How did we come to think about nature, technology and society in the way that we do? How are the revolutions in

technology—bio, nano, info, cogno—revolutions gathered up under the umbrella term transhuman-ism—changing the very foundations on which understandings of the human and the environment are built? What new understandings are needed to face the ac-celerating level of complexity of virtually all human, built and natural systems?

These are some of the questions that Dan Sarewitz, director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO) and professor of science and society in the School of Life Sciences, and Brad Allenby, Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics, professor of civil and environmental engineering, and professor of law, will take on as Templeton co-Fellows in 2007-08.

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, professor of history and director of the Templeton Research Lectures at ASU, said that the selection of Sarewitz and Allenby were obvious choices for the interdisciplin-ary research committee that guides the project.

“The Templeton Research Lectures on ‘Facing the Challenges of Transhumanism: Religion, Science, and Technology’ will greatly

benefit from the expertise of Professors Allenby and Sarewitz,” commented Tirosh-Samuelson. “As national leaders in their respective fields, they are uniquely able to reflect on the complex

interrelations of science, technology, and public policy and explore the philosophical foundations of modern technology and its social and environment impact.”

Sarewitz and Allenby will each deliver a public lecture as part of the Templeton Research Lectures series as well as collabo-rate in a faculty research seminar on the issues of transhumanism, technology, nature and society.

“Being named Templeton co-Fellows will afford Brad and I the opportunity

to develop ideas we have been discussing for several years,” said Sarewitz. “Our goal is to produce a book for the general public that will not only reflect on the challenges of transhumanism, but will provide a new approach to considering the implications and potentials of technological change for human society.”

“Transhumanism raises so many questions,” added Allenby. “It provides an important lens through which to refract and rene-gotiate many of the assumptions about science, nature and the individual that have shaped modern life.”

SAREWITZ AND ALLENBY NAMED TEMPLETON CO-FELLOWS FOR 2007-08

The term ‘transhumanism’ was coined by Julian Huxley in 1957 in a book titled New Bottles for New Wine. Today the term

denotes the confluence of new discoveries in the life sciences, neuroscience, genomics, robotics, informatics, medicine, and nano-technology. The new developments include new kinds of cognitive tools that combine artificial intelligence with interface technology, molecular nanotechnology, extension of human life span, genetic enhancing of human physical and mental capacities, combating diseases and slowing down the process of aging, and exercising control over desires, moods, and mental states. Those who enthusi-astically promote these changes maintain that the accelerating pace of technological development and scientific understanding are ushering in a new age in the history of the human species dur-ing which people will live longer, will possess new physical and cognitive abilities, and will be liberated from suffering and pain due to aging and disease. Humans will no longer be controlled by nature—they will be the controllers of nature.

Transhumanism is suffused with optimistic futurism and many of its advocates are idealists who believe that technology itself will deliver a better future for humanity. Some of the ideas character-istic of transhumanism today can be traced to the 1920s to the writings of J.B.S. Haldane (1923) and J.D. Bernal (1929) although Aldous Huxley’s famous novel, Brave New World (1932), depicted a dystopia in which psychological conditioning, promiscuous sexu-ality, biotechnology, and opiate drugs are used to maintain totalitar-ian control of a placid population by a few controllers.

The horrors of WW II invalidated the goal of creating a new and better world through a centrally imposed vision and they also discredited the eugenics movement that had flourished in the 1920s. But in the 1960s more optimistic futuristic scenarios were articulated by science fiction writers (e.g., Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Stalislaw Lem, and later Bruce Sterling,

Greg Egan, and Vernor Vinge) who speculated about the new, transhuman future. In the 1970s and 1980s various organizations began to advocate life extension, cryonics, space colonization, and other scenarios while advances in biotechnology, neuroscience, and nanotechnology began to make their mark. The writings of Mar-vin Minsky, an eminent artificial intelligence researcher, articulated many of the themes of the transhumanist vision and he was joined by other famous scientific visionaries such as Ray Kurtzweil, Eric Drexler, Frank Tipler, and Hans Moravec. In 1998 the World Trans-humanist Association was founded and in 1999 the first scholarly peer reviewed journal for transhumanist studies was established under the title the Journal of Evolution and Technology.

