Transhumanism and the New Human

From the opening pages

You have been issued a human body. It arrives without a warranty, requires constant maintenance, and begins deteriorating almost immediately. Its joints wear down, its teeth do not replace themselves, its immune system occasionally attacks the person it is meant to defend, and its brain can remember an advertising jingle from 1998 while forgetting why it entered the kitchen. Yet this arrangement is commonly described as the finished work of nature, as though nature had approved the prototype and moved confidently into production.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, presented natural selection as a process by which inherited variations that help organisms survive and reproduce become more common over generations. Evolution does not work toward perfection. It has no final plan. It modifies what already exists.

The French molecular biologist François Jacob made this point in his 1977 essay “Evolution and Tinkering.” An engineer designs from a specification. Evolution works more like a tinkerer, using available parts for new purposes. A structure that once solved one problem may later be adapted to another. The result can be ingenious, but ingenuity is not elegance. Evolution produces bodies that function well enough to pass on genes, which is a lower standard than comfort, longevity, rationality, or ease of repair.