come out of the eugenicist closet in recent years. This is an excerpt taken from his book, Redesigining Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future. I got my personal copy in the mail a week or so ago.

We are on the cusp of profound biological change, poised to transcend our current form and character on a journey to destinations of new imagination. The arrival of safe, reliable germline technology will signal the beginning of human self-design. Progressive self-transformation could change our descendants into something sufficiently different from our present selves to not be human in the sense we use the term now. But the ultimate question of our era is whether the cutting edge of life is destined to shift from its present biological substrate — the carbon and other organic materials of our flesh — to that of silicon and its ilk, as proposed by leading artificial-intelligence theorists such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil.

We know that Homo sapiens is not the final word in primate evolution, but few have yet grasped that we are on the cusp of profound biological change, poised to transcend our current form and character on a journey to destinations of new imagination.

At first glance, the very notion that we might become more than "human" seems preposterous. After all, we are still biologically identical in virtually every respect to our cave-dwelling ancestors. But this lack of change is deceptive. Never before have we had the power to manipulate human genetics to alter our biology in meaningful, predictable ways.

Bioethicists and scientists alike worry about the consequences of coming genetic technologies, but few have thought through the larger implications of the wave of new developments arriving in reproductive biology. Today in vitro fertilization is responsible for fewer than 1 percent of births in the United States; embryo selection numbers only in the hundreds of cases; cloning and human genetic modification still lie ahead. But give these emerging technologies a decade and they will be the cutting edge of human biological change.

These developments will write a new page in the history of life, allowing us to seize control of our evolutionary future. Our coming ability to choose our children's genes will have immense social impact and raise difficult ethical dilemmas. Biological enhancement will lead us into unexplored realms, eventually challenging our basic ideas about what it means to be human.

Some imagine we will see the perils, come to our senses, and turn away from such possibilities. But when we imagine Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, we are not incredulous or shocked by his act. It is too characteristically human. To forgo the powerful technologies that genomics and molecular biology are bringing would be as out of character for humanity as it would be to use them without concern for the dangers they pose. We will do neither. The question is no longer whether we will manipulate embryos, but when, where, and how.

We have already felt the impact of previous advances in reproductive technology. Without the broad access to birth control that we take so for granted, the populations of Italy, Japan, and Germany would not be shrinking; birth rates in the developing world would not be falling. These are major shifts, yet unlike the public response to today's high-tech developments, no impassioned voices protest birth control as an immense and dangerous experiment with our genetic future. Those opposing family planning seem more worried about the immorality of recreational sex than about human evolution.

In this book, we will examine the emerging reproductive technologies for selecting and altering human embryos. These developments, culminating in germline engineering -- the manipulation of the genetics of egg or sperm (our "germinal" cells) to modify future generations -- will have large consequences. Already, procedures that influence the germline are routine in labs working on fruit flies and mice, and researchers have done early procedures on nonhuman primates. Direct human germline manipulations may still be a decade or two away, but methods of choosing specific genes in an embryo are in use today to prevent disease, and sophisticated methods for making broader choices are arriving every year, bringing with them a taste of the ethical and social questions that will accompany comprehensive germline engineering.

The arrival of safe, reliable germline technology will signal the beginning of human self-design. We do not know where this development will ultimately take us, but it will transform the evolutionary process by drawing reproduction into a highly selective social process that is far more rapid and effective at spreading successful genes than traditional sexual competition and mate selection.

Human cloning has been a topic of passionate debate recently, but germline engineering and embryo selection have implications that are far more profound. When cloning becomes safe and reliable enough to use in humans -- which is clearly not yet the case -- it will be inherently conservative, if not extremely so. It will bring no new genetic constitutions into being, but will create genetic copies of people who already exist. The idea of a delayed identical twin is strange and unfamiliar, but not earthshattering. Most of us have met identical twins. They are very similar, yet different.

Dismissal of technology's role in humanity's genetic future is common even among biologists who use advanced technologies in their work. Perhaps the notion that we will control our evolutionary future seems too audacious. Perhaps the idea that humans might one day differ from us in fundamental ways is too disorienting. Most mass-media science fiction doesn't challenge our thinking about this either. One of the last major sci-fi movies of the second millennium was The Phantom Menace, George Lucas's 1999 prequel to Star Wars. Its vision of human biological enhancement was simple: there won't be any. Lucas reveled in special effects and fantastical life forms, but altered us not a jot. Despite reptilian sidekicks with pedestal eyes and hard-bargaining insectoids that might have escaped from a Raid commercial, the film's humans were no different from us. With the right accent and a coat and tie, the leader of the Galactic Republic might have been the president of France.

Such a vision of human continuity is reassuring. It lets us imagine a future in which we feel at home. Space pods, holographic telephones, laser pistols, and other amazing gadgets are enticing to many of us, but pondering a time when humans no longer exist is another story, one far too alien and unappealing to arouse our dramatic sympathies. We've seen too many apocalyptic images of nuclear, biological, and environmental disaster to think that the path to human extinction could be anything but horrific.

Yet the road to our eventual disappearance might be paved not by humanity's failure but by its success. Progressive self- transformation could change our descendants into something sufficiently different from our present selves to not be human in the sense we use the term now. Such an occurrence would more aptly be termed a pseudoextinction, since it would not end our lineage. Unlike the saber-toothed tiger and other large mammals that left no descendants when our ancestors drove them to extinction, Homo sapiens would spawn its own successors by fast-forwarding its evolution.

Some disaster, of course, might derail our technological advance, or our biology might prove too complex to rework. But our recent deciphering of the human genome (the entirety of our genetic constitution) and our massive push to unravel life's workings suggest that modification of our biology is far nearer to reality than the distant space travel we see in science fiction movies. Moreover, we are unlikely to achieve the technology to flit around the galaxy without being able to breach our own biology as well. The Human Genome Project is only a beginning.

Considering the barrage of press reports about the project, we naturally wonder how much is hype. Extravagant metaphor has not been lacking. We are deciphering the "code of codes," reading the book of life," looking at the "holy grail of human biology." It is reminiscent of the enthusiasm that attended Neil Armstrong's 1969 walk on the moon. Humanity seemed poised to march toward the stars, but 2001 has come and gone, and there has been no sentient computer like HAL, no odyssey to the moons of Jupiter. Thirty years from now, however, I do not think we will look back at the Human Genome Project with a similar wistful disappointment. Unlike outer space, genetics is at our core, and as we learn to manipulate it, we are learning to manipulate ourselves.

Well before this new millennium's close, we will almost certainly change ourselves enough to become much more than simply human. In this book, I will explore the nature and meaning of these coming changes, place them within the larger context of our rapid progress in biology and technology, and examine the social and ethical implications of the first tentative steps we are now taking.

