Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
A decade after his now-famous pronouncement of "the end of history," Francis Fukuyama argues that as a result of biomedical advances, we are facing the possibility of a future in which our humanity itself will be altered beyond recognition. Fukuyama sketches a brief history of man's changing understanding of human nature: from Plato and Aristotle to the modernity's utopians and dictators who sought to remake mankind for ideological ends.
Fukuyama argues that the ability to manipulate the DNA of all of one person's descendants will have profound, and potentially terrible, consequences for our political order, even if undertaken with the best of intentions. In Our Posthuman Future, one of our greatest social philosophers begins to describe the potential effects of genetic exploration on the foundation of liberal democracy: the belief that human beings are equal by nature.
“Stunning...The genius of Our Posthuman Future is that it brings home just how important [these issues] will be in our immediate future for ordinary people.” ―San Francisco Chronicle
“Invaluable...Rarely has someone entering the policy arena so eloquently and precisely laid out the case for political control of emerging technology.” ―Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A timely, thoughtful and well-argued contribution to an important subject.” ―The New York Times Book Review
“A provocative argument that raises the nature-versus-nurture debate and questions about the role biology plays in human nature.” ―Chicago Tribune
“A lucid overview of the biotechnology revolution and its discontents...For anyone seeking an ideal entry into the biotechnology debate, Fukuyama's book is it.” ―National Review
“This groundbreaking inquiry...provides a remarkably sensible and human vision of what is at stake and what needs to be done.” ―Foreign Affairs
“[A] comprehensive guidebook for policymakers.” ―Dow Jones
“A cogent and important argument against the technocrats and ‘casual academic Darwinians' who have so enthusiastically attempted to reduce our humanity to an increasingly implausible and culturally neutral calculus.” ―Times Literary Supplement
“In Our Posthuman Future, he has looked past the end of history and described the end of mankind...[An] informative survey of contemporary bioscience and its political implications [and] an effort to lay ethical foundations for policy judgments.” ―The American Prospect
Read more
Showing 1-10 of 42 reviews
Justin Greenough
2.0 out of 5 starsNot a book about our posthuman future.October 19, 2018
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
I'd expect a title like "Our Posthuman Future - Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution" to substantially address the consequences of the biotechnology revolution for our posthuman future. This text does neither. Neither does it, as some of its supporting reviewers suggest, prepare a reader interested in the biotech / bioethics debate for that discussion. Furthermore I'd expect a writer with such stunning credentials to bring a better informed less error-ridden perspective to these complex issues. Again, prepare to be disappointed: many claims appearing in the text are simply wrong.
A good 66% of the text is bound up in a futile attempt to convince the reader of two extremely questionable points:
1. Modern thinking is misguided about "human nature", the only remedy being a return to pre-Kantian thinking about essences etc.
2. That any notion of human rights and ethics must be founded on a concept of human nature.
Though the subject of a should-be text on the pedantics of contemporary rights talk, this would be allowable if his arguments were compelling and clearly written, and if additionally these points were then leveraged to comprehensively describe what life and policy might look like in a future where the implications of biotech development at all touches on these points. Unfortunately, we are instead gifted an open window into a confused mind struggling with fundamental concepts surrounding "human nature" and its connection to human rights and ethics (huge can of Renaissance-grade worms there), only to inevitably fail in the basic task of describing in any way what precisely human nature consists: since the crux of the entire text hinges on it one would think his positions would be clearly unpacked. Not so.
Moving from the botched philosophical underpinnings of the author's position, perhaps he'll redeem himself with an imaginative and informed description of how we as a future society and as a species might address the inevitable realities of genetic modification for enhancement (very interesting), or even just for treatment (a bit tired)? Again the text unquestionably fails to deliver. Instead we are treated to an unflinchingly conservative position that the only way to combat negative outcomes is to pass the burden of biotech research regulation to political bodies which will be successful in hedging these outcomes to the degree that they are successful in orchestrating global consensus to outlaw biotech research. Nothing imaginative here, just the usual fear mongering.
If you're looking for a description of global/local social policy in a future with responsible access to biotech-enabled human enhancements this is not what you're looking for. Personally I'm shocked that someone with such stellar credentials could turn out such impoverished thinking and writing. Very disappointed.
