2 Timothy 3:1-5
Psalm 139:1-14
Matthew 24:1-14
Joel Garreau “Radical Evolution”
“Four interrelated, intertwining technologies are cranking up to modify human nature. Call them GRIN technologies – the genetic, robotic, information and nana processes. These four advances are intermingled and feeding on one another. And they are collectively creating a curve of change unlike anything we humans have ever seen.
Already enhanced people walk among us. You can see it most clearly. ‘The current doping agony’ says John Hoberman, a University of Texas authority on performing drugs, ‘is a kind of very confused referendum on the future of human enhancement.’ Extreme pharmacological sport did not begin or end with East Germany. Some athletes today look grotesque. Curt Schilling, the All-star pitcher, in 2002 talked to Sports Illustrated about the major leagues. ‘Guys out there look like Mr. Potato Head, with a head and arms and six or seven body parts that just don’t look right.’ Competitive bodybuilding is already divided into tested shows (i.e., drug free) verses untested shows (anything goes). That’s merely the beginning. Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania who created genetically modified “mighty mice” have been deluged by calls from athletes and coaches who want to try this technology themselves. These mice are shockingly large and muscular. They are built like steers, with massive haunches and necks wider than their heads. Could such gene doping work in humans – assuming it isn’t already? ‘Oh yea, it’s easy.’ H. Lee Sweeney, chairman of Penn’s Department of Physiology, told The New York Times. ‘Anyone who can clone a gene and work with cells could do it. It’s not a mystery……You could change the endurance of the muscle or modulate the speed – all the performance characteristics. All the biology is there. If someone said, ‘Here is $10 million – I want you to do everything you can think of in terms of sports’ you could get pretty imaginative.”
April 2020, the book ‘HACKING DARWIN; GENETIC ENGINEERING AND THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY, was published. The author Jamie Metzl; a leading futurist, geopolitical expert, a Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council who has served in the White House, State Department, and United Nations. In 2019, Jamie was appointed to the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on developing global standards for the governance and oversight of human genome editing.
“About 350 million years ago, some fish crawled out of the water and evolved into mammals. Around 300,000 years ago, some of those mammals morphed into Homo sapiens, a.k.a. us.
That’s basically our evolutionary history. Every one of us is a single-cell organism gone wild through nearly four billion years of random mutation whose ancestors have continually outcompeted their competitors in a never-ending cage match for survival. If your ancestors survived and procreated, you are here. If not, you are not. The shorthand name for this is DARWINIAN EVOLUTION. It got us to this point. But now the principles of Darwinian evolution are themselves mutating.
From this point onward, much of our mutation will not be random. It will be self-designed. From this point onward, our species will take active control of our evolutionary process by genetically altering our future offspring into something different from what we are today. We are, in other words, beginning a process of hacking Darwin.
It is an incredible idea with monumental implications.
The current version of our Homo sapiens species was never an evolutionary endpoint but always a stop along the way in our continuous, evolutionary journey. Going forward, we will be driving this process like never before THROUGH TECHNOLOGY, hopefully guided by our best values.
If we traveled a thousand years into the past, kidnapped a baby, and brought that baby into our world today, that child would grow up into an adult indistinguishable from everyone else. But if we jumped back into the time machine and went a thousand years from today into the future to do the same the baby we brought back would be a genetic superhuman by our current standards. He or she would be stronger and smarter than the other children, resistant to many diseases, longer-lived, and have genetic traits today associated with outlier humans like particular forms of genius or with animals like super-keep sensory perceptions. He or she might even carry new traits not yet known in the human or animal worlds but made from the same
“biological building blocks that have given rise to the great diversity of all life.
”Many of the first applications will seem both miraculous and comfortable as they improve the quality of our health care. Our increasing understanding of human genetics will allow us to shift from our current system of generalized health care based on population averages to our new world of personalized (also known as precision) health care, where we are all treated differently based on each of our unique, individual biologies. To provide the right drug or treatment tailored just for you, your doctor will need to know who you are on a much deeper level than what is currently the case. That’s why, in very short order, most of us will have our genomes sequenced as part of the electronic health records our doctors and their artificial intelligence algorithms will use when deciding how best to treat us. As an essential part of our systemic transition to personalized care, we’ll very soon have many people who’ve had their genomes sequences – WHICH WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING.”
“We could sequence every person on Earth and it wouldn’t mean a thing UNLESS WE HAD A WAY OF COMPARING WHAT THE GENES SAY TO HOW THOSE GENES ARE EXPRESSED OVER THE COURSE OF A PERSON’S LIFETIME.
But that’s exactly the type of information we will have in people’s electronic health and life records. And when we compare the genetic and life information of billions of people, we’ll be able to increasingly crack the code of complex genetics. This will not only dramatically improve the accuracy of our personalized health care but also move us very quickly from a paradigm of precision medicine to one of increasingly predictive medicine, health and life that will transform the ways we think about human potential, parenting, and fate.