Many bioethicists do not share my perspective on where we are heading. They imagine that our technology might become potent enough to alter us, but that we will turn away from it and reject human enhancement. But the reshaping of human genetics and biology does not hinge on some cadre of demonic researchers hidden away in a lab in Argentina trying to pick up where Hitler left off. The coming possibilities will be the inadvertent spinoff of mainstream research that virtually everyone supports. Infertility, for example, is a source of deep pain for millions of couples. Researchers and clinicians working on in vitro fertilization (IVF) don't think much about future human evolution, but nonetheless are building a foundation of expertise in conceiving, handling, testing, and implanting human embryos, and this will one day be the basis for the manipulation of the human species. Already, we are seeing attempts to apply this knowledge in highly controversial ways: as premature as today's efforts to clone humans may be, they would be the flimsiest of fantasies if they could not draw on decades of work on human IVF.

Similarly, in early 2001 more than five hundred gene-therapy trials were under way or in review throughout the world. The researchers are trying to cure real people suffering from real diseases and are no more interested in the future of human evolution than the IVF researchers. But their progress toward inserting genes into adult cells will be one more piece of the foundation for manipulating human embryos.

Not everything that can be done should or will be done, of course, but once a relatively inexpensive technology becomes feasible in thousands of laboratories around the world and a sizable fraction of the population sees it as beneficial, it will be used.

Erewhon, the brilliant 1872 satire by Samuel Butler, contains a scene that suggests what would be needed to stop the coming reworking of human biology. Erewhon is a civilized land with archaic machines, the result of a civil war won by the "anti-machinists" five centuries before the book's story takes place. After its victory, this faction outlawed all further mechanical progress and destroyed all improvements made in the previous three centuries. They felt that to do otherwise would be suicide. "Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years," wrote their ancient leader, "and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing . . . I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity at which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present . . . Though our rebellion against their infant power will cause infinite suffering . . . we must [otherwise see] ourselves gradually superseded by our own creatures until we rank no higher in comparison with them, than the beasts of the field with ourselves."

Butler would no doubt have chuckled at his own prescience had he been able to watch the special-purpose IBM computer Deep Blue defeat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997.We are at a similar juncture with our early steps toward human genetic manipulation. To "protect" ourselves from the future reworking of our biology would require more than an occasional restriction; it would demand a research blockade of molecular genetics or even a general rollback of technology. That simply won't occur, barring global bio- catastrophe and a bloody victory by today's bio-Luddites.

One irony of humanity's growing power to shape its own evolution is the identity of the architects. In 1998, I spoke at a conference on mammalian cloning in Washington, D.C., and met Ian Wilmut, the Scottish scientist whose cloning of Dolly had created such a furor the previous year. Affronted by my relative lack of concern about the eventual cloning of humans, he vehemently insisted that the idea was abhorrent and that I was irresponsible to say that it would likely occur within a decade. His anger surprised me, considering that I was only speaking about human cloning, whereas he had played a role in the breakthrough that might bring it about. Incidentally, patent attorneys at the Roslin Institute, where the work occurred, and PPL Therapeutics, which funded the work, did not overlook the importance of human applications, since claims on their patent specifically cover them.

We cannot hold ourselves apart from the biological heritage that has shaped us. What we learn from fruit flies, mice, or even a cute Dorset ewe named Dolly is relevant to us. No matter how much the scientists who perform basic research in animal genetics and reproduction may sometimes deny it, their work is a critical part of the control we will soon have over our biology. Our desire to apply the results of animal research to human medicine, after all, is what drives much of the funding of this work.

Over the past hundred years, the trajectory of the life sciences traces a clear shift from description to understanding to manipulation. At the close of the nineteenth century, describing new biological attributes or species was still a good Ph.D. project for a student. This changed during the twentieth century, and such observations became largely a means for understanding the workings of biology. That too is now changing, and in the first half of the twenty-first century, biological understanding will likely become less an end in itself than a means to manipulate biology. In one century, we have moved from observing to understanding to engineering. Early Tinkering The best gauge of how far we will go in manipulating our genetics and that of our children is not what we say to pollsters, but what we are doing in those areas in which we already can modify our biology. On August 2, 1998, Marco Pantani cycled along the Champs Élysées to win the eighty-fifth Tour de France, but the race's real story was the scandal over performance enhancement -- which, of course, means drugs. [/quote]

[Petr]

Silver has a different view. :p
We already know his cultist opinions.

Silver, Watson - a small tight circle it looks like.


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

The banned hormone erythropoietin was at the heart of this particular chapter in the ongoing saga of athletic performance enhancement. By raising the oxygen-carrying capacity of red blood cells, the drug can boost endurance by 10 to 15 percent. Early in the race, a stash of it was found in the car of the masseur of the Italian team Festina -- one of the world's best -- and after an investigation the entire team was booted from the race. A few days later, more erythropoietin was found, this time in the possession of one of the handlers of the Dutch team, and several of its cyclists were kicked out. As police raids intensified, five Spanish teams and an Italian one quit in protest, leaving only fourteen of the original twenty-one teams.

The public had little sympathy for the cheaters, but a crowd of angry Festina supporters protested that their riders had been unfairly singled out, and the French minister of health insisted that doping had been going on since racing began. Two years later in a courtroom in Lille, the French sports icon Richard Virenque, five- time winner of the King of the Mountains jersey in the Tour de France, seemed to confirm as much when the president of the court asked him if he took doping products. "We don't say doping," replied Virenque. "We say we're 'preparing for the race.'"

The most obvious problem with today's performance-enhancing drugs -- besides their being a way of cheating -- is that they're dangerous. And when one athlete uses them, others must follow suit to stay competitive. But more than safety is at issue. The concern is what sports will be like when competitors need medical pit crews. As difficult as the problem of doping is, it will soon worsen, because such drugs will become safer, more effective, and harder to detect.

Professional sports offers a preview of the spread of enhancement technology into other arenas. Sports may carry stronger incentives to cheat, and thus push athletes toward greater health risks, but the nonsporting world is not so different. A person working two jobs feels under pressure to produce, and so does a student taking a test or someone suffering the effects of growing old. When safe, reliable metabolic and physiological enhancers exist, the public will want them, even if they are illegal. To block their use will be far more daunting than today's war on drugs. An antidrug commercial proclaiming "Dope is for dopes!" or one showing a frying egg with the caption "Your brain on drugs" would not persuade anyone to stop using a safe memory enhancer.