4 people found this helpful
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Matty
4.0 out of 5 starsOur Posthuman FutureOctober 1, 2018
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
I was assigned this book for a class and enjoyed it immensely. There were many aspects of biotechnology that I had never taken the time to familiarize myself with but this book answered a lot of my questions. While I do not agree with much of Fukuyama’s political views and some of the information is now dated, he still laid out a compelling case in a book that is both broad and deep in terms of content, theories and arguments.
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Neil Cotiaux
4.0 out of 5 starsHuman Nature Has Never Been StaticNovember 11, 2003
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
What is "human nature"? And will failure to initiate widespread government oversight of scientific research that could change this definition open a Pandora's Box of dire consequences?
Fukuyama suggests that failure to impose substantial government dictates over the "when's" and "how's" of future research centering on the human body and mind will precipitate a significant sea change in the inherent nature of our species, how we interact with one another, and a potential threat to Liberal Democracy. The implicit message is that unfettered scientific inquiry will lead to developments we will come to deeply regret.
While Fukuyama correctly illustrates the "easy fixes" that our society has latched onto (Prozac, Ritilin: Who said freedom to choose would mean wise choices?), his thesis fails to acknowledge the considerable roadblocks that authorities have placed in the way of the evolution of our species throughout history.
"Human nature" has, in fact, demonstrated a rather elastic nature over time. If one accepts the premise that human nature is fixed in an eternal quest for freedom, self-development and dignity and is manifested in superior intelligence, then one would want to remove any artificial roadblocks to creating the maximum environment in which these attributes could flourish. How else to explain the demise of almost all competing political models to Liberal Democracy? Yet, Fukuyama proposes a step backward, based on what appears to be a fixed, non-elastic definition of human nature.
Were a caveman to be plopped down in the late 20th Century and witness the first heart transplant, would he recoil in disgust and declare the practice inimical to the basic fabric of human existence? Quite likely. Does that mean, with the limited intelligence of a less developed brain - but with a brain nonetheless and all basic body parts and feelings that "Modern Man" exhibits - that the caveman would be right? I don't believe anyone would answer in the affirmative.
As dispassionate and thoughtful as Fukuyama's work appears on the surface, his call to action would have us expand the yoke of State control at a time when his beloved model of Liberal Democracy is finally expanding across the globe, toppling barriers to the practical application of human intelligence everywhere.
Which, in its own way, is rather ironic.
7 people found this helpful
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William S Jamison
5.0 out of 5 starsWonderful experience!April 11, 2002
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Fukuyama has been one of my favorites since "The End of History." Glad to see history has started again and science is the new narrative! "Posthuman" continues to demonstrate that the author has a very comprehensive view of current insights in many fields and puts them in a cohesive picture that rings true. Reading Fukuyama is a great way to read a hundred up-to-date books all at once and get the highlights from all of them. Expect frequent pauses while reading this as your own mind reels with the ideas.
This is a great read for those who want to know everything and understand it too.
Bill
13 people found this helpful
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Rodrigo Negrete Prieto
4.0 out of 5 starsA risk map not to be ignoredAugust 7, 2005
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
There is no doubt that Francis Fukuyama is a thinker who performs pretty well in a strategic scale. He aptly outlines one of the leading subjects who will shape the political, cultural, religious and economic clashes of the XX1 century and is as his best both synthesizing a lot of relevant information and detecting as well the transcendence of some debates apparently out of the public and media limelight (such as the Searle-Dennett on the role and nature of consciousness) not only because their implications, but also because they are symptoms of how scientism has taken over more and more territories of the human identity to a point that is not so far away to deny it. But above all the best asset of this book consists on his clear understanding on which is at stake. The disruptive potential of the more extreme forms of technological hubris such as genetic "improvement "applied to human genome it is clearly stated: because as unintended consequence it could lead not only to a sort of "arms race" between states but also within society itself (among private citizens with de facto different access to resources) inequality would acquire another dimension and meaning. Under a perspective where a society of classes could take the path of a society of castes, the whole foundations of political order, as was understood in the western tradition would crumble. The peril is simply that differences in socioeconomic terms turn into a difference in biological terms. The mere possibility of that gap is just unbearable for a modern society. If that happen class struggle never had before a stronger motivation.
