Well, it's going to be a really weird leap.
But I want to give you a sense of different things
that are in this book.
And this is from a chapter called "Return,"
and it's coming back to the United States
after a long excursion in Mexico and then
trying to get a sense of an absurdly huge question,
where are we in the whole course of human evolution
and civilization, anyway?
Where are we now in the human story?
That's what I've been trying to get at in my travels
and speculation.
We're the first people to see ourselves
as participating in a story, four million years old,
and the first to contemplate our evolutionary destiny.
What we see is this--
5,000 years of city-states, at first, discrete, then spilling
into one another with violence and confusion
as political boundaries had to be redefined.
500 years of becoming global, beginning
with the voyages of discovery and ending with the internet.
The electronic lace stitching the world together
into one fabric, woven of little neo-tribal communities
based on informational affinity.
100 years of dazzling technology and science
that have changed for the better our relationship
with nature, time, place, work, suffering, and death.
50 years of intoxicating material invention: the bomb,
the pill, footprints on the moon, fingerprints on genes,
instruments expanding our vision farther into space
than our minds can comprehend.
The brand new fusing of microchip and DNA technology
that makes actual the sci-fi dream of cyborgs.
And a few decades of the sobering global perspective,
that while our species has been sprawling clumsily
across the planet, trying to figure out how to get along
with itself, it has both willfully and accidentally torn
the fabric of nature into tattered islands where
extinction is occurring, according to E.O. Wilson,
"thousands of times faster than the production of new species."
This last is a fact not incidental
but central to our story.
The human species, Wilson asserts,
is an environmental hazard.
I have flipped a ghoulish photograph
from the New York Times Magazine special issue on technology.
A middle-aged man sits on a steel laboratory stool.
Behind him stands a bank of monitors, oscilloscopes, dials,
switches, surgical lamps, and IV poles,
hung with sacks of saline or glucose solution.
The man is well-dressed in an expensive California way,
pale rose Oxford cloth, shirt buttoned at the neck,
tawny worsted trousers, crisply pressed.
He is a large man.
His face is dull and pasty; lips, thin, and unsmiling;
eyes, set into shadowy recesses; forehead, high and square.
He looks a lot like Frankenstein.
No, Walter, Frankenstein.
But the photo is no joke or fiction.
Though I suspect, the photographer
worked the angles and lighting to enhance this similarity.
Beside the man sits a robust German shepherd, leashed,
both man and dog, bleached, both man and dog,
looking right into the camera's lens.
The man's hand comforting on the dog's head,
or perhaps, gently holding the collar to sustain the pose.
The man is Saul Kent, co-founder of the Life Extension Foundation
in Southern California, where he and his staff
have been experimenting with cryogenic freezing
as an alternative to death.
He has brought his pet dog, Franklin,
to within a few degrees above freezing
and successfully revived him after five
hours of having essentially no normal blood
circulation to the brain.
Dozens of other dogs have died in his experiments.
The problem is that freezing creates expanding ice crystals
that rupture cells and organs.
Kent became a fringe celebrity, the article elaborates,
after the 1987 death of his mother,
Dora Kent, who had signed up for cryonic preservation
as a neuro head-only patient.
Many cryonics advocates believe that science
will one day be able to throw a new body
around the preserved brain.
This is the ultimate anthropocentrism.
A perspective Wilson defines to be anthropocentric
is to remain unaware of the limits of human nature,
the significance of biological processes
underlying human behavior, and the deeper meaning of long term
genetic evolution.
Kent's version of the future is one
in which we leave nature behind for a completely human-made
world.
And it rhymes with the version that says,
we will colonize space and time to escape
the mess we've made of Earth.
Both of these versions believe that human beings
are smart enough or will be soon to take over
the controls from nature and steer it where we want it to go.
They follow the trajectory set in the past few centuries
of our increasing exemption from nature's rules.
Any exemptions we have earned, however, are extremely limited.
One example, taken for granted, but nevertheless profound,
is our control of human reproductive technology.
Enhanced sexuality, the evolutionary theorists tell us,
is very ancient in us, part of the hominid success story.
It goes something like this, female hominid
gives no biological sign when she's in estrus.
The other primates are more physically communicative
about the matter, raising a rosy rump, so to speak,
when the egg is ready for sperm.
Rather than being discouraged by the female hominid's discretion,
the map reads that she is available for sex all the time.
And her pleasure in the act, along with his,
confirms his reading.
This arouses him further and makes him stick around,
and incidentally, help raise the young.
He gets easy sex, she gets help with the kids.
The species becomes a big success because of this contract
based upon a misunderstanding that women have been
trying to correct ever since.
Giving 100,000 years or so of that history,
it should not surprise us that now, even though we have managed
to control the reproductive aspects of our sexual behavior,
we are still befuddled about who wants what, when, on what terms,
and what we ought to want.
We've learned to control one particular mechanism
of human sexuality, but the whole matrix within which
the mechanism functions is not only beyond our control,
but beyond our understanding.
Cloning, the next step in the control
of reproductive technology, is stirring up
new anxieties about the moral uses of human power.
So far, no one really wants to go back
in technological time on reproductive matters.
This control of nature is as welcome, to us,
as our oil furnaces, air conditioners, immunizations,
antibiotics, and cardiac defibrillators.
But as one example of how limited our control actually is,
this story reminds us that we may not yet
be capable of leaving nature behind.