Our posthuman future : consequences of the biotechnology revolution / Francis Fukuyama.

Our posthuman future : consequences of the biotechnology revolution / Francis Fukuyama.

xiii, 256 pages ; [28] cm

0374236437
9780374236434
1861972970 Profile
9781861972972 Profile
0312421710
9780312421717
1861974957 2003
9781861974952 2003

G 252 FUK.O

In 1989, [the author] made his now-famous pronouncement that because "the major alternatives to liberal democracy had exhausted themselves," history as we knew it had reached its end. Ten years later, he revised his argument: we hadn't reached the end of history, he wrote, because we hadn't yet reached the end of science. Arguing that our greatest advances still to come will be in the life sciences, [he] now asks how the ability to modify human behavior will affect liberal democracy. To re-orient contemporary debate, [he] underlines man's changing understanding of human nature through history: from Plato and Aristotle's belief that man had "natural ends," to the ideals of utopians and dictators of the modern age who sought to remake mankind for ideological ends. [He] persuasively argues that the ultimate prize of the biotechnology revolution-intervention in the "germ-line," the ability to manipulate the DNA of all of one person's descendents-will have profound, and potentially terrible, consequences for our political order, even if undertaken by ordinary parents seeking to "improve" their children. In [this book, he] begins to describe the potential effects of exploration on the foundation of liberal democracy: the belief that human beings are equal by nature.-Dust jacket.

Originally published: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ©2002. 1st ed.

Princeton, N.J. : Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, 2002.

eng