No less important is his identification of how inadequate is the utilitarian philosophy that pervades economical thinking which its mantra "minimize pain/maximize pleasure" when it invades other areas of human action especially medical practice. The peril consists on blurring the difference between healing and enhancement. Actually it disorients society in important issues such as how to deal with drugs consumption. We have not to wait to extreme forms of human nature manipulation to detect that trend in the current abuses in using Prozac or Ritalin. Some cases for which the safer bet is to enforce nerve, self control and character are taking short cuts when the easy way is a technological manipulation of behavior.
In this sense Fukuyama's strongest point is that even a democratic assumption of enhancement and improvement for everyone -when genetic engineering takes the helm as the leading technology to achieve those goals- is that it is not preposterous to think the biological differentiation of beings it would yield as a result may resemble rather a sort of Nietzschean dystopia where the best intentions of that pursuit have not place at all: a new order where shared human ideals have not to be recognized any longer.
Fukuyama without wasting time identifies to which extend the whole conceptual building of the ethical and political tradition -at least of the west- depends on two crucial assumptions: there is a human nature and there is a human dignity. But in taking these issues he falls short. He understands that the challenge to face now is to find new secular foundations to both ideas grounded in the disintegrating bedrock of metaphysics, religion and theology, but far to solve the conundrum (after all the book is only 218 pp long) he rather gets to draw with precision the map of the future battles to come. The author intends a solution alternative to the Kantian sharp distinction between actions based on knowledge and action based on ethics (categorical imperatives) at the time he insists that science does not have -and cannot have- the last world in defining ultimate human values and goals. But he bets anyway in some sort of knowledge in route to find new foundations to the very idea of human nature, so what kind of knowledge could be that? Maybe the sort of knowledge we can find in literature which is not systematic almost by definition, maybe the sort of knowledge that some thinkers as Merlin Donald intends (by the way with very interesting results indeed) which are at mid point between philosophy and scientific knowledge: an argumentation where the latter still is the tool, not the master.
However and beyond what FF achieved or not I am tempted to say that every citizen should read it. But because it sounds as an overstatement I only wish that someday it will be discussed in every college at any level, alongside with Neil Postman's amazingly intelligent, witty little book entitled "Technopoly".
7 people found this helpful
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Kate Wescott
3.0 out of 5 starsinterestingJune 5, 2013
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
I don't feel the same way about genetic modification, but his arguments were valid points, but he jumped to conclusions that are impossible at this time, so it felt like reading a conspiracy novel.
One person found this helpful
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Alex Foster
5.0 out of 5 starsLoved it!March 4, 2013
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
This book is sooo good! And it is still very relevant. You do not need to know anything about biotchnology to enjoy this book!
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Ahmed M. El Minawi
2.0 out of 5 starsnot convincingMay 19, 2014
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Having read other titles by this author i eagerly purchased this. I put it down after a few pages and finally finished 3 weeks later. Very different writing style from what we are used to. His ideas in this book are at times far-fetched and plainly wrong.
One person found this helpful
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Catherine
5.0 out of 5 starsFive StarsMarch 27, 2015
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
As expected thanks!
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aytek
5.0 out of 5 starsfrom one extreme to otherJanuary 30, 2013
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
The cocktail recipes is just a few pages with some simple illustrations by unknown artists. Why does it cost 10 $. I feel like ripped off. Why do you sell this as a .book. İt is more like a leaflet. And must be free of charge.
On the other side of the spectrum, Fukuyama's book is a classic I would recommend it to everybody who can read.
----------
Francis Fukuyama fears that biotechnology will make monsters of us. Steven Rose weighs the evidence
Sat 1 Jun 2002 10.13 AESTFirst published on Sat 1 Jun 2002 10.13 AEST
Shares
6
Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
By Francis Fukuyama 256pp
Profile, £17.99
Francis Fukuyama achieved fame - or notoriety - when, 10 years ago, he published The End of History . It was not some futuristic speculation, but an argument that the collapse of Soviet communism and the triumph of US-style liberal democracy meant that, effectively, the world was now under stable management. He has been rowing back ever since.
This is not, as one might have imagined, because the world has been anything but stable in the past decade. It is because he has belatedly realised that so long as scientific and technological innovation proceeds at its current breakneck pace, social stasis - the end of history - is impossible. Some of us have been saying this for years, but it is encouraging that the political economists have eventually caught up.
