When Natural Reproduction Ends - Genetic Choice Replaces Gender Reveal In The Post-Human Generation

Ours will be the last recognizable, old-fashioned human generation – a human race unchanged since the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago.  Soon genetic engineering and symbiotic interface with the computer will alter this living fossil and render it recognizable only to paleontologists who will look upon it as today’s scientists look at Neanderthals, apes, and dinosaurs.  Slow, progressive Darwinian evolution will be a thing of the past.  Radical, immediate, revolutionary change will be the new algorithm.

Since the human genome was completely sequenced, the identification of specific gene configurations linked to human characteristics and behavior has become routine; and the engineering of some of those sequences to modify or eliminate them has proceeded quickly.  It will not be long before all genetic sequences will have been identified, codified, sorted and catalogued, and available for modification. 

Natural reproduction will be a thing of the past.  Leaving such an important decisions to chance when selective certainty is a reality would be folly. Within only a few years, parents will be able to select the child they want and not be held to any racial, intellectual, or physical constraints of traditional reproduction. 

The DNA of the most intelligent, the most beautiful, and the most athletic men and women alive today, and that harvested from the genetic material of those who have died will be available to all. 

In short, the guesswork will be taken out of reproduction, the stakes will never be higher and classical free market principles of supply and demand will include humanity's most precious commodity -selective fertility. 

Naysayers are already protesting biogenetic laboratories. The outcry is already loud and insistent.  Artificial reproductive choice is  a clear distortion if not perversion of God’s will.  Once parents can choose from a catalog and pick the child they want, the human race will become little more than Barbie clones and Hollywood automatons.

Yet such selectivity is already happening.  The market for high-quality eggs is booming.  The ova of women of breeding, beauty, and intelligence go for a premium, and the same prices are paid for the sperm of aristocratic, handsome, intelligent men from Yale. 

Genetic defects are weeded out before in vitro fertilization, and expectant couples can be sure of desirable results. Some DNA of the 'natural' parents can be combined with imported material - only that which will add to and not detract from that donated - and the product is assured within a high degree of probability to be what was expected. 

That is now, so it is easy to imagine how easily prospective parents would opt for even more aggressive and satisfying genetic recombination. 

Post-human reproduction will not only be a matter of personal beauty, intelligence, artistic ability, or physical prowess but will enable us to more easily adapt to a changing environment. The second important implication of this rapid evolution will be Man’s complete control of his environment.  No amount of global warming, Ice Age cooling, or variant climate change will be of any consequence.  

Just as agriculturalists are genetically modifying plants to be resistant to drought, pests, and soil depletion; so will human engineers be able to modify our genome to adapt to current environmental conditions.   Cities will not have to be changed to accommodate global warming.  Human beings will change. 

The ability to thrive in water, to breathe different compositions of air, and to live well in either colder or warmer climates will be easily programmed.  Environmentalism will die as a movement, and human modification will be the focus of all attention.  The alterations are infinite. 

On a recent BBC World Service program, a group of space scientists were gathered to discuss these and other aspects of the post-human era.  “What about the human soul”, the moderator asked, wondering whether or not these post-humans would still be human.   

None of the participants were particularly troubled by the question, since they all had assumed that the soul was no more than the particular configurations of DNA which resulted in varying degrees of insight, intelligence, creativity, and sensitivity.  Post-humans will be no different, they all agreed.  Only their individual genomes will have been altered to produce a very different human reality – in other words a different human soul.

“What about God?” would have been the next question had time remained; and indeed the subject is essential.  Religious conservatives will certainly object not only to tampering with God’s creation but playing God; but equally faithful but less doctrinaire believers will only conclude that God’s hand is miraculous and all-powerful.  Everything that happens on Earth or anywhere in the universe was caused by him.  He simply set the ball rolling.

Secularists will be the least distressed.  There is no God to be offended.  Evolution, whether happening the old way or the new, is simply a neutral, value-free progression from past to present.  There is no purpose to evolution, and the only reality is change.  The concept of  anicca - impermanence is an undeniable and inescapable fact of human existence from which nothing that belongs to this earth is ever free – has long been at the heart  of Buddhism.

On a more practical level, such assisted reproduction will eliminate unwanted babies. Women will opt for voluntary sterilization, male serial sexuality for so long criticized as misogynist at best and socially irresponsible at worst will be freed from artificial social constriction, and insular communities - such as inner cities which have never been able to refresh the gene pool, will finally be able to reach out beyond restrictive covenants. The children of the ghetto can be of greater intelligence, beauty, and ability than those destined to finish their lives there. 

The Law Of Unexpected Consequences will certainly have its day.  As much men might dream of a mating pool of stunningly beautiful blonde, blue-eyed women, would this be too much of a good thing? It certainly would be a great thing to have America filled with Einstein quality geniuses, its museums and art galleries filled with new Rembrandts and Picassos.  Tinkering with the unknown leads to more unknown, of course, but the genie is out of the bottle.  There is no putting it back, and the post-human revolution is upon us. 

An ancillary aspect of the revolution is the ultimate mind-computer interface.  Already the electronic patterns of thought are being deciphered, brain implants already common, and once the system is complete, every human being will have access to all the world's information and will be able to manipulate it at will. 

Engineers, currently working on a mind-machine interface will soon be able to seamlessly and completely link the human mind with the electronic circuitry of the computer thus creating a purely virtual world in which individuals will be able to instantaneously have access to all the world’s information, images, and experiences; to manipulate them at will,  and to create worlds of their own choosing. 

Artificial Intelligence, now just an important, revolutionary interface with human agents, will soon be completely integrated within the human brain.  Virtuality will not simply change the means of perception; it will define a completely new way of thinking - an unlimited, unimpeded, infinite intellectual and sentient world. 

Genetically engineered human beings, living in a perfectly virtual world where physical reality is meaningless and irrelevant, will be of a new race, a post-human race.

Pink bonnets and blue blankets, gender reveal parties, and the old saws of masculine and feminine will be footnotes to history.  There will be nothing similar between the human and the post-human.  Everything must go, fire sale for the irrelevant, the hand-me-downs, and the tried-and-true.  Darwin never anticipated such an abrupt, technologically mediated change in the evolutionary algorithm, but then again, how he could he have? 

There will be new Darwins in a hundred years who will discern patterns in the post-human ways of life, reproduction, survival, death, and prosperity, and will write about them.  Until then, there is more reality in the old Marvel comic books than what's coming down the pike.