Aesthetic surgery is another budding field for enhancement. When we try to improve our appearance, the personal stakes are high because our looks are always with us. Knowing that the photographs of beautiful models in magazines are airbrushed does not make us any less self-conscious if we believe we have a smile too gummy, skin too droopy, breasts too small, a nose too big, a head too bald, or any other such "defects." Surgery to correct these nonmedical problems has been growing rapidly and spreading to an ever-younger clientele. Public approval of aesthetic surgery has climbed some 50 percent in the past decade in the United States. We may not be modifying our genes yet, but we are ever more willing to resort to surgery to hold back the most obvious (and superficial) manifestations of aging, or even simply to remodel our bodies. Nor is this only for the wealthy. In 1994, when the median income in the United States was around $38,000, two thirds of the 400,000 aesthetic surgeries were performed on those with a family income under $50,000, and health insurance rarely covered the procedures. Older women who have subjected themselves to numerous face-lifts but can no longer stave off the signs of aging are not a rarity. But the tragedy is not so much that these women fight so hard to deny the years of visible decline, but that their struggle against life's natural ebb ultimately must fail. If such a decline were not inevitable, many people would eagerly embrace pharmaceutical or genetic interventions to retard aging.

The desire to triumph over our own mortality is an ancient dream, but it hardly stands alone. Whether we look at today's manipulations of our bodies by face-lifts, tattoos, pierced ears, or erythropoietin, the same message rings loud and clear: if medicine one day enables us to manipulate our biology in appealing ways, many of us will do so -- even if the benefits are dubious and the risks not insignificant. To most people, the earliest adopters of these technologies will seem reckless or crazy, but are they so different from the daredevil test pilots of jet aircraft in the 1950s? Virtually by definition, early users believe that the possible gains from their bravado justify the risks. Otherwise, they would wait for flawed procedures to be discarded, for technical glitches to be worked through, for interventions to become safer and more predictable.

In truth, as long as people compete with one another for money, status, and mates, as long as they look for ways to display their worth and uniqueness, they will look for an edge for themselves and their children.

People will make mistakes with these biological manipulations. People will abuse them. People will worry about them. But as much could be said about any potent new development. No governmental body will wave some legislative wand and make advanced genetic and reproductive technologies go away, and we would be foolish to want this. Our collective challenge is not to figure out how to block these developments, but how best to realize their benefits while minimizing our risks and safeguarding our rights and freedoms. This will not be easy.

Our history is not a tale of self-restraint. Ten thousand years ago, when humans first crossed the Bering Strait to enter the Americas, they found huge herds of mammoths and other large mammals. In short order, these Clovis peoples, named for the archaeological site in New Mexico where their tools were first identified, used their skill and weaponry to drive them to extinction. This was no aberration: the arrival of humans in Australia, New Zealand, Madagascar, Hawaii, and Easter Island brought the same slaughter of wildlife. We may like to believe that primitive peoples lived in balance with nature, but when they entered new lands, they reshaped them in profound, often destructive ways. Jared Diamond, a professor of physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine and an expert on how geography and environment have affected human evolution, has tried to reconcile this typical pattern with the rare instances in which destruction did not occur. He writes that while "small, long- established egalitarian societies can evolve conservationist practices, because they've had plenty of time to get to know their local environment and to perceive their own self-interest," these practices do not occur when a people suddenly colonizes an unfamiliar environment or acquires a potent new technology.

Our technology is evolving so rapidly that by the time we begin to adjust to one development, another is already surpassing it. The answer would seem to be to slow down and devise the best course in advance, but that notion is a mirage. Change is accelerating, not slowing, and even if we could agree on what to aim for, the goal would probably be unrealistic. Complex changes are occurring across too broad a front to chart a path. The future is too opaque to foresee the eventual impacts of important new technologies, much less whole bodies of knowledge like genomics (the study of genomes). No one understood the powerful effects of the automobile or television at its inception. Few appreciated that our use of antibiotics would lead to widespread drug resistance or that improved nutrition and public health in the developing world would help bring on a population explosion. Our blindness about the consequences of new reproductive technologies is nothing new, and we will not be able to erase the uncertainty by convening an august panel to think through the issues.

No shortcut is possible. As always, we will have to earn our knowledge by using the technology and learning from the problems that arise. Given that some people will dabble in the new procedures as soon as they become even remotely accessible, our safest path is to not drive early explorations underground. What we learn about such technology while it is imperfect and likely to be used by only a small number of people may help us figure out how to manage it more wisely as it matures. Genes and Dreams James Watson, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, cowinner of the Nobel Prize, and first director of the Human Genome Project, is arguably the most famous biologist of our times. The double-helical structure of DNA that he and Francis Crick described in 1953 has become the universally recognized symbol of a scientific dawn whose brightness we have barely begun to glimpse. In 1998, I was the moderator of a panel on which he sat with a half-dozen other leading molecular biologists, including Leroy Hood, the scientist who developed the first automated DNA sequencer, and French Anderson, the father of human gene therapy. The topic was human germline engineering, and the audience numbered about a thousand, mostly nonscientists. Anderson intoned about the moral distinction between human therapy and enhancement and laid out a laundry list of constraints that would have to be met before germline interventions would be acceptable. The seventy-year-old Watson sat quietly, his thinly tufted head lolled back as though he were asleep on a bus, but he was wide awake, and later shot an oblique dig, complaining about "fundamentalists from Tulsa, Oklahoma," which just happens to be where Anderson grew up. Watson summed up his own view with inimitable bluntness: "No one really has the guts to say it, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?"

Anderson, a wiry two-time national karate champion in the over-sixty category, is unused to being attacked as a conservative. Too often he has been the point man for gene therapy, receiving death threats for his pioneering efforts in the early 1990s and for a more recent attempt to win approval for fetal gene therapy. But the landscape has shifted. When organizing this symposium, a colleague and I worried about disruptive demonstrators, and could find only an occasional article outside academia on human germline therapy. A year later, stories about "designer children" were getting major play in Time and Newsweek, and today I frequently receive e-mail from high school students doing term papers on the subject.

Watson's simple question, "If we could make better humans . . . why shouldn't we?" cuts to the heart of the controversy about human genetic enhancement. Worries about the procedure's feasibility or safety miss the point. No serious scientists advocate manipulating human genetics until such interventions are safe and reliable.

[Petr]

But the ultimate question of our era is whether the cutting edge of life is destined to shift from its present biological substrate — the carbon and other organic materials of our flesh — to that of silicon and its ilk, as proposed by leading artificial-intelligence theorists such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil.[/b]
Kurzweil, eh? More cultist networking.


Petr

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Why all the fuss, then? Opinions may differ about what risks are acceptable, but virtually every physician agrees that any procedure needs to be safe, and that any potential benefit needs to be weighed against the risks. Moreover, few prospective parents would seek even a moderately risky genetic enhancement for their child unless it was extremely beneficial, relatively safe, and unobtainable in an easier way. Actually, some critics, like Leon Kass, a well-known bioethicist at the University of Chicago who has long opposed such potential interventions, aren't worried that this technology will fail, but that it will succeed, and succeed gloriously.