Social transformations are an inevitable corollary of the dramatic changes in the nature of work and communication generated by technology. Until the mid-20th century, utopias - from those of Francis Bacon and Samuel Butler to that of HG Wells - all envisaged a technologically stable society. The much more common dystopic writing of the past 50 years has largely been posited on disruptive scientific and technological fantasies.
Of these, first information technology and then biotechnology have come to be seen as presenting the greatest challenges. Gung-ho geneticists promise to encode human life on a CD, to create designer babies, to extend human life indefinitely. Only slightly more soberly, psychopharmacologists offer the prospect of tailor-made drugs to ease the mental pain of living, enhance intelligence, and control disruptive behaviour. A new trade of bioethics has grown up around such prospects, providing gainful, albeit generally vacuous, employment to otherwise out-of-work moral philosophers.
With Fukuyama's move into this territory, it may be that bioethicists are going to be upstaged by political economists. His question is clear: do we really want this post-human future, full of bioengineered cyborgs? Should we just retreat behind the mantra - originated by physicists who worked on the hydrogen bomb - that science is progress, and cannot and will not be halted? Most US free marketeers writing in this area take this view, in contrast to the European tradition of regulating in the public interest. So the major surprise of Fukuyama's book is that, in the field of human biotechnology at least, he favours regulation.
He begins by summarising what he sees as the current state of play in the science and technology of genetic and brain sciences, in terms of their capacity to extend healthy human life, to understand the roots of human behaviour (intelligence, aggression, sexual orientation), and to control and change that behaviour with drugs (Prozac, Ritalin and so on). Although refreshingly sceptical about the claims made for the power and scope of such drugs, he rightly argues that at the least they are harbingers of increasingly effective new generations of psychochemicals.
He is on less firm ground when dealing with genetic claims, where he accepts at face value the rather suspect evidence for so-called "smart" or "aggressive" mice engineered by adding or removing DNA from their genomes. And sometimes he is way off course, as when he repeats the once-fashionable 19th-century nostrum that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" - ie, that a human foetus relives its evolutionary history in the nine months prior to birth. But for his purposes, such errors in biological understanding aren't important, and his assessment of the direction in which such work is heading seems about right.
That some of us are sceptical about its feasibility should not prevent us from looking hard at its potential consequences. We should be warned by the example of Sir Ernest Rutherford, who knew more about the structure of atoms in the early decades of the past century than anyone else, but still insisted that the prospect of atomic power was "moonshine".
So what should we do about it? The middle section of the book centres on two classical philosophical problems viewed from within this new context: human rights and human nature. The discourse of rights has become very murky in recent years, in part, according to Fukuyama, because of the rejection of naturalism. Naturalism would claim that there is an intrinsic universal human nature, and that therefore ethics, and as a consequence human "rights", can be derived from it.
These assumptions together constitute what has been called the naturalistic fallacy. Critics point out that human nature can be expressed only within the diverse and historically contingent societies that humans create, and therefore cannot be understood a priori. There is no "nature" outside social context, and within the limits of evolved human biology the societies that we have created are extraordinarily diverse.
In any event, as philosophers from Hume onwards have pointed out, one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is". Evolutionary psychologists reject the first criticism, and despite their protestations that they wouldn't dream of doing so, happily spend their time deriving multiple oughts from diverse ises. Fukuyama accepts their claims to universalism in order to build his case that the naturalistic fallacy is itself fallacious. Hence, he argues, there is a human nature on which human rights can be based. And insofar as human biotechnology threatens to interfere with that human nature, it is essential that it be regulated. Sound conclusion, faulty premises.
So, finally, to the tough question: how to bell this particular cat. Most biotech is done in the US, and outside federal laboratories it is largely unregulated. But the situation is paradoxical, as US conservative religious views on, for instance, stem-cell research clash with an otherwise deregulatory agenda. (Legislation to ban so-called therapeutic cloning is currently before Congress, at the same time as the US withdraws from the Kyoto and Start treaties and weakens environmental protection.)
