Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
your personality and your soul into this new being.”
24
As the hearings
ended, the chair of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, Rep. Billy
Tauzin, promised legislation to ban the practice altogether. While lob-
bying by the likes of Rael and Boisselier may generate negative reactions
in the short term, today's posthumanists may be remembered as bold
opinion leaders of a movement in which the combined fascination with
UFOs, alien abductions, cyborg fashions, age-old yearnings for tran-
scendence, and the promise of life-enhancing biomedical breakthoughs
began to seem like an entirely reasonable, highly marketable package.
From Toolmaking Animal to Cyborg
Beyond the extravagant pronouncements of zealots from the community
of scientists and the dreams of posthuman publicists, one finds that ideas
that are at least highly compatible with projects of posthumanism are
now very much in vogue in the social sciences and the humanities.
Among prominent scholars and writers, the view that humans are stable,
coherent natural entities has gone out of fashion. At the same time, the
once commonsense view that there is an important distinction to be
drawn between human beings and the technical implements they use has
begun to fade, replaced by the conclusion that humans and their tools
have finally merged.
The rise of this way of thinking can be traced through a sequence of
three perspectives on humans and technology that have focused schol-
arly debates in recent decades. One persuasion widely endorsed by edu-
cated people in the middle of the twentieth century held that humans are
toolmaking animals. This conception, formulated by Benjamin Franklin
and creatively expanded by Karl Marx, took on renewed significance
with twentieth-century archaeological evidence of protohumans and
their evolution. Thus, anthropologist Sherwood Washburn, among
others, argued that the chance discovery or haphazard creation of sharp-
ened stones used in hunting enabled Australopithecus to increase the
amount of animal protein in its diet, and this in turn led to the evolu-
tion of a larger brain and more robust physical features. In this view,
toolmaking and tool use, especially the ability to perfect tools over time,
was the ability that distinguished humans from other species and estab-
lished their dominance. From this foundation, the complex structures of
