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In 1989, Francis Fukuyama made his now-famous pronouncement
that because the major alternatives to liberal democracy had exhausted themselves,
history as we knew it had reached its end. Ten years later, he revised his argument:
we hadn't reached the end of history, he wrote, because we hadn't yet reached
the end of science. Arguing that the greatest advances still to come will be in
the life sciences, Fukuyama now asks how the ability to modify human behavior
will affect liberal democracy. To reorient contemporary
debate, Fukuyama underlines man's changing understanding of human nature through
history: from Plato and Aristotle's belief that man had "natural ends"
to the ideals of utopians and dictators of the modern age who sought to remake
mankind for ideological ends. Fukuyama persuasively argues that the ultimate prize
of the biotechnology revolution -- intervention in the "germ line,"
the ability to manipulate the DNA of all of one person's descendents -- will have
profound, and potentially terrible, consequences for our political order, even
if undertaken by ordinary parents seeking to "improve" their children.
In Our Posthuman Future, our greatest social philosopher
describes the potential effects of our exploration on the foundation of liberal
democracy: the belief that human beings are equal by nature. Francis
Fukuyama is Bernard Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the
Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
In 2002, he was appointed to the President's Council on Bioethics. He is the author
of The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order,
Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, and The End
of History and the Last Man, among other works. He lives in McLean, Virginia.
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