Fukuyama looks almost enviously at the tighter regulatory structures in Europe as a harbinger of hope that biotechnology's post-human world does not have to be competitive, hierarchical and full of social conflict - a future he sees as probable if unregulated biotechnology delivers on its promises. He - and we - should be so lucky. For a political economist to derive a conclusion abstracted from either practical politics or economy almost makes one wish for the return of the bioethicists.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Stunning...The genius of Our Posthuman Future is that it brings home just how important [these issues] will be in our immediate future for ordinary people.” ―San Francisco Chronicle
“Invaluable...Rarely has someone entering the policy arena so eloquently and precisely laid out the case for political control of emerging technology.” ―Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A timely, thoughtful and well-argued contribution to an important subject.” ―The New York Times Book Review
“A provocative argument that raises the nature-versus-nurture debate and questions about the role biology plays in human nature.” ―Chicago Tribune
“A lucid overview of the biotechnology revolution and its discontents...For anyone seeking an ideal entry into the biotechnology debate, Fukuyama's book is it.” ―National Review
“This groundbreaking inquiry...provides a remarkably sensible and human vision of what is at stake and what needs to be done.” ―Foreign Affairs
“[A] comprehensive guidebook for policymakers.” ―Dow Jones
“A cogent and important argument against the technocrats and ‘casual academic Darwinians' who have so enthusiastically attempted to reduce our humanity to an increasingly implausible and culturally neutral calculus.” ―Times Literary Supplement
“In Our Posthuman Future, he has looked past the end of history and described the end of mankind...[An] informative survey of contemporary bioscience and its political implications [and] an effort to lay ethical foundations for policy judgments.” ―The American Prospect
Read more
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Showing 1-10 of 42 reviews
Justin Greenough
2.0 out of 5 starsNot a book about our posthuman future.October 19, 2018
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
I'd expect a title like "Our Posthuman Future - Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution" to substantially address the consequences of the biotechnology revolution for our posthuman future. This text does neither. Neither does it, as some of its supporting reviewers suggest, prepare a reader interested in the biotech / bioethics debate for that discussion. Furthermore I'd expect a writer with such stunning credentials to bring a better informed less error-ridden perspective to these complex issues. Again, prepare to be disappointed: many claims appearing in the text are simply wrong.
A good 66% of the text is bound up in a futile attempt to convince the reader of two extremely questionable points:
1. Modern thinking is misguided about "human nature", the only remedy being a return to pre-Kantian thinking about essences etc.
2. That any notion of human rights and ethics must be founded on a concept of human nature.
Though the subject of a should-be text on the pedantics of contemporary rights talk, this would be allowable if his arguments were compelling and clearly written, and if additionally these points were then leveraged to comprehensively describe what life and policy might look like in a future where the implications of biotech development at all touches on these points. Unfortunately, we are instead gifted an open window into a confused mind struggling with fundamental concepts surrounding "human nature" and its connection to human rights and ethics (huge can of Renaissance-grade worms there), only to inevitably fail in the basic task of describing in any way what precisely human nature consists: since the crux of the entire text hinges on it one would think his positions would be clearly unpacked. Not so.
Moving from the botched philosophical underpinnings of the author's position, perhaps he'll redeem himself with an imaginative and informed description of how we as a future society and as a species might address the inevitable realities of genetic modification for enhancement (very interesting), or even just for treatment (a bit tired)? Again the text unquestionably fails to deliver. Instead we are treated to an unflinchingly conservative position that the only way to combat negative outcomes is to pass the burden of biotech research regulation to political bodies which will be successful in hedging these outcomes to the degree that they are successful in orchestrating global consensus to outlaw biotech research. Nothing imaginative here, just the usual fear mongering.
If you're looking for a description of global/local social policy in a future with responsible access to biotech-enabled human enhancements this is not what you're looking for. Personally I'm shocked that someone with such stellar credentials could turn out such impoverished thinking and writing. Very disappointed.
4 people found this helpful
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Matty
4.0 out of 5 starsOur Posthuman FutureOctober 1, 2018
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
I was assigned this book for a class and enjoyed it immensely. There were many aspects of biotechnology that I had never taken the time to familiarize myself with but this book answered a lot of my questions. While I do not agree with much of Fukuyama’s political views and some of the information is now dated, he still laid out a compelling case in a book that is both broad and deep in terms of content, theories and arguments.
