by Joel Garreau
Harvard Law of Animal Behavior: Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002). ISBN: 0-670-03151-8, page 177.
Informing all of Carson’s work: Brian Payton, “On the Shoulders of Giants: Rachel Carson (1907–1964),” Earth Observatory Library, National Aeronautics and Space Administration. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/Giants/Carson/Carson2.html
change is specifically not progress: Joel Garreau, George Cook, et. al., “Progress: Can Americans Ever Agree on What It Means?” School of Public Policy, George Mason University, course syllabus, 1994–1998.
It could cause the extinction of a quarter of the planet’s species: J. Alan Pounds and Robert Puschendorf, “Ecology: Clouded Futures: Global warming is altering the distribution and abundance of plant and animal species. Application of a basic law of ecology predicts that many will vanish if temperatures continue to rise,” Nature, January 8, 2004.
Those who writhe in icy agony: Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. Robert Pinsky, (New York: Noonday Press, 1996), Circle 9, cantos 31-34. ISBN: 0374524521. See also “Danteworlds,” University of Texas, Austin. http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/circle9.html
“Human nature exists”: Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). ISBN: 0-374-23643-7, page 7.
“happy slaves”: Leon Kass, Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (New York: Free Press, 1985). ISBN: 0029170710, page 35.
no end to history . . . if there were no end to science: Francis Fukuyama, “Second Thoughts: The Last Man in a Bottle,” The National Interest, summer 1999, pages 16–33. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_56/ai_55015107
technology could destroy democracy: Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future, page 7.
“breed some people with saddles on their backs”: Ibid., page 10.
The Enhanced, The Naturals, and The Rest: Focusing more on genetics than the other GRIN technologies, Lee M. Silver refers to people with many of the same capabilities as The Enhanced as “the GenRich” in Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family (New York: Avon, 1997). ISBN: 0-380-79243-5. In the uncommonly thoughtful 1997 film Gattaca, featuring Uma Thurman, those who qualify for positions at prestigious corporations such as Gattaca by virtue of their genetic engineering are called “Valids”; the naturally born are called “In-Valids.”
like fundamentalists eschewing modern pleasures: If you really want to scare yourself, don’t obsess about fundamentalists who want to remain Naturals. Worry about the ones who want to become Enhanced so they can seem to create miracles.
If her family travels to Africa: Personal observation, Nigeria and Ghana, May 2004.
“self-awareness may be overrated”: Vernor Vinge interview, January 24, 2003.
dial this creature back to 1603: Terry A. Gray, “A Shakespeare Timeline Summary Chart.” http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/timeline/summarychart.htm
he created both Othello and Caliban: Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). ISBN: 052145817X. http://books.cambridge.org/052145817X.htm
he would have no trouble recognizing the astronauts as adventurers: I am indebted to M. Mitchell Waldrop for this observation.
“The thing I’m worried the most about”: Fukuyama interview, November 20, 2002.
He loves the work of the anthropologist: Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991). ISBN: 007008209X.
If there is prompt recognition: Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future, page 128.
He defines human nature as: Ibid., page 130.
That essence, whatever it is: Ibid., pages 149–151.
“the idea that one could exclude any group of people”: Ibid., page 155.
human nature has not been static: Ibid., page 156.
“I mean, the Romans were unbelievably cruel”: Fukuyama interview, November 20, 2002.
He recalls a passage: Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), Volume II, Third Book, Chapter I, “Influence of Democracy on Manners Properly So Called: How Customs Are Softened,” pages 174–77.
effort to fix its shortcomings: Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future, page 13.
The cotton gin was bad: Ibid., page 15.
The ultimate result was the bloodiest conflict: Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). ISBN: 0-262-19347-7, page x.
“full-scale class war”: Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future, page 16.
“human nature is what gives us a moral sense”: Ibid., pages 101–2.
He’s terrified that The Enhanced: Ibid., page 157.
“actually picking up guns and bombs”: Ibid., page 158.
“I think the answer is no”: Fukuyama interview, November 20, 2002.
“You can’t have real compassion”: Ibid.
“literally, people dying off.”: Ibid.
unless robots learn to dream: The title of the 1968 Philip K. Dick book on which the film Blade Runner was based, is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (New York: Del Rey, 1996). ISBN: 0345404475.
Fukuyama, who was born in 1952: “Biography: Francis Fukuyama.” http://www.sais-jhu.edu/fukuyama/biograph.htm
“[Raising children] plays a role in the socialization of the parents”: Fukuyama interview, November 20, 2002.