Their nightmare is that safe, reliable genetic manipulations will allow people to substantively enhance their biology. They believe that the use -- and misuse -- of this power will tear the fabric of our society. Such angst is particularly prevalent in western Europe, where most governments take a more conservative stand on the use of genetic technologies, even banning genetically altered foods. Stefan Winter, a physician at the University of Bonn and former vice president of the European Committee for Biomedical Ethics, says, "We should never apply germline gene interventions to human beings. The breeding of mankind would be a social nightmare from which no one could escape."

Given Hitler's appalling foray into racial purification, European sensitivities are understandable, but they miss the bigger picture. The possibility of altering the genes of our prospective children is not some isolated spinoff of molecular biology but an integral part of the advancing technologies that culminate a century of progress in the biological sciences. We have spent billions to unravel our biology, not out of idle curiosity, but in the hope of bettering our lives. We are not about to turn away from this.

The coming advances will challenge our fundamental notions about the rhythms and meaning of life. Today, the "natural" setting for the vast majority of humans, especially in the economically developed world, bears no resemblance to the stomping grounds of our primitive ancestors, and nothing suggests that we will be any more hesitant about "improving" our own biology than we were about "improving" our environment. The technological powers we have hitherto used so effectively to remake our world are now potent and precise enough for us to turn them on ourselves. Breakthroughs in the matrixlike arrays called DNA chips, which may soon read thirty thousand genes at a pop; in artificial chromosomes, which now divide as stably as their naturally occurring cousins; and in bio-informatics, the use of computer-driven methodologies to decipher our genomes -- all are paving the way to human genetic engineering and the beginnings of human biological design.

The birth of Dolly caused a stir not because of any real possibility of swarms of replicated humans, but because of what it signified. Anyone could see that one of the most intimate aspects of our lives -- the passing of life from one generation to the next -- might one day change beyond recognition. Suddenly the idea that we could hold ourselves apart and remain who we are and as we are while transforming the world around us seemed untenable.

Difficult ethical issues about our use of genetic and reproductive technologies have already begun to emerge. It is illegal in much of the world to test fetal gender for the purpose of sex selection, but the practice is commonplace. A study in Bombay reported that an astounding 7,997 out of 8,000 aborted fetuses were female, and in South Korea such abortions have become so widespread that some 65 percent of thirdborn children are boys, presumably because couples are unwilling to have yet a third girl. Nor is there any consensus among physicians about sex selection. In a recent poll, only 32 percent of doctors in the United States thought the practice should be illegal. Support for a ban ranged from 100 percent in Portugal to 22 percent in China. Although we may be uncomfortable with the idea of a woman aborting her fetus because of its gender, a culture that allows abortion at a woman's sole discretion would require a major contortion to ban this sex selection.

Clearly, these technologies will be virtually impossible to control. As long as abortion and prenatal tests are available, parents who feel strongly about the sex of their child will use these tools. Such practices are nothing new. In nineteenth-century India, the British tried to stop female infanticide among high-caste Indians and failed. Modern technology, at least in India, may merely have substituted abortion for infanticide.

Sex selection highlights an important problem that greater control over human reproduction could bring. Some practices that seem unthreatening when used by any particular individual could become very challenging if they became widespread. If almost all couples had boys, the shortage of girls would obviously be disastrous, but extreme scenarios of this sort are highly suspect because they ignore corrective forces that usually come into play.

Worry over potential sex imbalances is but one example of a general unease about embryo selection. Our choices about other aspects of our children's genetics might create social imbalances too -- for example, large numbers of children who conform to the media's ideals of beauty. Such concerns multiply when we couple them with visions of a "slippery slope," whereby initial use, even if relatively innocuous, inevitably leads to ever more widespread and problematic future applications: as marijuana leads to cocaine, and social drinking to alcoholism, gender selection will lead to clusters of genetically enhanced superhumans who will dominate if not enslave us. If we accept such reasoning, the only way to avoid ultimate disaster is to avoid the route at the outset, and we clearly haven't.

The argument that we should ban cloning and human germline therapy because they would reduce genetic diversity is a good example of the misuse of extrapolations of this sort. Even the birth of a whopping one million genetically altered children a year -- more than ten times the total number of IVF births during the decade following the first such procedure in 1978 -- would still be less than 1/100 of the babies born worldwide each year. The technology's impact on society will be immense in many ways, but a consequential diminution of biological diversity is not worth worrying about.

To noticeably narrow the human gene pool in the decades ahead, the technology would have to be applied in a consistent fashion and used a hundred times more frequently than even the strongest enthusiasts hope for. Such widespread use could never occur unless great numbers of people embraced the technology or governments forced them to submit to it. The former could happen only if people came to view the technology as extraordinarily safe, reliable, and desirable; the latter only if our democratic institutions had already suffered assaults so grave that the loss of genetic diversity would be the least of our problems. While there are many valid philosophical, social, ethical, scientific, and religious concerns about embryo selection and the manipulation of the human germline, the loss of genetic diversity is not one of them. Flesh and Blood As we explore the implications of advanced reproductive technologies, we must keep in mind the larger evolutionary context of the changes now under way. At first glance, human reproduction mediated by instruments, electronics, and pharmaceuticals in a modern laboratory seems unnatural and perverted. We are flesh and blood; this is not our place. But by the same token, we should abandon our vast buzzing honeycombs of steel, fiber optics, and concrete. Manhattan and Shanghai bear no resemblance to the African veldt that bore us.

Cocooned in the new environments we have fashioned, we can easily forget our kinship to our animal ancestors, but roughly 98 percent of our gene sequences are the same as a chimpanzee's, 85 percent are the same as a mouse's, and more than 50 percent of a fruit fly's genes have human homologues. The immense differences between us and the earth's other living creatures are less a result of our genetic and physiological dissimilarities than of the massive cultural construct we inhabit. Understanding this is an important element in finding the larger meaning of our coming control of human genetics and reproduction. And if we are to understand the social construction that is the embodiment of the human enterprise and the source of its technology, we need to see its larger evolutionary context.

A momentous transition took place 700 million years ago when single cells came together to form multicellular life. All the plants and animals we see today are but variations on that single theme -- multicellularity. We all share a common origin, a common biochemistry, a common genetics, which is why researchers can ferry a jellyfish gene into a rabbit to make the rabbit's skin fluoresce under ultraviolet light, or use a mammalian growth-hormone gene to make salmon grow larger.

Today we are in the midst of a second and equally momentous evolutionary transition: the human-led fusion of life into a vast network of people, crops, animals, and machines. A whir of trade and telecommunications is binding our technological and biological creations into a vast social organism of planetary dimensions. And this entity's emergent powers are expanding our individual potentials far beyond those of other primates.

