Anti-transhumanism is evolution denialism

[elfs]

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.

Comments

[hugh-mannity.livejournal.com]

I've never thought of myself as a cyborg, but I've got 2 aftermarket knees.

I shall have to put that on my business cards :D

[amindofiron.livejournal.com]

here here.

[mouser.livejournal.com]

I would equate it more to my mothers pacemaker:

An apparent hiatus in publication of research conducted between the early 1930s and World War II may be attributed to the public perception of interfering with nature by 'reviving the dead'. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_cardiac_pacemaker)

If I'm looking at it right, they got serious about pacemakers before artificial joints. Weird.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Oh sure, of course they did. They discovered that electricity can move muscles - even in dead animals - before the 20th century. That's where the whole concept of Dr. Frankenstein's monster came from in the first place.

Come to the conclusion that hearts are muscles, and two and two go together rather easily.

Also, faulty hearts kill people. Faulty joints do not.

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

I meant to add this comment closer to when you made this post, but, well, things.
Improvements to the sensors put in artificial limbs (http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2012/01/sensor-adds-feeling-to-prosthetic.html).