Assorted Links

1. What’s the most dangerous karate move? Science KNOWS!
2. DNA copying for everyone.
3. More evidence dinosaurs were warmblooded, even the swimmy ones.
4. Cloned horse!
5. Courtesy and disability discussion on Reddit.
6. When are you an adult?

The Only News That Matters

Good news everyone!

From Gears to Genes: A Sea Change in Transhumanism

Transhumanism was for the better part of its existence a philosophy built around computers, robotics, A.I, and nanotech. Extropianism, one of the most impressive and potent iterations of transhumanism, was born out of Silicon Valley. Many transhumanist research institutes still operate out of the lovely southern California epicenter of futurist dreaming. Only in the past decade have we started to realize that transhumanism won’t realize its dreams through mechanization and computerization. Though seminal authors on transhumanism, like Kurzweil, Morovac, Drexler, and More focus on nanotechnology and cybernetics, those technologies haven’t seen real progress since the 70′s.

But genetics and biotech has. Starting in the 1950′s with the Pill, vaccines, and antibiotics, our knowledge of medicine and biology radically improved throughout the second half of the twentieth century with assisted reproduction technologies like IVF, not to mention genomic sequencing, stem cell research, organ transplantation, and neural mapping, advances in biology and medicine are what are driving the transhumanist revolution. When someone like Mark Gubrud starts arguing transhumanism won’t work because we can’t upload our minds into robot bodies, one has to gawk for a moment in awe at the irrelevance of the argument. It’s like arguing we can’t ever cure cancer because cold fusion is impossible. Transhumanism is the idea of guiding and improving human evolution with intention through the use of technologies and culture. If those technologies are not robotic and cybernetic but, instead, genetic and organic, then so be it. And that seems to be the way things are going.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the moment of change, but 2001 seems to be a good year as any. Before that you have an engineer’s perspective on how to improve humanity, as with the above authors. After that, you have writers like Bostrom, Pearce, Hughes, Agar, and Bailey nodding to the older, mechanical ideas, but instead choosing to focus on pre-implantation genetic diagnostics, senescence, cognition enhancing drugs, growth hormones, eugenics, mood control, suffering, sentience, sexuality and neurodiversity. The clone has replaced the cyborg, and the only engineering that matters has the words “genetic” or “chemical” as a prefix.

Cryonics, A.I., and nanotech remain points of interest, but of significantly reduced importance. One of our best and most amazing cybernetic devices, a cochlear implant, is rudimentary compared to the fantastic goals of syncing a mind, a thing we can’t even define, with circuitry. Yet our efforts to sequence the very instructions from which a mind is grown, DNA, has been a smashing success. Genetics and biotechnology is currently where electronics and computing were in the 1960′s: the very basics have been established and we don’t even know what we’re going to do with the technology. We don’t even know what we have yet: biology is in a liminal space.

And it is because of that liminality that we as transhumanists must not focus on technologies, on possibilities or guesses as to what may come, but rights and responsibilities. No one, and I mean no one, predicted the iPhone and everything it entails (cellular communication, hand-held computing, the internet, digital music and video, mass affordability) at the dawn of the computing era. No one even predicted it during the Dot Com Boom. To guess as to where biotech might go in the next 50 years is an equally huge exercise in futility.

The critical difference is, of course, that the human body is biological. Unlike technology, which mediates our interaction with the world, whatever advances occur in biology will mediate how we are embodied and will directly effect our state of existence. It is this existential threat to the “human” that is triggering the backlash and why opponents of transhumanism are no longer Luddites, but bioconservatives. Technology is no longer the enemy, but the very nature of humanity itself.

To be a bioconservative is to pick a moment in time and choose it as the appropriate point for human beings to remain in evolutionary stasis. That we have gone from a pre-sapiens, hunter/gatherer, small tribe, nomadic, raw food processing, species that lacked language/culture/and higher reasoning to a sprawling, urban, technological, language based, culture ruled, rational, super species is irrelevant. The cry of the bioconservative is, to paraphrase McKibben, “Enough! this far, but no further, in the name of “humanity” as we have retroactively defined it!”

But their movement will fail as bioconservatives oppose the very essence of the thing they claim to love: human nature. If there is one thing humans do, it is change, learn, and evolve. We are the apotheosis of evolution, because for the first time in the universe the process has a conscious agent. Like a confused and frightened Urizin stumbling along with the love and wisdom of Sophia as our guide, we desperately seeking to live up to our potential and the racking weight of the knowledge that we may fall short. As with computers and the digital revolution, we do not know where biotech and the genetic revolution will take us. But we know it will take humanity somewhere else, somewhere new.

One can reject that change, concede to fear and in doing so reject one’s humanity; or one can take hold of the brighter burning flame of science and philosophy and, in doing so, dare to believe we can ethically and boldly bring our species out of the biological Dark Ages and into a future of unexpected wonders and challenges.