This global matrix has taken form in only a few thousand years and grows ever tighter and more interconnected. The process started slowly among preliterate hunter-gatherers, but once humans learned to write, they began to accumulate knowledge outside their brains. Change began to accelerate. The storage capacity for information became essentially unlimited, even if sifting through that information on the tablets and scrolls where it resided was hard. Now, however, with the advent of the computer, the power to electronically manipulate and sort this growing body of information is speeding up to the point where such processing occurs nearly as easily as it previously did within our brains. With the amount of accessible information exploding on the Internet and elsewhere, small wonder that our technology is racing ahead.

The social organism we have created gives us not only the language, art, music, and religion that in so many ways define our humanity, but the capacity to remake our own form and character. The profound shifts in our lives and values in the past century are not some cultural fluke; they are the child of a larger transformation wrought by the diffusion of technology into virtually every aspect of our lives, by trade and instantaneous global telecommunications, and by the growing manipulation of the physical and biological worlds around us.

Critical changes, unprecedented in the long history of life, are under way. With the silicon chip we are making complex machines that rival life itself. With the space program we are moving beyond the thin planetary film that has hitherto constrained life. With our biological research we are taking control of evolution and beginning to direct it.

The coming challenges of human genetic enhancement are not going to melt away; they will intensify decade by decade as we continue to unravel our biology, our nature, and the physical universe. Humanity is moving out of its childhood and into a gawky, stumbling adolescence in which it must learn not only to acknowledge its immense new powers, but to figure out how to use them wisely. The choices we face are daunting, but putting our heads in the sand is not the solution.

Germline engineering embodies our deepest fears about today's revolution in biology. Indeed, the technology is the ultimate expression of that revolution because it may enable us to remake ourselves. But the issue of human genetic enhancement, challenging as it is, may not be the most difficult possibility we face. Recent breakthroughs in biology could not have been made without the assistance of computerized instrumentation, data analysis, and communications. Given the blistering pace of computer evolution and the Hollywood plots with skin-covered cyborgs or computer chips embedded in people's brains, we naturally wonder whether cybernetic developments that blur the line between human and machine will overshadow our coming ability to alter ourselves biologically.

The ultimate question of our era is whether the cutting edge of life is destined to shift from its present biological substrate -- the carbon and other organic materials of our flesh -- to that of silicon and its ilk, as proposed by leading artificial-intelligence theorists such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil. They believe that the computer will soon transcend us. To be the "last humans," in the sense that future humans will modify their biology sufficiently to differ from us in meaningful ways, seems tame compared to giving way to machines, as the Erewhonians so feared. Before we look more deeply at human biological enhancement and what it may bring, we must consider what truth these machine dreams contain.

[Petr]

Quit the spamming!


Petr

[Petr]

Silver has a different view. :p
Members of the American elite are sure not acting like they have deep faith in future:

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

(This is really frightening reading)


"If you've been wondering why the Bush administration has been spending money, cutting social programs, and starting wars like there's no tomorrow, now you have your answer: as far as they are concerned, there is no tomorrow."


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

Quit the spamming!

Such fascinating information belongs in this thread. BTW, I would rather read something informative about the potential of future technology to enhance our lives than all the worthless Biblical nonsense you are always belching out.

[Fade the Butcher]

Members of the American elite are sure not acting like they have deep faith in future

So, you would have us believe the end of capitalism is something we should be afraid of?

[Petr]

So, you would have us believe the end of capitalism is something we should be afraid of?
Do you really think that capitalism is the only thing under threat?

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/SecondPage.html


"While there are some promising technological advancements in solar-nanotechnology, even Dr. Richard Smalley, the scientist at the forefront of these technologies, admits we need a series of "miracles" to prevent a total collapse of industrial civilization.

In the February 2005 issue of Discover Magazine, Dr. Smalley gave the following prognosis:

There will be inflation as billions of people compete for
insufficient resources. There will be famine. There will be
terrorism and war.

He went on to say that it will take "presidential leadership" to inspire us to pursue technologies that might alleviate this crisis.

In other words, the chances of technology saving you from the coming economic collapse are about the same as the chances of another virgin-birth taking place.

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Do you really think that capitalism is the only thing under threat?

I don't think our circumstances are that dire. I'm sure everyone has noticed that gas prices are already higher today though than they were when Hurricane Katrina hit last fall. The hideous phenomena that is the suburb will disappear. There might be something like the Great Depression at worst (which actually resulted in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and all but killed immigration in the thirties), which is probably needed, but it won't be the end of the world, and we will probably even benefit in the long run. We should already be moving to nuclear power and a society oriented towards the common good as opposed to individual license. I have nothing to fear from Peak Oil. I welcome it.

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Kurzweil, eh? More cultist networking.

A brilliant man. He is getting a little ahead of himself though. I personally have no objection to cybernetic enhancement.

[Petr]

We should already be moving to nuclear power and a society oriented towards the common good as opposed to individual license. I have nothing to fear from Peak Oil. I welcome it.
Does "peak uranium" say anything to you? You should really read that link that I gave, if not else then just to prepare yourself for the worst-case scenario.


Petr

[Petr]

A brilliant man. He is getting a little ahead of himself though.
I'm not the only one who smells internal promotion networks:

http://www.betterhumans.com/blogs/george/archive/2006/04/03/5720.aspx

I've read the Smalley piece Reynolds refers to, and this is simply an attempt by a mainstream scientist to debunk the transhumanist cult-like view that atom-size robots can cure all disease, as well as aging and death. The tendency to dismiss mainstream scientific views is, of course, characteristic of cults and quackery. Kurzweil, who is an inventor and self-promoter with no background in chemistry, is portrayed as out-arguing a Nobelist.

If the Wall Street Journal's editors knew that one Scientologist was going to review (very favorably) another Scientologist's book, and the book was a highly slanted apology for Scientology, I don't believe the WSJ would print such a thing. But this is what Reynolds did with Kurzweil.


Petr

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Does "peak uranium" say anything to you? You should really read that link that I gave, if not else then just to prepare yourself for the worst-case scenario.

I know far more about the subject than you do (having spent considerable time researching it last summer). If I wanted to, I could easily direct you to the literature available about the matter (a lot of which I own). Peak Oil isn't the end of the world. It is the end of cheap oil and the beginning of a period of dramatic socioeconomic adjustment. The vast majority of the oil that is used in the United States today is simply being wasted. Consumers will respond to higher oil prices by purchasing more fuel efficient cars, traveling less, and relocating closer to their workplace. We will build more nuclear power plants and produce synthetic oil from our coal reserves (America has the largest coal reserves on earth). The end of the world: less traffic, less urban sprawl, and less pollution? I don't think so.

