Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (review)

History, concedes Francis Fukuyama, is not coming to an end after all—and irresponsible science is the major reason why. Fukuyama's celebrated 1989 article (and subsequent 1992 book) about the "end of history" argued that clashes between different systems, ideologies, and civilizations were fast losing their potency and might soon cease altogether. The indefinite future would then be marked by the "universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." But now Fukuyama worries that biotechnology poses a threat to the integrity of human nature itself. Unless sternly regulated, it could spawn a new kind of tyranny, with the genetically enhanced wielding a monopoly of resources and political power.

Fukuyama is hardly alone in voicing this fear. He acknowledges that many governments have moved quickly to ban human cloning, and that a growing number of European nations place strict limits on the introduction of genetically modified crops and organisms. However, in his brisk survey of a swiftly evolving field—from drugs that purport to cure attention-deficit disorder to gene therapies capable of producing "designer babies"—Fukuyama is more concerned with the larger purposes, the meta-ethics, of curbing biotechnology than with the prospect that a race of superhumans will rule the planet anytime soon. While a lucid synthesizer of current developments, he is, after all, a social philosopher, not a research scientist.

Fukuyama's critique of biotechnology revolves around his definition and defense of "human nature." He surveys existing medians of height and intelligence that have evolved slowly over the millennia and warns they should not be tampered with. More significantly, he argues that humans "have been wired by evolution to be social creatures who naturally seek to embed themselves in a host of communal relationships" (125). For evidence, he cites the deep structures of language and the prohibition of murder against members of one's own cultural group.

It is because genetic engineering and its ancillary technologies can transcend these limits and destroy these bonds that Fukuyama believes they are so dangerous. He scorns thinkers on the scientific left, such as Richard Lewontin, who believe that human behavior is socially constructed and who would base the control of biotechnology on a defense of human rights instead of human nature. Fukuyama claims that a philosophical reliance on rights—following the Enlightenment tradition stretching from Locke and Kant to John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin—too easily slides into an amoral defense of the individual's freedom to clone herself if she so chooses. Far better, writes Fukuyama, to rely on biological norms to stave off a biological dystopia.

Unfortunately, his own approach ignores an unsavory historical record. In the 20th century, the belief in an unalterable human nature legitimized a host of discriminatory and sometimes genocidal measures—based on ethnicity, gender, national origin, and physical disability. Both the Nazis and the architects of Jim Crow swore they were only replacing an artificial egalitarianism with a "natural" hierarchy of races.

Fukuyama, of course, bases his own definition on characteristics he believes all humans have in common. But as recently as 1994, the authors of The Bell Curve deployed a unitary gauge of intelligence to contend that African-Americans were naturally inferior to other racial groups. Fukuyama devotes a rather lyrical chapter to the need for policies that cherish "human dignity." But he fails to consider that, beginning with the Enlightenment thinkers he disparages, dignity has been advanced far more often and more securely by defenders of rights, both individual and collective, than by theorists of an unchanging nature.

Those who share Fukuyama's laudable desire that the state regulate biotechnology do not share a philosophical premise. There are religious thinkers who want to preserve God's handiwork, environmentalists who want to curb all aggressive technologies, and secular liberals and leftists who warn against a ruling class hogging the best...