6.6.07

After quoting Fukuyama, I then asked the people in the room, “What do you think is the most dangerous idea around today?” I received the expected answers from people my age: genetically modifed food and so forth. Then a young woman said very quietly, “The idea that we should not evolve.” I would have said she was an impeccably groomed woman of about thirty, of Chinese ancestry, her accent standard Ontario well-educated. I ought to have been prepared, for I had given a more highbrow talk with a similar theme in Montreal a few weeks earlier. There, a young black man asked me very strong direct questions in standard educated French. I was later told he was an officer in the local transhumanist society.

As the discussion proceeded with various members of the audience, the penny dropped more slowly than it should have. Half the population in this audience already knew all about transhumanism. 'Cyborg' had been my unwitting bait. Moreover, a fair number of them had chosen their identities - in some cases, perhaps only for the day. I, the bland permissive liberal, became more and more uncomfortable. I realized how much I depend on knowing to whom I am speaking. I had no reason to think that the respondent was female, thirty, or Chinese. Yet, I wanted to know 'who' she was-and the same for a number of others.

But they were rejecting that question. Refusing to choose a society or a biology, they were denying in every gesture the very concept of a biosocial identity.

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Genetics, biosocial groups & the future of identity (PDF)