There will certainly be serious economic dislocation at first and I predict the response will be similar to that of the Great Depression. It will strengthen the immigration reform movement. It will force people to live closer together and will weaken support for multiculturalism. I predict that millions of illegal aliens will be deported as economic growth constricts. Globalization will grind to a halt and radical laissez-faire capitalism will fall into disrepute like it did back in the thirties. It is certainly not going to stop GE though. We are just going to have to change the way we use energy and the way we live. In the long run, I think we will emerge from this better off than we were before. Also, if there are all these vast famines that you predict, then they will happen in the third world, as the poorest humans will suffer the most from rising petroleum prices and stagnating economic growth.

[Fade the Butcher]

Noam Chomsky weighs in here.

http://blogs.zmag.org/ee_links/peak_oil_theory

The basic theory is incontrovertible. The only questions have to do with timing and cost. ...

The date can be pushed back much farther if more costly (or maybe some to-be-discovered improved) technology is used. As for the estimates of cost, by reasonable standards one could argue that oil is far under-priced. In real terms, it's not particularly high now as compared with other commodities, from some reasonable base line. And low-priced oil leads to heavier use and less effort to create sustainable alternatives.

That I think is a far more serious problem than production peaking. In fact, one could argue that the earlier production peaks, the better off the human species (and a lot more) is, because of the effects of unconstrained use of hydrocarbons on the environment.

Talk about "shrinking our economies" is pretty meaningless. Our economies would shrink substantially if we got rid of huge expenditures for the military, for incarceration, and other highly destructive activities. Sustainable economies might lead to highly improved quality of life.

[Fade the Butcher]

So long as "we" survive the ....."period ofadjustment".

I think we should rewind the tape back to the Great Depression. During the Great Depression, Americans absolutely refused to tolerate immigration from abroad. The Hoover administration deported hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens from Mexico (Hispanic activists are demanding reparations for that today). C'mon, il ragno. Why should you be opposed to such a scenario? I mean, if your goal is to create something like the Third Reich in the United States, then such an event is arguably the best shot you got, as we know from history that revolutionary political movements thrive best in periods of economic crisis, especially when racial and ethnic conflict is thrown into the mix, as would obviously be the case in such a future America.

[Fade the Butcher]

Here is an interview with Lee Silver from two years ago. He published his book Remaking Eden way back in 1997.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0402/12/asb.00.html

LEE SILVER, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: Good evening, Aaron.

BROWN: Professor, put a headline on this from where you saw it today. What is the thing we should be most focused on?

SILVER: Well, this is a giant technical step, in the sense that a lot of scientists thought that, even if human embryo cloning was possible, it would always be very inefficient.

And what the Korean scientists have done is, they have developed a method to make cloning of human embryos efficient. There was a 25 percent success rate of turning eggs into embryos. So this suggests that it's -- there's not just a hypothesis stem cells could be used to overcome disease, but this provides really good evidence that -- it's going to be down the line. We're going to be able to use embryonic stem cells to create tissues that can be used to overcome a person's disease.

BROWN: What about this, if anything, should make me nervous?

SILVER: I think that a lot of people are very nervous about reproductive cloning.

But there's a bright line between using these cells for therapeutic purposes and for reproductive purposes. And that bright line is whether you put the embryo into a woman's womb or not. If you just work in the laboratory, you cannot create a fetus or a baby. We have to remember, of course, the embryos we're talking about are invisible to the human eye. It's only if you put that into a womb.

That's not a slippery slope. That's a giant leap, if somebody did that. And, at the moment, the technology is dangerous in animals. And the Korean scientists didn't do anything to show that it might be safe to use reproductive cloning in humans.

BROWN: Do different countries or different cultures here view the prospects of human baby cloning differently?

SILVER: Well, it's not the human baby cloning that cultures view differently. Most people don't like that idea. I think different cultures look at the human embryo in very different ways.

So, in the United States there's a real polarization between those who look at this invisible embryo and equate it with a human being vs. those who just see cells that could be used for tissues that can overcome disease. The Asian countries don't seem to have as much of a problem with using human embryos to overcome disease, which is why a lot of scientists and money is moving to Asia, as opposed to the United States.

BROWN: Back two, 2 1/2 years ago, when the president made his decision and made his speech on stem cell research, there was talk about brain drain and money drain going to other places. Have we, in fact, seen that?

SILVER: Well, in fact, there's some evidence that that actually is happening.

We've seen a reduce in the amount of money and research being done in the United States, at the same time, as Singapore and China and now Korea are investing a lot more money, again, because they don't have the same cultural objection that exists in some people in the United States.

BROWN: I'm not quite sure how to ask this question. But I think what I want to know is, do you think, in your lifetime, for example, in your lifetime, they will be able to repair a broken spinal cord, get someone who's paralyzed to walk? Do you anticipate that?

SILVER: I do, actually. I think many scientists are very optimistic that this technology can be used to replace all sorts of tissues and organs.

Now, organs are more difficult. I think the first replacement, clinical use of replacement technology will be with simple cells, like muscle cells to overcome heart disease or pancreatic cells to overcome diabetes or perhaps to neurological cells to overcome Parkinson's disease. When you try to make something more complicated, like a kidney, for example, that's going to be further down the road. But I think, perhaps in my lifetime, I might even see that.

BROWN: That would be some sort of day, if we get there. And there will be a lot of battles between now and then, scientific and otherwise.

SILVER: Yes.

BROWN: Professor, good to have you with us tonight. Thank you, sir, very much.

SILVER: Very good to be with you.

BROWN: Thank you, Lee Silver, Professor Lee Silver, out of Princeton University.

[Petr]

Here is an interview with Lee Silver from two years ago. He published his book Remaking Eden way back in 1997.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0402/12/asb.00.html
"And what the Korean scientists have done is, they have developed a method to make cloning of human embryos efficient."

Does this interview imply that Silver bought into the recent Korean cloning-hoax hook, line and sinker?

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/bethell2.html

The Stem-Cell Scam


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

Does this interview imply that Silver bought into the recent Korean cloning-hoax hook, line and sinker?

I doubt Dr. Silver has read The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science or regularly reviews AnswersInGenesis for the latest decoded hot tips from the Bible about molecular biology. As it happens, Silver has a new book coming out next month about organized religion and its quarrel with science, Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060582677/104-5083650-0527952?v=glance&n=283155).