“sex becomes a fairly minor part of life”: Ibid.
“can people conceive of dying for a cause”: Ibid.
“I’m not sure that I’d be happy” [about living for a very long time.]: Ibid.
“what the world needs is more regulation”: Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future, page 183.
He thinks little of scientific self-regulation: Ibid., page 184.
“Science cannot by itself establish the ends”: Ibid., page 185.
as much revulsion as we did after Hiroshima: Ibid., page 216.
“Scientists do not believe”: Personal communication, August 25, 2004.
If you view an organism as so dangerous: “Secondary Barriers in Representative P4 Facility,” Donald S. Fredrickson Papers, National Library of Medicine. http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/FF/B/B/M/D
“It’s just in two different forms”: Joy interview, May 5–6, 2003.
“an ultimate ‘Doomsday’ catastrophe”: Martin Rees, Our Final Hour. A Scientist’s Warning (New York: Basic Books, 2003). ISBN: 0-465-06862-6, pages 1–2.
“society more vulnerable to disruption”: Ibid., page 21.
He quotes the odds: Ibid., page 8.
“rather be red than dead”: Ibid., page 28.
“even if the alternative was a certainty of a Soviet takeover”: Ibid.
As the renowned British satirist: Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time (New York: Harper Collins, 2001). ISBN: 0-06-103132-1, page 82.
“this rock on that head”: Ibid, page 175.
“should support be withdrawn from a line of ‘pure’ research”: Rees, Our Final Hour, page 80.
a “brain gain”: Ibid., page 81.
“Singapore and China aim to leapfrog the competition”: Ibid., page 81.
“The difficulty with a dirigiste”: Ibid.
“To say that a few grams could in principle kill millions”: Ibid., page 50.
a novel way to colonize Mars: Ibid., page 174.
Actually, in the American Film Institute: “100 Heroes and Villains,” American Film Institute. http://www.afi.com/tvevents/100years/handv.aspx
Susan Greenfield: Susan Greenfield, Tomorrow’s People: How 21st-Century Technology Is Changing the Way We Think and Feel (London: Allen Lane: The Penguin Group, 2003). ISBN: 0-713-99631-5.
“permanently ‘blow’ our minds”: Ibid., page 264.
couldn’t handle the problems of plot: Ibid., page x.
So she tried to make her book nonfiction: Ibid., p
age ix.
Since “large-scale death”: Ibid., page 264.
“Men’s collective passions are mainly for evil”: Ibid., page 216. Also cited in Melvin Konner, “Fuzzy Vision: A Dark View of a Future Where the Lines of Self Are Blurred,” Nature, November 27, 2003. http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v426/n6965/full/426385a_fs.html
“the celebration of individuality”: Greenfield, Tomorrow’s People, page 271; Konner, “Fuzzy Vision.”
“The central problem of an intelligent species is the problem of sanity”: Greenfield, Tomorrow’s People, page 270. Konner, “Fuzzy Vision.”
“On a visit to North-East Asia, I saw this future”: Greenfield, Tomorrow’s People, page 266.
In developing countries the proportion of people with access to a phone: “Mobiles Narrow Information Gap: Mobile Phones Are Helping to Bridge the Communications Divide Between the World’s Rich and Poor, a Report Says,” BBC News, December 23, 2003. http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3344437.stm
an organization devoted to “an environmentally sustainable”: Worldwatch Institute. http://www.worldwatch.org
Judging from the billboards in the megacity of Lagos: Personal observation, May 2004.
intentionally slow the revolution: “Poor Connections: Trouble on the Internet Frontiers,” RAND Review, December 2002. http://www.rand.org/publications/randreview/issues/rr.12.02/connections.html
Some Middle Eastern societies recoil: Ian Buruma, “The Origins of Occidentalism,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 6, 2004. http://chronicle.com/free/ V50/i22/22b01001.htm
Singapore researchers examining: Hao Xiaoming and Chow Seet Kay, “Factors Affecting Internet Development: An Asian Survey,” First Monday (February 2004). http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_2/hao/
The International Telecommunication Union: “ITU Digital Access Index: World’s First Global ICT Ranking: Education and Affordability Key to Boosting New Technology Adoption,” International Telecommunication Union, November 20, 2003. http://www.itu.int/newsarchive/press_releases/2003/30.html
In a postliterate world: Xiaoming and Kay, “Factors Affecting Internet Development.”
