Making 'perfect' babies.

Our Post-Human Future
Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
Francis Fukuyama
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25, 256 pp.

Francis Fukuyama first made a name for himself with The End of History and the Last Man (1992), in which he argued that, with the collapse of the USSR, history had reached its culmination in the increasing convergence of liberal principles and polities around the world. Fukuyama's provocative and controversial thesis depended on his reading of the logic of history, which in turn relied on the idea of a shared human nature. The accelerating pace of biotechnology, however, allows us, in principle, to alter human nature; genetic interventions now offer both the promise and the perils of "engineering the engineer."

Our Post-Human Future is structured in three sections. Part 1 provides a useful overview of what Fukuyama calls pathways to the future and focuses on developments in cognitive neuroscience, neuropharmacology and the control of behavior, life-prolonging technologies, and genetic engineering. Fukuyama combines generally accurate reporting on recent developments with sober speculation on their implications in light of larger cultural tendencies. Georges Santayana once described skepticism as the chastity of the mind, and Fukuyama exhibits that virtue in his measured musings about the future. On the one hand, he appreciates the possibilities of genetic medicine to extend therapies to the molecular level. On the other, he is skeptical that medicine's traditional therapeutic commitments can be sustained as genetic efforts to enhance traits, rather than merely respond to diseases, grow more likely. Throughout the discussion, he avoids all-or-nothing scenarios and eschews the jeremiad tones adopted by biotechnology critics like Jeremy Rifkin. Instead, Fukuyama considers plausible future developments in light of established social attitudes. For Fukuyama, "the widespread and rapidly growing use of drugs like Ritalin and Prozac demonstrates just how eager we are to make use of technology to alter ourselves. If one of the key constituents of our nature, something on which we base our notions of dignity, has to do with the gamut of normal emotions shared by human beings, then we are already trying to narrow the range for the utilitarian ends of health and convenience."

That quote also echoes, in its emphases, the contentious terms that lie at the heart of Fukuyama's discussion in part 2 of the book: notions of "normalcy" and "abnormalcy" and their role in the way we think about appropriate interventions into human biology; the nature of "human nature" itself (for example, what makes us distinctive); and the intricate, but difficult to specify, ways that evolutionary "givens" of human nature (if they exist) bear upon conceptions of a dignity distinctive to humans. Each of these issues is hotly contested among specialists, and Fukuyama's reflections as a generalist are unlikely to persuade those fond of more systematic approaches, although I find his commonsensical approach largely on target. Many "social constructivists," for example, deny that we share a common human nature whose alteration, biological or otherwise, need concern us. Fukuyama is unpersuaded. Human beings, while cultural animals and therefore quite malleable, also share innate characteristics: "Research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology has replaced the [tabula rasa] with a view of the brain as a modular organ full of highly adapted cognitive structures, most of them unique to the human species. There are in fact what amount to innate ideas or, more accurately, innate species-typical forms of cognitions and species-typical emotional responses to cognition." Fukuyama then links claims about human nature to conceptions of human dignity. What humans have in common--capacity for language, for choice, for socialization, for culture--becomes the basis both for defeating attitudes, such as racism, that are based on prejudice, and the motive for reforming conditions, cultural and environmental, that generate material inequalities between social groups.

Given this linkage between human nature and human dignity, Fukuyama worries that biotechnology threatens our sense of shared humanity. By deliberately "taking charge of our own biological makeup," we may undercut the very biology that, as a product of evolution, has generated the range of specifically human behavior and emotion that "allows us to connect...with all other human beings." Indeed, at some point, we may "have mixed human genes with those of so many other species that we no longer have a clear idea of what a human being is."

Such selective quotations sound more alarmist than the book does, taken as a whole. Fukuyama is not antitechnology, nor is he an uncritical enthusiast for scientific progress. Rather, he urges caution, and in part 3 he discusses ways to institutionalize that attitude with regard to future developments. This is the briefest section of the book, and in some ways, the most surprising. Given his embrace by political conservatives, Fukuyama has been falsely interpreted as the champion of unfettered individualism. In his recommendations about biotechnology policy, he clearly is not. Unlike those who would apply Adam Smith's invisible hand to everything from bread baking to genetics, Fukuyama calls for stringent regulation and oversight of the new sciences. He believes that the stakes involved--the biological basis of our shared humanity--are high enough to warrant significant regulation of genetic interventions, and an outright ban of such practices as reproductive cloning. (Surely the Catholic social tradition, especially its recent emphasis on the need to regulate markets in furtherance of the common good, would support Fukuyama's recommendations.)

The book does have its flaws. Fukuyama's arguments are more than occasionally repetitive; one might have wished for a closer final edit. And while in his reporting on various developments he strikes a balance between different schools of thought, his own conclusions sometimes seem to rely too much on a single perspective. For example, Fukuyama is admirably evenhanded in presenting the latest information on "nature" versus "nurture" in relation to heritable traits such as intelligence. But his later musings on the dangers that attend genetic engineering sometimes sound like those of a genetic determinist, thereby undercutting the balance of his earlier empirical discussion.

Such faults aside, Fukuyama's contribution to the discussion of biotechnology and the human future is an important one. It is no accident that he was recently appointed to President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics. His credentials as a "conservative" surely helped to gain him that appointment. But the larger case he makes in this book suggests that a literally conservative perspective is appropriate on these matters. Changing the genetic legacy that we claim in common raises issues that call for sober analysis, cautious policy judgments, and the willingness to question what we might lose, as well as gain, in entering the brave new world of biotechnology.

Andrew Lustig is director of the Program on Biotechnology, Religion, and Ethics and research scholar in religious studies at Rice University.