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Article: Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution.(Book Review)
- Article from:
- The Christian Century
- Article date:
- July 26, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 The Christian Century Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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By Francis Fukuyama. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 256 pp., $25.00.
POSTHUMAN," the newest buzz word, is beginning to eclipse "postmodern." Postmodernism consists of a philosophical reexamination of foundational suppositions of the Enlightenment: objectivity, realism, universal truths, rationalism, the blank slate, essences and meta-narratives (socialism, liberalism, etc.). But "posthuman" refers to biology, as thinkers grapple with the fact that we have entered a period of monumental advance in the life sciences. Just as splitting the atom in 1945 set the stage for the cold war, so the discovery of DNA in 1953 launched us into a new era of biotechnology. While ...