While "ethicists" debate the implications of all this, the rest of us reread Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" and marvel at his prescience. We may take comfort in the fact that our brave new world, unlike his, is not totalitarian;"
So has she changed her mind or any other neocon's on the cognitive gauntlet laid down by the very drugs they've been demonizing for the last gazillion years, and that Huxley was utterly fearless in exploring? The New Scientist magazine did an article a few years back on designer personalities stating that we'll soon have nootropics/psychedelics that make Prozac and LSD look like kid stuff. Whatever will the DEA do?
With regards to this very question, our society is already totalitarian.
"Contra naturam, the defiance of nature, used to be a sufficient argument for those who were not persuaded by contra deum, provoking the wrath of God. But what does it mean today,"
How utterly un-Taoist a sentiment. She is still stuck in the Cartesian (Augustinian) dualism that the ancient Chinese and contemporary biology say are an illusion. There is no such thing as an unnatural act.
"But the ultimate question is how far we may go in defying nature without undermining our humanity."
The necessity of reconfiguring the topology of the genome will become increasingly necessary sometime in the next millenium due to increased entropy and toxicity in the major food webs. We'll start with the stomach, kidneys, pancreas and liver and move on from there...Whether this will start as a fad of the rich as Bruce Sterling claims or becomes a public health program to maintain reproductive rates is, of course, quite unknowable at this point in evolution. But sooner or later we will shed the Pleistocene phenotype. Anti-essentialism's triumph! It is a sorites paradox as to which number of genes -in a cumulative sense- will be that Godel number which launches us on the path of posthumanism...
Of course, there is no mention of the subversive science par excellence; Evolutionary Ecology, the real unwinder of all our rationalisms and platonisms.
Ian Murray Seattle, WA