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0060582677.01._AA240_SCLZZZZZZZ_V55001083_.jpg

From Publishers Weekly

Silver, a molecular biologist at Princeton, examines new dimensions of the contentious debate between science and religion over cloning and other biotechnologies, and brings fresh insights to it. Many Western religious people believe biotechnology is an attempt to play God and that human clones would be created not in God's image but in the image of humankind. Such arguments rest on the nature of humanity, and Silver points out that the only characteristic that makes us human is not that we have a soul but that we have human parents. Silver also explores the debate over genetically modified foods and synthetic crops. He argues that the organic and natural foods movements make their case on spiritual grounds, imbuing Mother Nature with a spiritual force equal to the force of the Christian God. Silver points out, however, that Mother Nature is a violent, not a benevolent, deity, and can cause more disasters than the making of synthetic foods ever will. Finally, Silver points out that biotechnology presents little problem for Eastern religions that believe in reincarnation. In the words of one Buddhist scientist, therapeutic cloning "restarts the cycle of life." Silver's provocative ideas and his graceful prose open new avenues for discussion of the challenges that face science and spirituality. (June 1)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Book Description

Biotechnology is the oldest and most widespread of inventions, providing sustenance for humankind since the beginning of civilization. Until recently, however, its tools were crude and its implementation was opaque. Today new understanding in the life sciences brings both precision and transparency to the process. Modern inventions could alleviate human suffering, feed the world, and, at the same time, stem the tide of earth's ecological degradation. Yet ironically, biotechnology becomes evermore contentious. On the left, New Age secularists rail against genetically modified crops. On the right, religious Americans want embryo stem-cell research to be a felony. While they share seemingly little beyond mutual contempt, Silver argues that both political camps are driven -- consciously or subconsciously -- by a fundamental fear of violating a higher spiritual authority, imagined either as the creator God of the Bible, who rules from above, or a vague Mother Nature goddess here on earth.

In Challenging Nature, Silver offers a provocative look at the collision of science, religion, pseudoscience, and politics. A hands-on scientist who has actually manipulated genes, he leaves the laboratory, traveling the globe in what he calls “one scientist's journey from a cloistered community, in which life is assumed to be combinations of complex molecules and information flow between them, to a world of humanity dominated by soul and spirits, and to the intense chaos of Mother Nature at large.” The result is a fascinating book that could provide a wake-up call for the West, where the economic ramifications of pseudoscience may be enormous: a future in which Asia becomes dominant in biotechnological advances.

[Petr]

I doubt Dr. Silver has read The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science or regularly reviews AnswersInGenesis for the latest decoded hot tips from the Bible about molecular biology.
Why does Fade keep making crude diversionary counter-attacks instead of answering direct questions?

Finally, Silver points out that biotechnology presents little problem for Eastern religions that believe in reincarnation. In the words of one Buddhist scientist, therapeutic cloning "restarts the cycle of life."
What did I tell you, a New Age cultist.


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

Why does Fade keep making crude diversionary counter-attacks instead of answering direct questions?

It was in the Bible all along!

http://shop5.gospelcom.net/isroot/AIGUS/aig_products/30-9-023.jpg

Dinosaurs by Design
Dr. David Menton

Our Price: USD $12.99
SKU: 30-9-023
Ages: Jr. High, High School, College, Adult
Length: 60 minutes
Format: DVD

Evolutionists use dinosaurs as much as any topic to showcase their belief system, especially to young people. In this revealing production, Dr. Menton presents the overwhelming evidence that these “terrible lizards” were not the products of millions of years of evolution, but were the special creation of a Master Designer—just a few thousand years ago!

What did I tell you, a New Age cultist.

This is absurd. Silver criticizes those people because of their opposition GE crops.

[Petr]

Peak Oil isn't the end of the world. It is the end of cheap oil and the beginning of a period of dramatic socioeconomic adjustment.
Has it occurred to you that economic disasters also impact things like science funding? Already now we are seeing signs of things to come:

Pulling the plug on science?

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0414/p14s01-stss.html

There will certainly be serious economic dislocation at first and I predict the response will be similar to that of the Great Depression. It will strengthen the immigration reform movement. It will force people to live closer together and will weaken support for multiculturalism. I predict that millions of illegal aliens will be deported as economic growth constricts. Globalization will grind to a halt and radical laissez-faire capitalism will fall into disrepute like it did back in the thirties.
Btw, here we can see how you are constantly hopping from capitalism to socialism and vice versa, picking and choosing - on the other hand, you count on the free market to engine your fanciful "GenRich revolution," but then also idealize the coming onslaught of statism with peak oil.

The 1930s "New Deal" was very much about recruiting the "average man" (whom you so despise) into the service of welfare/warfare state.

Welfare is not, deep down of it, just about giving away greenbacks for nothing but a sort of protection money, a bribe that the modern state gives to masses so that they will support its policies or at very least don't rise violently against it.


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

Has it occurred to you that economic disasters also impact things like science funding? Already now we are seeing signs of things to come:

The disaster is upon us: the decline of suburbs, people switching to more fuel efficient cars, less traffic, less pollution, weening ourselves of our addiction to foreign oil, a shift to a sustainable economic model, immigration restriction, the decline of multiculturalism etc. :p

Btw, here we can see how you are constantly hopping from capitalism to socialism and vice versa, picking and choosing

No one on this forum engages in more "picking and choosing" than you do. Hell. Just the other day you were citing Richard Dawkins!

on the other hand, you count on the free market to engine your fanciful "GenRich revolution," but then also idealize the coming onslaught of statism with peak oil.

I pointed out to il ragno earlier in this thread that I don't find such a scenario desirable and neither does Silver. I would much rather socialize this technology and have the government maintain reprogenetics clinics just as we currently maintain public schools. Everyone could benefit from it that way. The only problem with this is that religious fundamentalists like yourself are going to block every effort by people like me to make this a reality, but the pursuit of your religious fantasies isn't going to stop GE. You are just going to succeed in driving GE underground or offshore and running up the price which will put GE beyond the reach of all but the affluent.

The 1930s "New Deal" was very much about recruiting the "average man" (whom you so despise) into the service of welfare/warfare state.

This is a malicious lie. If I truly hated the average man, then I would be a laissez-faire capitalist, but I have never been of that point of view. The New Deal brought about all sorts of progressive reforms that I admire.

Welfare is not, deep down of it, just about giving away greenbacks for nothing but a sort of protection money, a bribe that the modern state gives to masses so that they will support its policies or at very least don't rise violently against it.

Why am I not surprised that you are a fan of poverty?

[Petr]

The disaster is upon us: the decline of suburbs, people switching to more fuel efficient cars, less traffic, less pollution, weening ourselves of our addiction to foreign oil, a shift to a sustainable economic model, immigration restriction, the decline of multiculturalism etc. :p
What makes you think that reality - that ugly, unaesthetic thing - will play along with your fantasy wish-list?

No one on this forum engages in more "picking and choosing" than you do. Hell. Just the other day you were citing Richard Dawkins!
Weak, Fade. Even il ragno can recognize that my worldview is much more coherent than yours, and it was entirely legit for me to point out how Dawkins contradicted your fancy definition-games about altruism.

