Category: Transforming Humanity: Fantasy? Dream? Nightmare?

Through drugs and implanted medical devices, we can now enhance the capacities of humans. The changes brought about so far are still relatively minor (for example, using Ritalin to increase the ability to concentrate), but it’s highly likely that we will develop the means to modify an increasing variety of human traits within ten to …

A problem with the current debates about emerging technologies is that they really are debates—plural. Reasonable policy approaches to embryonic sex selection, for example, or to human reproductive cloning, if it were available, might not generalize to more radical technologies that could reverse the aging process, dramatically increase our cognitive capacities, alter the gross morphology …

  Perspective 1 Adrienne Asch Proponents of so-called moderate genetic enhancements contend that we nee dn’t worry much about possible upgrades to future human beings because they will not be transformative. Proponents of more radical enhancements endorse possible radical changes to humans that might come from their envisioned radical genetic and biotechnological innovations. Like other …

When I was seventeen I was part of a six-week summer seminar at Cornell University on the theme of “the individual and the community.” A dozen of us nerdy teens read an intensive diet of John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud under the tutelage of two philosophy professors. Afterward, I was a determined socialist …

Improving the brain’s cognitive performance is the next great frontier for not just the brain sciences but also the wider field of medical therapy. As soon as some fresh discovery about the brain’s functioning is announced, there are novel proposals for modifying and enhancing that brain process. Therapies that repair poorly functioning brains are treatments …

Can terrestrial religion survive intact in a universe in which innumerable planets orbit other suns? The short answer may seem to be no. At first glance, the world’s religious traditions do not appear to have room in their myths to deal with the discovery of new planets in far-off star systems. However, religions are resilient …

In everyday life, evolution explains phenomena that nothing else can—and not just in biological specialties. It is the master key to much that has been locked in mystery. If you seek real understanding in almost any field, you must not reject evolutionary theory. It has never been my bread and butter, as I practiced medicine …