Printer-Friendly
Email this Story
Post a Comment (0)
One step further is toughest part of the journey
Last week, as I sat among Highland students listening to author Joel Garreau, I reminisced about my college days. Garreau reminded me of some of my university professors.Having written a somewhat controversial book, “Radical Evolution,” he posed thought-provoking theories, sprinkled with bits of humor. Some of his visionary lecture was based on fact, some on opinion, some on hypotheses. He moved about the lecture area, gestured with his hands and occasionally glanced at his notes as if he were comfortable in a large classroom environment. Although I was there to cover his speech, I took notes like a student preparing for an exam.
Simply put, Garreau's complex theories predict engineered human transformation. Well, maybe that doesn't sound simple after all.
“Through advances in genetics, robotics, information and nanotechnologies, we are altering our minds, memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our progeny — and perhaps our very souls,” he writes in his book. These processes could increase student test scores, athletic performances, memory enhancement — even fat loss.
For some of us, that sounds pretty good. I, for one, could stand a change in metabolism and memory right off the bat. But Garreau sees these as “modifications of what it means to be human.”
Some of these enhanced modifications are actually already developed; some will be in the near future. Garreau cites experiments in which implanted computer chips could augment brain function, vaccines could take away pain, lasers through photo-biomodulation could restore vision and maybe even regenerate tissue and organs. In making immune systems invulnerable, he said scientists have found that “there are half a dozen approached to viruses and bacteria in the works...one seems to work on smallpox, malaria, anthrax and tularemia.”
Garreau maintains that theorists “see our lives changing more dramatically in the next few decades than in all of recorded history.” Wherever there is the greatest competition — military, beauty, sports — there will be a cry for enhancement.
With all these technologies and more coming at a faster rate than ever in the history of mankind, he said that these changes are not about computers, but about “defining the cultural, social and political issue of our age. It is about human transformation.”
With this transformation, Garreau said that all of a sudden we have extra memory and extra cognition. We are smarter, but are we wiser?
Any good lecturer gives you that one point to consider, that one point you can relate to, that one point you can't get out of your mind. And Garreau did that for me. Is the human factor of wisdom perhaps the missing link in the radical evolution? How do you create wisdom?
Those questions made me think of my pediatrician when I was a young child in Atlanta — Leila Denmark, M.D. A role model for me and a visionary in her own right, Denmark celebrated a healthy 110th birthday a couple of weeks ago. She practiced medicine until she was 103, the oldest practicing physician in the world. Not only has she lived a naturally “enhanced” life, she has radical evolution's missing link of wisdom.
Her wisdom came to me in few words: “Always take things one step further.”
Denmark was the only woman in her 1928 graduating class at the Medical School of Georgia. She once told me that when she was in medical school, she had an experiment which caused her a great deal of trouble. Every time her specimen reached a certain point in the experiment, it would “mold over” and she would throw it away.
Later she found out that had she carried her experiment just one step further, she would have discovered penicillin, an antibiotic derived from the penicillium notatum mold. With that hard-learned lesson of perseverance, she later discovered the vaccine for pertussis (whooping cough). All revolutionary for the early part of the 20th century — all without robotics and nanotechnologies—all to help mankind.
“For all previous millennia,” Garreau writes, “our technologies have been aimed outward, to control our environment. Now we are entering an engineered evolution, one that we direct for ourselves.”
He is suggesting powerful possibilities for humans in the radical evolution, with the speeding advances of technologies never before imagined, technologies that will blur “the distinction between the 'made' and the 'born.'”
But will they take us just one step further?
E-mail the reporter: afelts@timespapers.com.
You must be logged in to post a comment.