Does Dawkins support transhumanism?

The only problem with this is that religious fundamentalists like yourself are going to block every effort by people like me to make this a reality, but the pursuit of your religious fantasies isn't going to stop GE. You are just going to succeed in driving GE underground or offshore and running up the price which will put GE beyond the reach of all but the affluent.
You keep begging the question that it will actually succeed.

This is a malicious lie. If I truly hated the average man, then I would be a laissez-faire capitalist, but I have never been of that point of view.
Ok, so you don't hate average man. You just despise him and don't consider his viewpoints to be worthy of any serious attention. You have criticized even Nazi Germany for being too populistic.

Why am I not surprised that you are a fan of poverty?
I am not. I just gave you a cold realpolitik description of the real function of welfare and it seems to be a bit too much for you to stomach.


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

What makes you think that reality - that ugly, unaesthetic thing - will play along with your fantasy wish-list?

I'm guessing here that high gas prices has something to do with lagging SUV sales in the United States. Americans are switching to lighter, more fuel efficient cars, that also happen to pollute less. The end of cheap energy is a great thing when you think about it. Do you like being stuck in traffic?

Weak, Fade. Even il ragno can recognize that my worldview is much more coherent than yours, and it was entirely legit for me to point out how Dawkins contradicted your fancy definition-games about altruism.

Your worldview is irrational and bizarre. You cite whatever happens to be convenient for your argument and ignore everything else. I see you doing this all the time. Dawkins has simply pointed out that the effect of altruism can be explained in terms of genetic self-interest, not that the phenomena of altruism per se doesn't exist. That is essentially my own position. You have also proven time and time again that you are utterly unwilling to critically examine Christianity in the same way you would any other subject.

Does Dawkins support transhumanism?

I have no idea. I'm still reading through Stock and Silver at the moment.

You keep begging the question that it will actually succeed.

GE has already succeeded. The basic technology is already there. We can already screen fertilized embryos for dozens of diseases, select the healthiest ones, and artificially implant the selected embryo in the womb of the mother. There are more advanced forms of GE that are at different stages of development, for example, germline genetic engineering and genetic therapy for adult somatic cells.

Ok, so you don't hate average man.

Of course. If I truly hated the average man, then I wouldn't be a racialist or a collectivist either.

You just despise him and don't consider his viewpoints to be worthy of any serious attention. You have criticized even Nazi Germany for being too populistic.

You don't have to despise someone to recognize they are unqualified to make certain decisions and should be prohibited from doing so. I don't hate myself because I would refuse to perform brain surgery on a patient.

I am not. I just gave you a cold realpolitik description of the real function of welfare and it seems to be a bit too much for you to stomach.

Bullshit.

[Petr]

I'm guessing here that high gas prices has something to do with lagging SUV sales in the United States. Americans are switching to lighter, more fuel efficient cars, that also happen to pollute less. The end of cheap energy is a great thing when you think about it. Do you like being stuck in traffic?
I repeat: what makes you think that the coming cataclysm will honor your personal idyllic wishes? In the French, Russian, as well as in the German revolution, moderates thought they had things well under their control, until Robespierre, Lenin and Hitler took them for a wild ride.

This is how all inevitabilists operate: they simply force themselves to believe that the History (with big "H") will proceed according to their fancy plans.

GE has already succeeded. The basic technology is already there. We can already screen fertilized embryos for dozens of diseases, select the healthiest ones, and artificially implant the selected embryo in the womb of the mother.
Talk is cheap. Why aren't we seeing examples of successful human clonings, even in the Far East? Oh yeah - those wicked Christians are to blame. It is they who prevent us from succeeding gloriously.

Of course. If I truly hated the average man, then I wouldn't be a racialist or a collectivist either.
Does the term champagne socialist say anything to you? A guy who thinks he can accomplish both statist control over the masses and retain his own privileged position?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champagne_socialist

Bullshit.
Naive Fade refuses to face reality. :p

Yggdrasil, who is older and wiser than you, comments:

"In Saturday's column, Buckley said, regarding the riots in France; "It seems to me that a very hard dose of market discipline would distract the attention of the young revolutionaries from their frolics, traditional and otherwise, and that my sense is that if they had to worry about how to eat, and buy food, they would stop screwing around and face reality."

It is Buckley and his fellow conservatives who cannot face reality.

First, the rioters are not "young revolutionaries" -- whatever that universalist abstraction might mean -- they are Africans! And rioting, looting, burning cars, and administering beatings is what Africans living in White societies do when they want to increase the tribute Whites pay them to keep quiet -- tribute which we euphemistically call welfare.

...

"And a "hard dose of market discipline" -- meaning cutting off their welfare checks -- would prompt the Africans to stop burning cars and start shooting Whites. It would precipitate a race war.

http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=6898

Yggdrasil, who worked himself from the wrong side of the tracks into financial success, also has some hard words for delusional elitists:

These White Gentile elites also have a strong belief in the new-age "information economy" and that their skills and the skills of their children will be needed in that economy even as that economy comes to be dominated by Chinese, Japanese and Hindus.

They apparently think that as Chinese and Japanese companies buy out our large U.S. corporations (as their huge domestic savings rates eventually ensure) their new owners will not "downsize" the White Gentile CEOs just as those CEOs downsized White Gentile middle management in the 1980s and 1990s.

But isn't it much more likely that the Chinese and Japanese cultures will produce ample intellectual leadership to satisfy the needs of world commerce without any American Whites?

Isn't it clear that those who have the most to lose are the children of America's White elites? Are they not next in line to have their wages and life styles scaled back to subsistence levels?

And what of those 180 million Euro-Americans in the fly-over areas of the country? What are they likely to think when the practical consequence of the aging of the Baby Boom generation begins to sink in?

Then we have the other half of the White Gentile political elite - the one fronting for the Racial Extortion Coalition. Does this fraction of the elite really believe that there will be a demand for White "front men" once Blacks, Mexicans and Asians become a majority?

For a political strategy, this elite hires consultants with Southern Accents who talk about "trailer trash" and affirm that "you never know what you will get when you drag a hundred dollar bill through the trailer parks!"

Most of those 180 million Euro-Americans harbor the illusion that in referring to "trailer trash", the elites mean someone else. They have no idea that it includes virtually all 180 million of us living outside the D.C Beltway, New York, and Beverly Hills.

What will happen when these 180 millions tie the practical economic consequences of the aging of the baby boom with the cultural consequence of the open contempt and hostility toward average Whites that is so freely and carelessly displayed by this elite?

How do these elites imagine they can continue to indulge these sorts of conceits without a consequence?

http://home.ddc.net/ygg/etext/ak-intro.htm


Petr