HelpfulComment Report abuse
Neil Cotiaux
4.0 out of 5 starsHuman Nature Has Never Been StaticNovember 11, 2003
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
What is "human nature"? And will failure to initiate widespread government oversight of scientific research that could change this definition open a Pandora's Box of dire consequences?
Fukuyama suggests that failure to impose substantial government dictates over the "when's" and "how's" of future research centering on the human body and mind will precipitate a significant sea change in the inherent nature of our species, how we interact with one another, and a potential threat to Liberal Democracy. The implicit message is that unfettered scientific inquiry will lead to developments we will come to deeply regret.
While Fukuyama correctly illustrates the "easy fixes" that our society has latched onto (Prozac, Ritilin: Who said freedom to choose would mean wise choices?), his thesis fails to acknowledge the considerable roadblocks that authorities have placed in the way of the evolution of our species throughout history.
"Human nature" has, in fact, demonstrated a rather elastic nature over time. If one accepts the premise that human nature is fixed in an eternal quest for freedom, self-development and dignity and is manifested in superior intelligence, then one would want to remove any artificial roadblocks to creating the maximum environment in which these attributes could flourish. How else to explain the demise of almost all competing political models to Liberal Democracy? Yet, Fukuyama proposes a step backward, based on what appears to be a fixed, non-elastic definition of human nature.
Were a caveman to be plopped down in the late 20th Century and witness the first heart transplant, would he recoil in disgust and declare the practice inimical to the basic fabric of human existence? Quite likely. Does that mean, with the limited intelligence of a less developed brain - but with a brain nonetheless and all basic body parts and feelings that "Modern Man" exhibits - that the caveman would be right? I don't believe anyone would answer in the affirmative.
As dispassionate and thoughtful as Fukuyama's work appears on the surface, his call to action would have us expand the yoke of State control at a time when his beloved model of Liberal Democracy is finally expanding across the globe, toppling barriers to the practical application of human intelligence everywhere.
Which, in its own way, is rather ironic.
7 people found this helpful
HelpfulComment Report abuse
William S Jamison
5.0 out of 5 starsWonderful experience!April 11, 2002
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Fukuyama has been one of my favorites since "The End of History." Glad to see history has started again and science is the new narrative! "Posthuman" continues to demonstrate that the author has a very comprehensive view of current insights in many fields and puts them in a cohesive picture that rings true. Reading Fukuyama is a great way to read a hundred up-to-date books all at once and get the highlights from all of them. Expect frequent pauses while reading this as your own mind reels with the ideas.
This is a great read for those who want to know everything and understand it too.
Bill
13 people found this helpful
HelpfulComment Report abuse
Rodrigo Negrete Prieto
4.0 out of 5 starsA risk map not to be ignoredAugust 7, 2005
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
There is no doubt that Francis Fukuyama is a thinker who performs pretty well in a strategic scale. He aptly outlines one of the leading subjects who will shape the political, cultural, religious and economic clashes of the XX1 century and is as his best both synthesizing a lot of relevant information and detecting as well the transcendence of some debates apparently out of the public and media limelight (such as the Searle-Dennett on the role and nature of consciousness) not only because their implications, but also because they are symptoms of how scientism has taken over more and more territories of the human identity to a point that is not so far away to deny it. But above all the best asset of this book consists on his clear understanding on which is at stake. The disruptive potential of the more extreme forms of technological hubris such as genetic "improvement "applied to human genome it is clearly stated: because as unintended consequence it could lead not only to a sort of "arms race" between states but also within society itself (among private citizens with de facto different access to resources) inequality would acquire another dimension and meaning. Under a perspective where a society of classes could take the path of a society of castes, the whole foundations of political order, as was understood in the western tradition would crumble. The peril is simply that differences in socioeconomic terms turn into a difference in biological terms. The mere possibility of that gap is just unbearable for a modern society. If that happen class struggle never had before a stronger motivation.
No less important is his identification of how inadequate is the utilitarian philosophy that pervades economical thinking which its mantra "minimize pain/maximize pleasure" when it invades other areas of human action especially medical practice. The peril consists on blurring the difference between healing and enhancement. Actually it disorients society in important issues such as how to deal with drugs consumption. We have not to wait to extreme forms of human nature manipulation to detect that trend in the current abuses in using Prozac or Ritalin. Some cases for which the safer bet is to enforce nerve, self control and character are taking short cuts when the easy way is a technological manipulation of behavior.