But the even more revolutionary applications of genetic technologies will revolutionize both the way we make babies and the nature of the babies we make.
As a start, we will us the existing technologies of in vitro fertilization and informed embryo selection not just to screen out the simplest genetic diseases and select gender, as is currently the case, but also to choose the genetics of our future children more broadly.
A second, overlapping phase of the human genetic revolution will go a step farther, bumping up the number of eggs available for IVF by inducing large numbers of adult cells like blood or skin cells into stem cells, turning those stem cells into egg cells, and then growing those egg cells into actual eggs.
Women undergoing IVF will be able to have not just ten or fifteen of their eggs fertilized, but hundreds. Instead of screening the smaller number of their own embryos, these prospective parents would be able to review screens of hundreds more, supercharging embryo selection process with big-data analytics. Many parents will also consider the possibility of not just selecting but of genetically altering their future children. Gene-editing technologies have been around for years, but the recent development of new tools like CRISPR-Cas9 is making it possible to edit the genes of all species, including ours, with far greater precision. With CRISPR and tools like it, it will ultimately be possible to give embryos new traits and capabilities by inserting DNA from other humans, animals, or someday even synthetic sources. “Once parents realize they can use IVF and embryo selection to screen out the risk of many genetic diseases and potentially select for perceived positive traits like higher IQ and even greater extroversion and empathy, more parents will want their children conceived outside the mother. Many will come to see conception through sex as a dangerous and unnecessary risk. GOVERNMENTS AND INSURANCE COMPANIES WILL WANT PROSPECTIVE PARENTS TO USE IVF AND EMBRYO SELECTION TO AVOID HAVING TO PAY FOR LIFETIMES OF CARE FOR AVOIDABLE AND EXPENSIVE GENETIC DISEASE.” “With these tools, we will want to eliminate genetic disease in the near term, alter and enhance other capabilities in the medium term, and perhaps, prepare ourselves to LIVE ON A HOTTER EARTH, IN SPACE, OR ON OTHER PLANETS IN THE LONGER TERM. Over time, mastering the tools of genetically manipulating ourselves will come to be seen as perhaps the greatest innovation in the history of our species, the key to unlocking an almost unimaginable potential and in many ways AN ENTIRELY NEW FUTURE.”
April 25th, 2019 an article was published in the ECONOMIST.COM The title was: HOW GENETIC ENGINEERING WILL RESHAPE HUMANITY.
In 1909, Psychologist Francis Galton and his colleagues established the journal “Eugenics Review”, which argued in its first edition that nations should compete with each other in “race-betterment” and that the number of people in with “prenatal conditions” in hospitals and asylums should be “reduced to a minimum” through sterilization and selective breeding.
Galton’s theories gained increasing prominence internationally, particularly in the New World. Although eugenics would later accrue sinister connotations, many of the early adopters of eugenics theories were American progressives who believed science could be used to guide social policies and create a better society for all. “We can intelligently mold and guide the evolution in which we take part”, progressive theologian Richard Rauschenbusch wrote. “GOD”, Johns Hopkins economic professor Richard Ely asserted, “WORKS THROUGH THE STATE.” Many American progressives embraced eugenics as a way of making society better by preventing those considered “unfit” and “defective” from being born. “We know enough about eugenics so that if that knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a decade,” University of Wisconsin president Charles Van Hise opined.
In the United States, the “science” of eugenics became intertwined with disturbing ideas about race. Speaking to the 1923 Second International Congress of Eugenics, President Henry Osborn of New York’s American Museum of Natural History argued that scientists should: “ascertain through observation and experiment what each race is best fitted to accomplish…..If the Negro fails in government, he may become a fine agriculturist or a fine mechanic…..The right of the state to safeguard the character and integrity of the race or races on which its future depends is, to my mind, as incontestable as the right of the state to safeguard the health and morals of its peoples. As science has enlightened government in the prevention and spread of disease, it must also enlighten government in the prevention of the spread and multiplication of worthless members of society, the spread of feeblemindedness, of idiocy, and of all moral and intellectual as well as physical disease.”
As the eugenics movement played out in the United States, another group of Europeans was watching closely. Nazism was, in many ways, a perverted heir of Darwinism. German scientists and doctors embraced Galton’s eugenic theories from the beginning.”
Adolf Hitler wrote in «MEIN KAMPF»
«Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all….
Since the inferior always outnumber the superior, the former would always increase more rapidly if they possessed the same capacities for survival and for the procreation of their kind; and the final consequence would be that the best in quality would be forced to recede into the background. Therefore a corrective measure in favor of the better quality must intervene…..for here a new and rigorous selection takes place, according to strength and health.”