Transhumanism is a vision for the future of humanity that requires public attention. The questions transhumanism engages are many and wide-ranging. What does it mean to be human? What is nature and what are the implications of transhumanism for the en-vironment? What do we mean by progress and how do we govern when rapid biotechnological developments are outpacing political, legal and regulatory mechanisms? Is transhumanism a seculariza-tion of religious eschatology or a deeply materialist rejection of religion? With ASU and many private companies in metropolitan Phoenix at the forefront of the biotechnological revolution, it is important not only to understand how religion, science and tech-nology interact to give rise to transhumanism, but also how the dialogue of science and religion can help us to address this vision of the human future.

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson is professor of history and project director of the Templeton Research Lectures at ASU. She specializes in premodern Jewish intellectual history, Judaism and science, Judaism and ecology, and feminist philosophy.

TempletonResearchLecturesatASUFacing the Challenges of Transhumanism: Religion, Science, Technology

TempletonResearch

LecturesFacing the Challenges of Transhumanism: Religion, Science, and Technology

Who Are We?: Reconciling Universal

Human Nature and Genetic Uniqueness

John ToobyTuesday, April 17, 2007

Old Main Carson Ballroom 7:30 p.m.

TRANSHUMANISM: A NEW HUMAN FUTURE?by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

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Dan Sarewitz Brad Allenby

ARE WE ALREADY TRANSHUMAN?by Steve Teichgraeber

“Are We Already Transhuman?” This is the question Leda Cosmides posed to an audience of over 300 people at the launching of CSRC’s project, “Facing the Challenges of Transhumanism: Religion, Science, Technology.” Funded by a grant from the Metanexus Institute, the project is part of the Templeton Research Lectures on the Constructive Engagement of Science and Religion. Following the lecture, Cos-mides, a path-breaking researcher and pioneer of the field of evolu-tionary psychology (EP), talked with us further about evolutionary psychology and transhumanism.

As an evolutionary psychologist, why is it important to talk about

transhumanism?

Transhumanists talk about changing human nature. But you should know what human nature is and how it develops before meddling with it. For each reliably developing, species-typical program in the human brain, evolutionary psychologists try to de-termine what its evolved function is, how it processes information to accomplish this function, and how the environment shapes its development. Transhumanists need to know all these things; they should not proceed in a function-blind way. Using technology (or anything else) to alter the information-processing structure of an evolved program could eliminate a person’s ability to solve important adaptive problems.

During your talk, you discussed some issues related to sensory

enhancement, a major trope of the “transhumanist age.” You asked

whether you were more transhuman with your glasses on or off.

You suggested that you were more transhuman without your

glasses, since your glasses help you see like everyone else. Is trans-

humanism mainly a matter of semantics, or is there more to it?

There’s more to it…It’s not just that the glasses make me see like everyone else, but they make me see the way our hunter gatherer ancestors did: they return me to the species-typical design. All our psychological mechanisms, including mechanisms of neural development, were designed to operate well given the structure of ancestral environments. As a result, you don’t find near-sighted hunter gatherers—the eye calibrates well for an average focal distance of about 15 feet. Genetic variation that is not expressed when that is your average focal distance can accumulate in the population, because it doesn’t make a design difference under those conditions. But if development occurs outside the ances-trally normal range of environmental conditions, that genetic variation can be expressed. Unlike hunter-gatherers, we spend a lot of time reading and watching TV, so the average focal distance we routinely experience is much shorter than 15 feet. Under

these evolutionarily novel condi-tions, certain genotypes (like mine) overcalibrate so they see well at the shorter focal distance (and not beyond), becoming near-sighted. Other genotypes do not. But all of these genotypes would produce well-calibrated eyesight given ancestrally normal conditions.

So it’s more than semantics. Natural selection favored genes that led to certain adaptive outcomes given particular environmental conditions. Mecha-nisms of neural development depend on two inheritances, one genetic and the other environmental. Mess with either, and you may change the outcome. So consider the transhumanist goal of implanting devices in the brain. If this changes the nature of the informational input the brain usually gets during development, it could profoundly change the developmental outcome—and not necessarily in the way intended.