In this sense Fukuyama's strongest point is that even a democratic assumption of enhancement and improvement for everyone -when genetic engineering takes the helm as the leading technology to achieve those goals- is that it is not preposterous to think the biological differentiation of beings it would yield as a result may resemble rather a sort of Nietzschean dystopia where the best intentions of that pursuit have not place at all: a new order where shared human ideals have not to be recognized any longer.
Fukuyama without wasting time identifies to which extend the whole conceptual building of the ethical and political tradition -at least of the west- depends on two crucial assumptions: there is a human nature and there is a human dignity. But in taking these issues he falls short. He understands that the challenge to face now is to find new secular foundations to both ideas grounded in the disintegrating bedrock of metaphysics, religion and theology, but far to solve the conundrum (after all the book is only 218 pp long) he rather gets to draw with precision the map of the future battles to come. The author intends a solution alternative to the Kantian sharp distinction between actions based on knowledge and action based on ethics (categorical imperatives) at the time he insists that science does not have -and cannot have- the last world in defining ultimate human values and goals. But he bets anyway in some sort of knowledge in route to find new foundations to the very idea of human nature, so what kind of knowledge could be that? Maybe the sort of knowledge we can find in literature which is not systematic almost by definition, maybe the sort of knowledge that some thinkers as Merlin Donald intends (by the way with very interesting results indeed) which are at mid point between philosophy and scientific knowledge: an argumentation where the latter still is the tool, not the master.
However and beyond what FF achieved or not I am tempted to say that every citizen should read it. But because it sounds as an overstatement I only wish that someday it will be discussed in every college at any level, alongside with Neil Postman's amazingly intelligent, witty little book entitled "Technopoly".
7 people found this helpful
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Kate Wescott
3.0 out of 5 starsinterestingJune 5, 2013
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
I don't feel the same way about genetic modification, but his arguments were valid points, but he jumped to conclusions that are impossible at this time, so it felt like reading a conspiracy novel.
One person found this helpful
HelpfulComment Report abuse
Alex Foster
5.0 out of 5 starsLoved it!March 4, 2013
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
This book is sooo good! And it is still very relevant. You do not need to know anything about biotchnology to enjoy this book!
HelpfulComment Report abuse
Ahmed M. El Minawi
2.0 out of 5 starsnot convincingMay 19, 2014
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Having read other titles by this author i eagerly purchased this. I put it down after a few pages and finally finished 3 weeks later. Very different writing style from what we are used to. His ideas in this book are at times far-fetched and plainly wrong.
One person found this helpful
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Catherine
5.0 out of 5 starsFive StarsMarch 27, 2015
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
As expected thanks!
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aytek
5.0 out of 5 starsfrom one extreme to otherJanuary 30, 2013
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
The cocktail recipes is just a few pages with some simple illustrations by unknown artists. Why does it cost 10 $. I feel like ripped off. Why do you sell this as a .book. İt is more like a leaflet. And must be free of charge.
On the other side of the spectrum, Fukuyama's book is a classic I would recommend it to everybody who can read.
----------
Don't mess with human nature...
Francis Fukuyama fears that biotechnology will make monsters of us. Steven Rose weighs the evidence
Sat 1 Jun 2002 10.13 AESTFirst published on Sat 1 Jun 2002 10.13 AEST
Shares
6
Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
By Francis Fukuyama 256pp
Profile, £17.99
Francis Fukuyama achieved fame - or notoriety - when, 10 years ago, he published The End of History . It was not some futuristic speculation, but an argument that the collapse of Soviet communism and the triumph of US-style liberal democracy meant that, effectively, the world was now under stable management. He has been rowing back ever since.
This is not, as one might have imagined, because the world has been anything but stable in the past decade. It is because he has belatedly realised that so long as scientific and technological innovation proceeds at its current breakneck pace, social stasis - the end of history - is impossible. Some of us have been saying this for years, but it is encouraging that the political economists have eventually caught up.
