[SP/ST/CORK] McKibben's "Enough" joins the growing Luddite trend

[Jeff Bone]

 From Salon (yeah, it's premium, ugh.)  Anybody read this book?

	http://www.salon.com/tech/books/2003/04/30/enough/index_np.html

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Faster! Stronger! Less human!

In "Enough," Bill McKibben argues that genetic engineering will deprive 
our children of their freedom to choose who and what they are.

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By Katharine Mieszkowski

printe-mail

April 30, 2003  |  Bill McKibben's "Enough: Staying Human in an 
Engineered Age" could be called a suicide-prevention manual for the 
human race.

McKibben counsels that life right now is good enough, while warning 
that the impending futuristic cure-alls for stupidity, ugliness and 
madness are really just tasty poisons.

Genetic engineering promises to make future generations healthier, 
smarter, happier, taller, thinner, better-looking, stronger, saner and 
just generally better than we are today. Proponents claim it will give 
us the power to prevent debilitating and fatal diseases and even, in 
conjunction with other new technologies, potentially conquer death 
itself.

But these claims haven't been realized yet, which makes reading 
McKibben's anti-genetic-engineering call to arms oddly like 
encountering a self-help manual when you're feeling pretty good about 
things.

A self-appointed crisis counselor on high-stakes issues for the future 
of the human race, Bill McKibben is known for his eloquent Chicken 
Littling on environmental ills ranging from global warming in "The End 
of Nature" to overpopulation in "Maybe One." In "Enough," he argues 
that "improving" humans through genetic engineering risks turning them 
into just so many humanoid robots. He charges that in the name of 
speeding up human evolution, we are robbing our descendants of freedom 
of choice and may even bring our own species' existence to an end.