Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution

Arguing that the greatest advances still to come will be in the life sciences, Fukuyama asks how the ability to modify human behavior will affect liberal democracy. He underlines man s changing understanding of human nature through history: from Plato & Aristotle s belief that man had natural ends to the ideals of utopians & dictators of the modern age who sought to remake mankind for ideological ends. The ultimate prize of the biotechnology revolution -- intervention in the germ line, the ability to manipulate the DNA of all of one person s descendants -- will have profound, & potentially terrible, consequences for our political order, even if undertaken by ordinary parents seeking to improve their children.