Social transformations are an inevitable corollary of the dramatic changes in the nature of work and communication generated by technology. Until the mid-20th century, utopias - from those of Francis Bacon and Samuel Butler to that of HG Wells - all envisaged a technologically stable society. The much more common dystopic writing of the past 50 years has largely been posited on disruptive scientific and technological fantasies.
Of these, first information technology and then biotechnology have come to be seen as presenting the greatest challenges. Gung-ho geneticists promise to encode human life on a CD, to create designer babies, to extend human life indefinitely. Only slightly more soberly, psychopharmacologists offer the prospect of tailor-made drugs to ease the mental pain of living, enhance intelligence, and control disruptive behaviour. A new trade of bioethics has grown up around such prospects, providing gainful, albeit generally vacuous, employment to otherwise out-of-work moral philosophers.
With Fukuyama's move into this territory, it may be that bioethicists are going to be upstaged by political economists. His question is clear: do we really want this post-human future, full of bioengineered cyborgs? Should we just retreat behind the mantra - originated by physicists who worked on the hydrogen bomb - that science is progress, and cannot and will not be halted? Most US free marketeers writing in this area take this view, in contrast to the European tradition of regulating in the public interest. So the major surprise of Fukuyama's book is that, in the field of human biotechnology at least, he favours regulation.
He begins by summarising what he sees as the current state of play in the science and technology of genetic and brain sciences, in terms of their capacity to extend healthy human life, to understand the roots of human behaviour (intelligence, aggression, sexual orientation), and to control and change that behaviour with drugs (Prozac, Ritalin and so on). Although refreshingly sceptical about the claims made for the power and scope of such drugs, he rightly argues that at the least they are harbingers of increasingly effective new generations of psychochemicals.
He is on less firm ground when dealing with genetic claims, where he accepts at face value the rather suspect evidence for so-called "smart" or "aggressive" mice engineered by adding or removing DNA from their genomes. And sometimes he is way off course, as when he repeats the once-fashionable 19th-century nostrum that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" - ie, that a human foetus relives its evolutionary history in the nine months prior to birth. But for his purposes, such errors in biological understanding aren't important, and his assessment of the direction in which such work is heading seems about right.
That some of us are sceptical about its feasibility should not prevent us from looking hard at its potential consequences. We should be warned by the example of Sir Ernest Rutherford, who knew more about the structure of atoms in the early decades of the past century than anyone else, but still insisted that the prospect of atomic power was "moonshine".
So what should we do about it? The middle section of the book centres on two classical philosophical problems viewed from within this new context: human rights and human nature. The discourse of rights has become very murky in recent years, in part, according to Fukuyama, because of the rejection of naturalism. Naturalism would claim that there is an intrinsic universal human nature, and that therefore ethics, and as a consequence human "rights", can be derived from it.
These assumptions together constitute what has been called the naturalistic fallacy. Critics point out that human nature can be expressed only within the diverse and historically contingent societies that humans create, and therefore cannot be understood a priori. There is no "nature" outside social context, and within the limits of evolved human biology the societies that we have created are extraordinarily diverse.
In any event, as philosophers from Hume onwards have pointed out, one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is". Evolutionary psychologists reject the first criticism, and despite their protestations that they wouldn't dream of doing so, happily spend their time deriving multiple oughts from diverse ises. Fukuyama accepts their claims to universalism in order to build his case that the naturalistic fallacy is itself fallacious. Hence, he argues, there is a human nature on which human rights can be based. And insofar as human biotechnology threatens to interfere with that human nature, it is essential that it be regulated. Sound conclusion, faulty premises.
So, finally, to the tough question: how to bell this particular cat. Most biotech is done in the US, and outside federal laboratories it is largely unregulated. But the situation is paradoxical, as US conservative religious views on, for instance, stem-cell research clash with an otherwise deregulatory agenda. (Legislation to ban so-called therapeutic cloning is currently before Congress, at the same time as the US withdraws from the Kyoto and Start treaties and weakens environmental protection.)
Fukuyama looks almost enviously at the tighter regulatory structures in Europe as a harbinger of hope that biotechnology's post-human world does not have to be competitive, hierarchical and full of social conflict - a future he sees as probable if unregulated biotechnology delivers on its promises. He - and we - should be so lucky. For a political economist to derive a conclusion abstracted from either practical politics or economy almost makes one wish for the return of the bioethicists.
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