Some transhumanists do not seem to understand that the mind is a collection of programs, each of which has a function. They talk about mental enhancements in a way that would strike most evolutionary scientists as function-blind. When transhuman-ists talk about using technology to alter legs, for example, it is with an understanding that legs evolved for walking. So they suggest prosthetic enhancements that still allow, or even improve, loco-motion. But each program in the brain also evolved for a specific function. It makes no sense to talk about “enhancements” if you don’t know the function of the mechanisms that you are trying to enhance. Many of the “enhancements” that transhumanists talk about—especially those to our emotions—have the potential to destroy the functionality of our social emotions, which regulate human social life.

Your lecture seemed to focus specifically on the question of germ-

line engineering and its possible negative consequences. Are there

any other technological fields advocated by transhumanists which

could affect the human condition in similarly unexpected ways?

Many technological advances that transhumanists talk about are changes that are already in process and have been so for a long time—life extension for example. Medical treatments, including genetic ones, to cure rare disorders are also an extension of regular medicine and strike me as a good thing. But when people start

talking about germline engineering to alter human nature—that is, our reliably developing, species-typical evolved design—I start to get concerned. Germline genetic engineering for this purpose has far reaching implications, many of which are pretty scary.

Many within transhumanism seem to argue that the risks of techno-

logical stagnation from not immediately applying new technologies

far outweigh the potential risks of their unintended misuse. They

appear to view whatever mishaps might arise as manageable.

I agree with many of their arguments. I don’t think it makes sense to stop technological development, and it seems to be something we humans are pretty good at managing. For example, some of the changes transhumanists talk about, like extending human life spans, have been in process for a long time—life spans have increased steadily over the past 200 years, and I think it is perfectly possible to manage the demographic consequences of an aging population, especially if life extension technology allows people to stay healthy, and reproductive technologies allow women to con-ceive children at later ages. So yes, I think it would be a mistake to not pursue life extension technologies, which have so much potential to alleviate human suffering and to improve the quality of life.

But in the case of germline genetic engineering to change human nature, you’re altering what defines a person’s human-ity. You’re affecting the control system of the body and altering complex, exquisitely well-designed mental mechanisms that have been engineered by the evolutionary process to solve problems of survival and reproduction. In some cases, we are only very gradu-ally coming to appreciate the nature of some of these problems. It doesn’t make sense to me to fundamentally alter human nature and the course of our development without understanding what consequences might arise from these actions.

Without fully understanding human nature before attempting to im-

prove it, could transhumanists inadvertently alter the human self so

drastically that the end result is a new species, i.e. the posthuman?

Yes. Even more worrisome is the possibility of splitting off differ-ent posthuman species. A species is defined as a set of individuals who can interbreed to produce fertile offspring. If you modify too many genes too quickly in a certain segment of the population, at a certain point they won’t be able to interbreed with each other (assuming they’ve each been modified in different ways) or with other, unmodified humans.

The problem is not that humanity may evolve into a differ-ent species. Natural selection happens all the time, and it could be that in 50,000 years it will have altered us so drastically that our descendants are a new species altogether, just as we Homo sapiens are different from our Homo erectus ancestors. If we evolve in-crementally into a different species through natural selection, our evolved systems will be coordinated with one another—with a few exceptions, selection favors genes that mesh well with the rest of the genome and with the environment. But when you attempt to change a species quickly by using germline genetic engineer-ing, the results can be quite the opposite from what you expect. There could be terrible unintended consequences that cannot be anticipated because our understanding of human nature is still in its infancy. If we think about what transhumanists are suggesting as a radical experiment, then it demands consideration as it is an experiment whose results can not be confined to a laboratory.

John Tooby, named co-Templeton Fellow along with Cosmides, will address one of the central concerns raised in this interview—Who Are We? —in a public lecture on April 17. A recording of Cosmides full lecture, and more information about Tooby’s lecture, is available at www.asu.edu/transhumanism.

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