Annihilation from Within Fred Iklé (cool books to read .txt) 📖

to a transcendental existence, a state of being after death that lies beyond the earthly matrix of time and space. This transcendental life-after-death is seen as a continuation of one’s personal identity in Christianity, and (less explicitly) in Judaism. In Asian religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism), the final stage after life on Earth is an impersonal oneness with all beings. How the views and teachings about death by philosophers and religions have changed through the ages is well documented in Jacques Choron, Death and Western Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1963).

3.   Some minimal adjustments in the retirement age have been found politically acceptable. In the United Sates, the retirement age of 65 will be raised two months per year until 2008, when it will reach 66. In France in 2003, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin courageously pressed the parliament to accept legislation raising the retirement age some three years. Yet in regional elections a year later, Raffarin suffered a crushing setback (the voters’ revenge for having to work past age 55?).

A dramatic treatment of the economic implications of aging is Peter G. Peterson, Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform America—and the World (New York: Times Books, 1999). Ten years earlier Peter G. Peterson had alerted the country to this problem in a book coauthored with Neil Howe, On Borrowed Time: How the Growth in Entitlement Spending Threatens America’s Future (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).

4.   That positive consequences can flow from serious social or political crises is a point made by Yehezkel Dror in his study on governance and policymaking: The Capacity to Govern: A Report to the Club of Rome (London: Frank Cass, 2002). Yehezkel Dror is professor at Hebrew University (Jerusalem) and has written creatively on policy planning and broad strategic problems.

5.   William F. Ogburn, “Cultural Lag as a Theory,” Sociology and Social Research (January–February 1957): reprinted in Otis Dudley Duncan, William F. Ogburn on Culture and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). For legislative remedies from the 1960s and 1970s to mitigate the harmful effects of technology, see Edmond W. Lawless, Technology and Social Shock (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1977).

6.   Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development distinguishes eight stages, from infancy to late adulthood, according to their emotive tendencies or moods. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 2d ed., 1963), 269–74.

7.   A broad treatment of the ethical issues of biotechnology innovations, illuminated by a profound understanding of political philosophy, is Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002).

8.   Mikhail Heller, Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man (New York: Knopf, 1988). The “Soviet man” idea was satirized by Yevgeniy Zamyatin’s anti-utopian novel We (1924), a precursor of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In Zamyatin’s novel, a surgical intervention in the brain makes the conversion to “Soviet man” irreversible.

9.   Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, online edition, May 30–June 3, 2005.

10.  On the genetically induced memory enhancement, see Joe Z. Tsien, “Building a Brainier Mouse,” Scientific American (April 2000): 62–68. On the learning-related plasticity: Z. Josh Huang et al., “BDNF Regulates the Maturation of Inhibition and the Critical Period of Plasticity in Mouse Visual Cortex,” Cell 98 (September 17, 1999): 739–55. Although the totality of intelligence appears to be polygenic, the same genetic factors influence different intellectual abilities (Robert Plomin, “Genetics of Childhood Disorders: Genetics and Intelligence,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 38 [June 1999]: 786–88).

11. Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg wrote in 1963 that “it would be incredible if we did not soon have the basis of developmental engineering technique to regulate, for example, the size of the human brain by prenatal and early postnatal intervention” (in Lederberg’s chapter in Gordon Wolstenholme, ed., Man and His Future [London: J. and A. Churchill, 1963], 266, a Ciba Foundation volume). Forty years later, research on the genetic determination of the human brain size has, of course, shed more light on this question. A gene that helps determine brain size has been discovered from its disrupted form associated with microcephaly. University of Chicago geneticist Bruce T. Lahn decoded the sequence of this gene in apes and humans and identified changes attributable to natural selection. (This and related studies are summarized by Nicholas Wade, “Evolution of Gene Related to Brain’s Growth Detailed,” New York Times, January 14, 2004.)

Some studies suggest that in Albert Einstein’s preserved brain the region supporting mathematical and spatial reasoning was unusually large. See Sandra F. Witelson, D. L. Kigar, and T. Harvey, “The Exceptional Brain of Albert Einstein,” Lancet 353 (1999): 2149. Steven Pinker, professor of cognitive science at MIT, noted in an Op Ed in the New York Times (June 24, 1999) that this finding seemed to conform with Einstein’s own observations about the workings of mathematical and spatial reasoning. Since then, however, several neurologists have cast doubt on the findings of the Lancet article.

Arthur R. Jensen notes that eight MRI studies of children and adults found significant correlations, close to + .40, between IQ and total brain size, after removing variance due to different body size (The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability [Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998], 147). However, M. Henneberg (“Evolution of the Brain: Is Bigger Better?” Clinical and Experimental Pharmacological Physiology [September 1998]: 745–49) believes that the correlation between brain size and intelligence might be weak.

12. Ray Kurzweil wrote in The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1999) that electronic and photonic “machines” will, by the end of this century, be more intelligent entities than humans. He also envisages “virtual bodies” that would provide environmental context and “virtual feelings” for these machines. In his most recent book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005), Kurzweil moves further into his computer world and asserts the dispensability of the human body.

A good overview of ongoing scientific research, science-informed speculations, and unscientific science fiction is Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing our Minds, Our Bodies—And What