Nature, Technology, and the Emergence of Cybernetic Humanity - Is Human Nature Obsolete? - page 64

evolutionary biology from Darwin—and from science as a whole, science defined
as the search for universal laws—[Gould] has sought to make the quest for
knowledge open-ended, even infinite. . . . Whereas most scientists seek to discern
the signal underlying nature, Gould keeps drawing attention to the noise.” (John
Horgan, The End of Science [New York: Broadway Books, 1996], 126-127).
35. See Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology
(New York: Harper and Row, 1966), Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed
to Technological Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), and The
Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
36. For the argument that computers incline their users to an epistemology and
ontology that are perfectly in line with modern atomism and the belief that being,
in the end, is nothing but information, see Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of
Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
37. When Descartes justifies Galilean science in the Discourse on Method as
enabling us to become the “masters and possessors of nature,” he further justi-
fies that mastery by pointing to ensuing technologies that will aid in “the preser-
vation of health, which is without doubt the chief blessing and the foundation
of all other blessings in this life” ( The Philosophical Works of Descartes ,
1:119-120).
38. See Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial
Intelligence (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).
39. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life , 120.
40. An early and instructive example of the claim that technoscience will enable
humans to seize control of their own evolution can be found in J. D. Bernal,
The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1929), 47.
41. Turning it into “artificial selection” through the usurpation of evolution's
mutational agency.
42. C.S. Lewis maintains that “what we call Man's power over Nature turns out
to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instru-
ment,” adding that “all long-term exercises of power, especially in breeding, must
mean the power of earlier generations over later ones” ( The Abolition of Man
[New York: Macmillan, 1947], 69). Sigmund Freud as well argues that “the influ-
ence exercised upon the social relations of mankind by progressive control over
the forces of Nature is unmistakable. For men always put their newly acquired
instruments of power at the service of their aggressiveness and use them against
one another” ( New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis , ed. and trans.
James Strachey [New York: W. W. Norton, 1989], 219).
43. See Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1999), 267-294.
44. See Karen Warren, ed., Ecofeminism: Women, Nature, Culture
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Carolyn Merchant, The Death
of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper