Customer Reviews

Rapture: How Biotech Became The New Religion

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book has got the buzz and the facts clear. It is a book about the "pioneers" of transhumanism and what they did early on that has set the pace for the futurists today.

Who else is going to tell the story but a writer that admires the ideas of transhumanists and also can laugh with us? If you cannot laugh at yourself, what is the point of living a long and enjoyable life? There isn't, and this is to Brian Alexander's credit.

We owe a lot to the Los Angeles Transhumanists - FM Esfandiary, Natasha Vita-More, Eric Drexler, Max More, Ralph Merkle, Greg Fahy - the entire gang.

If you want to read a book that literally gets you to go to the frig and get a beer, kick back on the sofa, and dream of a long life - this is the book!

Left of Center - but thinking toward the future.

Jason Jefferson

"Rapture" is a truly interesting book, and worthy of serious consideration. It explores the bio-utopian impulse in modern America, charting the last thirty-some years of research into human biology and how it might apply to a range of issues. These include not only the decoding of the human genome for the improvement of human life, but also the possibilities of life extension for decades and perhaps centuries. Those who advocate life extension see a "brave new world," pun intended, in which all are healthy, happy, and wise. They view it as the next stage in human evolution. It is a heady goal, one that has consumed some billionaires and fueled a revolution in bio-technology. Public advocates in the United States range from billionaire William Haseltine to Ray Kurzweil, but include thousands more in a subculture known to few.

Advocacy of bio-utopian ideas opens a wide array of ethical considerations, and opposition to it has ensured a rollicking debate between the extreme positions. The bio-luddites, in author Brian Alexander's parlance, question the morality of altering the human body through genetics, chemicals, or technology. They recall images of Nazi eugenics and the selective breeding of humans. Those in favor, of course, emphasize the positive results of intervention in whatever form it might take.

My own interest in this subject comes from my study of the past, present, and possible future of spaceflight. For instance, one of the truly fascinating developments associated with interstellar spaceflight is the possibility of a trans-human migration. In fulfilling the spacefaring dream, the intelligent life to leave Earth and colonize the galaxy may not be entirely human in form. Extensive discussions have taken place in recent years on the relationship between artificial computer intelligence, biotechnology, and human evolution. In spite of its obvious relevance to space travel, little of this has been extended to outer space, and it is not in "Rapture" either, but it offers a fascinating possibility.

The rigors of galactic flight that will likely confine humans to the inner solar system might not confine reengineered humans that have a cyborg quality about them. Given the great difficulties of interstellar flight, humans reengineered to withstand long duration space travel, possibly iwth technological enhancements might represent the future of spaceflight. The possibilities are truly amazing and somewhat weird, and as remote today from common experience as were the early images of space travel to the people who first envisioned them. Nonetheless, they are not wholly impossible. Because of current directions in technology, a trans-human galaxy is not beyond the realm of possibility. In one such vision, biological species become so technologically proficient that they cease to exist in purely biological form. The possibilities for trans-human evolution has the potential to radically alter the dominant paradigm of human spaceflight.

This interesting popular history of the trans-human movement is an important statement of an evolving debate in modern American society. We see vestiges of it in everything from the controversies over stem cell research to the fight over cloning. While I await a scholarly history of the trans-human movement, this work by Brian Alexander is a fine addition to the literature.

I know many of the people outlined in this book and am deeply involved in cloning. Alexander's portrayal of me and my activities was accurate & pithy but was unduly one-dimensional.
However, this is a brilliant work which ties together ideas that have combined within the past decade or so to become a movement called Transhumanism.
By connecting the thoughts of early scientific dreamers with the realities of modern day biotechnology, Brian Alexander deserves the glowing cover blurb by Glen McGee:
"Brian Alexander has turned the most important scientific revolution since Galileo into an adventure story that touches your mind and soul. No writer has ever dug this deep or looked forward this imaginatively. With Rapture, Alexander has become the voice of biotechnology for the 21st Century."
As a cloning activist, I usually end up debating McGee on the air. However, he is right on target here. Alexander is quite right that science and biotechnology have become a new religion for disparate groups that believe in cryonics, cloning, life extension, etc. Many don't like the label "religion" because religionists are usually the ones persecuting them. The historic philosophical roots of this religion versus science debate provide a useful perspective to the new debates we are having in this new age.
If I could give it ten stars, I would. It is really the most informative "connecting" book I have ever read.

Brian Alexander writes about many people I happen to know. In fact, his description of the Extropian movement in the early 1990's made me rather nostalgic.

But he doesn't seem to understand why people would want to conquer aging and death, and he performs a disservice by characterizing the movement as a "religion," by which he means a belief system that's impractical or lacking factual support. Scientists have radically extended the lives of certain species of laboratory animals in apparent good health. Because of the conservative nature of the genome across species, similar biochemical pathways probably exist in humans that we might be able to use to retard aging and greatly extend our healthy lives well past 120 years.

Religions, by contrast, don't have anything like an animal model to demonstrate that their beliefs can send animals' "souls" to otherworldly heavens, much less human "souls." So comparing physical immortalism with a religion is patently absurd.

Still, I gave the book three stars because Alexander provides some valuable information and historical insight into a social movement that promises to revolutionize the human condition, unless the Kassian "Yuck" faction succeeds in suppressing it.

While the title and subtitle of this book were rather eye-catching, the book itself was a little flat and at times disjointed. It's one thing to discuss the potential for the use of stem cells in regenerative meddicine, or the use of nuclear transfer as a cloning technique. It's a whole other ballgame to discuss this side by side with caloric restriction diets, cryonics, and some of the other transhumanist mumbo jumbo that Alexander talks about.

Scientific progresses generally trickle into mainstream medicine as can be seen by the ability to live with every day disorders like myopia, asthma, and colds or even thosee healthy with the HIV virus. But what about those who take scientific progresses and try to propel them into a science fiction novel. Thats what the author here does. Perhaps he was going for a provocative book, wanting to draw attention to how biotech COULD change the world around us. But in reality, he left out the current advances and the medical implications and spends TOO much time talking about the transhumanists.

I would have preferred an indepth look at the scientists and the science. If you like books about stem cells please check out Cynthia Fox's "Cell of Cells". That was a book that discussed the directions of stem cells, with interesting stories and less meanderings into fictitious what-ifs.

I wanted to like this book. However, I found the writing very droll. I just couldn't feel the emotion, the ideals, the "rapture" of the subject matter. Instead, the book is bogged down in endless and pointless biographical details...this person did this, and then this, and so on. Maybe I'm not giving it the benefit of the doubt, but there are other books on transhumanism I found far more interesting, informative, and readable.