Sam Harris on Enhancement

Sam Harris is a favorite of us trans-spiritual Cyborg Buddhist types because he is an atheist who is nonetheless open to, and investigates, meditation. In this latest edition of the Edge.org round-up of interesting ideas Harris gives us another reason to applaud him: he gets it on enhancement and human evolution:

Mother Nature is Not Our Friend

...Considering humanity as a whole, there is nothing about natural selection that suggests our optimal design. We are probably not even optimized for the Paleolithic, much less for life in the 21st century. And yet, we are now acquiring the tools that will enable us to attempt our own optimization. Many people think this project is fraught with risk. But is it riskier than doing nothing? There may be current threats to civilization that we cannot even perceive, much less resolve, at our current level of intelligence. Could any rational strategy be more dangerous than following the whims of Nature? This is not to say that our growing capacity to meddle with the human genome couldn’t present some moments of Faustian over-reach. But our fears on this front must be tempered by a sober understanding of how we got here. Mother Nature is not now, nor has she ever been, looking out for us.

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