Anti-transhumanism is evolution denialism

There's a riff among counter-transhumanists that goes something like this: "You guys are just eugenecists in disguise. You think that you know better than evolution how to create better people. Evolution is smarter than you." The counter-transhumanists then try to drape themselves in the mantle of being the sensible, scientific types, opposed to those wacky transhumanists who get their ideas out of Marvel comics.

Edward Jenner, the man who discovered the smallpox vaccine and the principle of vaccination in general, could never have forseen a world where families did not regularly experience smallpox, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and a host of other sufferings, all of them fatal to some of the population. The average peg-legged pirate could never have forseen a day when an athletic runner with two prostheses ran faster than her counterparts with more ordinary limbs.

Vaccination is transhumanism, in the same sense that Grandma's hip replacement makes her a cyborg. Once, we couldn't do anything about a failing hip or smallpox. Today, we can prevent some diseases, and we can replace or enhance some failing body parts. Once: none. Then: one. Then: a few. Now: some.

And just as the anti-evolutionary crowd at the Discovery Institute has failed to find that one principle in biology or physics that finally and critically reveals how evolution is impossible, the anti-transhumanist crowd at the New Atlantis have failed to find that one principle in biology or physics that reveals how we will never be able to replace or enhance all of them.

And that is transhumanism. Vaccination is transhumanism, after all. Go read your Dickens, and be thankful that, after 50,000 years, most of us reading this post will never have the oh-so-human experience of watching a beloved child die from a disease.

I am always buying "gamer's cases" from now on.

A year ago, I bought a brand new computer. In parts. While in Fry's, I discovered that they did not have the case I wanted, but they had the "gamer's equivalent" for about $20 more. I bought that one.

That was an experience I will be repeating from now on. This case is quiet, much more quiet than the older "office grade" case. This morning, I had the quad-cores running all-out loading the Human genome (homo_sapiens_core_65_37) into MySQL. DNA sequencing took about two minutes, and the whole alignment features collection took about ten minutes total. The hottest spot on the motherboard was 112°F (44C).

Sweet!