WEBVTT

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Well, it's going to be
a really weird leap.

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But I want to give you a
sense of different things

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that are in this book.

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And this is from a
chapter called "Return,"

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and it's coming back
to the United States

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after a long excursion
in Mexico and then

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trying to get a sense of
an absurdly huge question,

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where are we in the whole
course of human evolution

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and civilization, anyway?

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Where are we now
in the human story?

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That's what I've been trying
to get at in my travels

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and speculation.

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We're the first people
to see ourselves

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as participating in a story,
four million years old,

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and the first to contemplate
our evolutionary destiny.

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What we see is this--

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5,000 years of city-states, at
first, discrete, then spilling

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into one another with
violence and confusion

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as political boundaries
had to be redefined.

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500 years of becoming
global, beginning

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with the voyages of discovery
and ending with the internet.

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The electronic lace
stitching the world together

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into one fabric, woven of
little neo-tribal communities

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based on informational affinity.

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100 years of dazzling
technology and science

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that have changed for the
better our relationship

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with nature, time, place,
work, suffering, and death.

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50 years of intoxicating
material invention: the bomb,

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the pill, footprints on the
moon, fingerprints on genes,

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instruments expanding our
vision farther into space

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than our minds can comprehend.

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The brand new fusing of
microchip and DNA technology

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that makes actual the
sci-fi dream of cyborgs.

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And a few decades of the
sobering global perspective,

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that while our species has
been sprawling clumsily

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across the planet, trying to
figure out how to get along

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with itself, it has both
willfully and accidentally torn

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the fabric of nature into
tattered islands where

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extinction is occurring,
according to E.O. Wilson,

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"thousands of times faster than
the production of new species."

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This last is a
fact not incidental

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but central to our story.

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The human species,
Wilson asserts,

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is an environmental hazard.

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I have flipped a
ghoulish photograph

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from the New York Times Magazine
special issue on technology.

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A middle-aged man sits on
a steel laboratory stool.

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Behind him stands a bank of
monitors, oscilloscopes, dials,

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switches, surgical
lamps, and IV poles,

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hung with sacks of saline
or glucose solution.

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The man is well-dressed in
an expensive California way,

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pale rose Oxford cloth,
shirt buttoned at the neck,

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tawny worsted trousers,
crisply pressed.

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He is a large man.

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His face is dull and pasty;
lips, thin, and unsmiling;

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eyes, set into shadowy recesses;
forehead, high and square.

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He looks a lot
like Frankenstein.

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No, Walter, Frankenstein.

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But the photo is
no joke or fiction.

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Though I suspect,
the photographer

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worked the angles and lighting
to enhance this similarity.

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Beside the man sits a robust
German shepherd, leashed,

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both man and dog,
bleached, both man and dog,

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looking right into
the camera's lens.

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The man's hand comforting
on the dog's head,

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or perhaps, gently holding the
collar to sustain the pose.

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The man is Saul Kent, co-founder
of the Life Extension Foundation

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in Southern California,
where he and his staff

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have been experimenting
with cryogenic freezing

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as an alternative to death.

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He has brought his
pet dog, Franklin,

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to within a few
degrees above freezing

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and successfully
revived him after five

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hours of having
essentially no normal blood

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circulation to the brain.

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Dozens of other dogs have
died in his experiments.

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The problem is that freezing
creates expanding ice crystals

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that rupture cells and organs.

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Kent became a fringe celebrity,
the article elaborates,

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after the 1987
death of his mother,

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Dora Kent, who had signed
up for cryonic preservation

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as a neuro head-only patient.

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Many cryonics advocates
believe that science

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will one day be able
to throw a new body

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around the preserved brain.

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This is the ultimate
anthropocentrism.

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A perspective Wilson defines
to be anthropocentric

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is to remain unaware of
the limits of human nature,

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the significance of
biological processes

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underlying human behavior, and
the deeper meaning of long term

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genetic evolution.

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Kent's version of
the future is one

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in which we leave nature behind
for a completely human-made

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world.

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And it rhymes with
the version that says,

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we will colonize space
and time to escape

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the mess we've made of Earth.

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Both of these versions
believe that human beings

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are smart enough or will
be soon to take over

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the controls from nature and
steer it where we want it to go.

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They follow the trajectory
set in the past few centuries

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of our increasing exemption
from nature's rules.

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Any exemptions we have earned,
however, are extremely limited.

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One example, taken for granted,
but nevertheless profound,

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is our control of human
reproductive technology.

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Enhanced sexuality, the
evolutionary theorists tell us,

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is very ancient in us, part
of the hominid success story.

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It goes something like
this, female hominid

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gives no biological sign
when she's in estrus.

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The other primates are more
physically communicative

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about the matter, raising
a rosy rump, so to speak,

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when the egg is ready for sperm.

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Rather than being discouraged by
the female hominid's discretion,

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the map reads that she is
available for sex all the time.

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And her pleasure in the
act, along with his,

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confirms his reading.

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This arouses him further
and makes him stick around,

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and incidentally,
help raise the young.

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He gets easy sex, she
gets help with the kids.

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The species becomes a big
success because of this contract

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based upon a misunderstanding
that women have been

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trying to correct ever since.

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Giving 100,000 years
or so of that history,

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it should not surprise us that
now, even though we have managed

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to control the reproductive
aspects of our sexual behavior,

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we are still befuddled about who
wants what, when, on what terms,

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and what we ought to want.

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We've learned to control
one particular mechanism

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of human sexuality, but the
whole matrix within which

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the mechanism functions is
not only beyond our control,

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but beyond our understanding.

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Cloning, the next
step in the control

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of reproductive
technology, is stirring up

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new anxieties about the
moral uses of human power.

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So far, no one really
wants to go back

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in technological time
on reproductive matters.

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This control of nature
is as welcome, to us,

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as our oil furnaces, air
conditioners, immunizations,

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antibiotics, and
cardiac defibrillators.

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But as one example of how
limited our control actually is,

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this story reminds us
that we may not yet

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be capable of leaving
nature behind.

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