Goodness

Mike Anissimov threw a few rocks through the paper-thin arguments of the wasps over at Futurisms, resulting in their version of an angry swarm (comments and a blog post). The initial post itself is pretty funny, because, in short, Futurisms argued, with a picture and a headline, “We like one of the most likable actresses to ever exist, but the people we critique think she needs to be made into a borg to be of value.” Just to clarify, we transhumanists love Hepburn, but think it’s sad that she 1.) had lots of miscarriages and 2.) died, so we argue for technology that would have fixed those problems. The back and forth is largely uninteresting, because neither party explores what is at stake here: goodness vis-a-vis humanism. Transhumanists are humanists and those at Futurisms claim to be humanists as well. So we have a problem of interpretation, not of standards of “goodness.”

I’ll make three quick points.

1. Humanist/Enlightenment standards of “goodness” have not changed, but have been consistently reinterpreted over the past 300 years. I can guarantee that no humanist in 1750 would have argued that all human beings are equal and have understood it the same way a humanist would in the year 2010. For example: the concept of “homosexual” didn’t even exist, so how could inclusion/exclusion goodness/badness even be considered in 1750.

2. The focus has never been “human beings” so much as it has been intelligent, rational adults. For a long time, only white, landowning, men could be considered intelligent, rational adults, with everyone else being too simple to be morally responsible/autonomous. All transhumanism does is expose the original criterion – intelligence, rationality, and sentience – and point out that the boundary isn’t drawn by DNA but by something emergent. Rights are a case by case situation.

3. The “goodness” of Hepburn is an interesting case because no mention is made of what makes Hepburn so good she can’t be better. She was a fantastic human being and remains iconic, but why? Is it because she is beautiful? Smart? Kind? A humanitarian? Because she was a great actress? Her fashion sense? She was a smoker, is that good? She had miscarriages, would remedying that situation lessen her? Not only would there be a debate over what actually makes her good, any agreement (say, her fashion) would lead to debates over someone who is better at that aspect (Jackie O, Gaga, Coco Chanel).

I agree that moral relativism is a problem. I also agree with Anissimov’s point that our morality and sense of goodness are innately connected to how our minds evolved (not each individual mind, but the whole species), and neuroscience has been kinda-sorta proving the Categorical Imperative.  But for the writers of Futurisms to come to the conclusion that ah! the late 20th century version of humanism is THE version to stick with, is willfully ignorant.

Cisgenics, High Speed Breeding

Good ol’ foresters have engineered a new form of genetic engineering that allows for gene exchanges within a single species:

“Until now, most applications of biotechnology have been done with transgenics, in which you take genetic traits from one plant or animal and transfer them into an unrelated species,” said Steven Strauss, a distinguished professor of forest biotechnology at OSU. “By contrast, cisgenics uses whole genes from the same plant or a very closely related species. We may be able to improve on the slow and uncertain process of plant breeding with greater speed and certainty of effect.”

This is possible in part because of the growing knowledge about what specific genes do in plants and animals, and enormous increases in the speed of genome sequencing, or mapping them out in their entirety. Sequencing that used to take years can now be accomplished in days.

Dolphins are Diplomatic

Dolphins, like me in a bar surrounded by large angry dudes, do there best to talk their way out of fights:

“Burst-pulsed sounds are used in the life of bottlenose dolphins to socialise and maintain their position in the social hierarchy in order to prevent physical conflict, and this also represents a significant energy saving,” Bruno Díaz, lead author of the study and a researcher at the BDRI, which he also manages, said. … According to the experts, the tonal whistle sounds (the most melodious ones) allow dolphins to stay in contact with each other (above all mothers and offspring), and to coordinate hunting strategies. The burst-pulsed sounds (which are more complex and varied than the whistles) are used “to avoid physical aggression in situations of high excitement, such as when they are competing for the same piece of food, for example,” explains Díaz.

Do As They Do

I saw Iain Couzin speak at Secret Science Club at the Bell House last month and he was fantastic. Brilliant, funny, engaging – he makes science all the more lovable. Here’s a video of his work on swarm theory:

Swarm Mentality from Scienceline on Vimeo.

Assorted Links

1. Eight principles of neurodiversity.
2. iPhone 4 = AR dream machine.
3. Interview with Julian Savulescu on bioethics and enhancement.
4. Jesse Bering, always entertaining, on the science of fag hags.
5. Self-control is slavery?
6. Whole brain emulation?

Assorted Links

1. The Hanky Pancreas
2. Putting the GMO food debate to rest. Shut. Up. Hippies.
3. Splice, a rather enjoyable sci-horror flick, seems to be something a few law makers are actually worried about.
4. Let’s talk about cyborg rights. Like, right now.
5. The evolution of zombies (as a meme/myth, not how real zombies evolve. That’d be silly).
6. Mongooses (Mongeese? what’s the plural?) pass on traditions to their young.

Someone Inform the CEV

Oh dear:

Cy&H via TDW