Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
cerned with cooperativeness than intelligence since he agreed with
Russell's claim that an increase in knowledge without a corresponding
increase in social motivation would spell disaster.) Fortunately, the
Bolshevik triumph provided a favorable opportunity to intervene. In
Out
of the Night: A Biologist's View of the Future
, Muller explained that
improvement could be accomplished through the mass insemination of
women with the sperm of men superior in intellect and fellow feeling.
(Although first published in 1935, the topic was written in 1925.) Such
a program of mass selection would rapidly raise the level of the popu-
lation. Right now, if we only had the will, it would be possible to so
“order our reproduction that a considerable part of the very next gen-
eration might average, in its hereditary physical and mental constitution,
half-way between the average of the present population and that of our
greatest living men of mind, body, or 'spirit' (as we choose). At the same
time, it can be reckoned, the number of men and women of great though
not supreme ability would thereby be increased several hundred fold.”
But this is only the immediate result. Eventually, pace Galton and
Wallace, evolution “will reach down into the secret places of the great
universe of its own nature and, by the aid of its ever-growing intelligence
and cooperation, shape itself into an increasingly sublime creation.”
33
An even more extreme transformist vision was articulated by the
Marxist crystallographer Bernal. Bernal took the practice of ectogenesis
for granted, and assumed it would result in a greatly increased life span
and intelligence. Those individuals with especially powerful intellects
would be plugged into an elaborate network of other superior beings.
Consciousness itself would likely “vanish in a humanity that has become
completely etherealized, losing the close-knit organism, becoming masses
of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps
resolving itself entirely into light.”
34
This world-mind would then be in
a position to manipulate (and experiment on) other lesser beings. Bernal
equably considers the possibility that the human race will split in two,
with a higher race that consists of scientists, who will also eventually
become rulers with “the means of directing the masses in harmless occu-
pations and of maintaining a perfect docility under the appearance of
perfect freedom.”
35
It might be noted that the idea of a world divided into rulers who
constitute a biological elite and the ruled who constitute a biological