The digital divide seems to be narrowing: Wenhong Chen and Barry Wellman, “Charting and Bridging Digital Divides: Comparing Socio-economic, Gender, Life Stage, and Rural-Urban Internet Access and Use in Eight Countries,” Netlab, Center for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto, October 31, 2003. http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/index.html
This technology is getting to the masses a lot faster: I am indebted to Kevin Kelly for this observation. See John Brockman, Digerati: Encounters With the Cyber Elite (San Francisco: HardWired, 1996). ISBN: 1-888869-04-6, page 158.
It has been translated into 20 languages: Carl T. Hall, “The Unnatural Man: A Search for Meaning in a Genetically Engineered Future,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 12, 2003. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/05/12/MN20770.DTL
inspired by the Bill Joy alert: McKibben interview, February 4, 2004.
“one of the great Paul Revere moments”: Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2003). ISBN: 0-8050-7096-6, page 92.
he argues in favor of humans embracing their limits: Ibid., page 216.
The End of Human Nature: McKibben interview, February 4, 2004.
“When it was done I had a clearer sense of myself”: McKibben, Enough, page 2.
“It’s not the personal challenge that will disappear”: Ibid., page 7.
The Chinese turned against global maritime exploration: Ibid., page 169.
and the Japanese gave up guns: Ibid., page 172.
But, as a result, . . . the West . . . was to dominate: Ibid., page 171, citing Nicholas D. Kristof, “1492: The Prequel,” New York Times, January 1, 2000.
The Middle East, too, is still shaped: See, for example, Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). ISBN: 0-19-514420-1.
The first licensed gene therapy: “China Aproves First Gene Therapy,” Nature Biotechnology, January 2004, page 3.
The first cloned human embryos came out of South Korea: Helen R. Pilcher, “Cloned Human Embryos Yield Stem Cells: Study Brings Therapeutic Cloning One Step Closer,” Nature Science Update, February 12, 2004. http://www.nature.com/nsu/040209/040209-12.html
more interesting case is that of the Amish: McKibben, Enough, page 166.
In 1991, for example, a team of Amish carpenters: Ibid., page 167, citing Stock, Redesigning Humans, page 39.
“actually rein in these technologies”: McKibben, Enough, page 162.
“translate into effective political resistance”: Ibid., page 163.
Among those deeply skeptical of human enhancement: James J. Hughes, “The Politics of Transhumanism,” paper originally prepared for the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, Cambridge, MA, 2001, page 8. http://www.changesurfer.com/Acad/TranshumPolitics.htm
But those finding some things about which to agree: Ronald Bailey, “Rage Against the Machines: Witnessing the Birth of the Neo-Luddite Movement,” Reason, July 2001. http://reason.com/0107/fe.rb.rage.shtml
people who don’t believe we are descended from monkeys: McKibben, Enough, page 195.
off-shoots of the Christian anti-abortion movement: Hughes, “The Politics of Transhumanism,” page 26.
McKibben describes as more pro-choice: Nigel Cameron and Lori Andrews, “Cloning and the Debate on Abortion,” Chicago Tribune, August 8, 2001, cited by McKibben, Enough, page 196.
and Prince Charles: Scott Rhodie, “Charles Fears Science Could Kill Life on Earth,” Scotland on Sunday. April 27, 2003. http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=481682003
Yet Friends of the Earth: McKibben, Enough, page 196.
William Kristol, editor of the conservative: Ibid., page 197.
grudgingly forced to acknowledge . . . technology funding is federal: Hughes, “The Politics of Transhumanism,” page 6.
In the Heaven enthusiasts’ Web sites: World Transhumanist FAQ, cited in Hughes, “The Politics of Transhumanism,” page 16.
Greens are imaginatively represented: “The Viridian Design Movement,” http://www.viridiandesign.org
Disabled people, who are among the most technology-dependent: Hughes, “The Politics of Transhumanism,” page 22.
You can find feminists: Ibid., page 25.
it’s the least all those robots . . . can do: Damien Broderick, “The Spike,” page 254, cited in Hughes, “The Politics of Transhumanism,” page 21.
You can find them among cultural liberals and conservatives: James Hughes, “Democratic Transhumanism,” Transhumanity, April 28, 2002. http://www.changesurfer.com/Acad/DemocraticTranshumanism.htm
“keeps us more or less human”: McKibben, Enough, page 197.