Understanding Human Technogenesis: Human Development in the Post-Genomic World

Abstract

Different schools of thought within continental philosophy claim that humans are instricably bound up with technology. As Ansell-Pearson states when discussing Bergson, Nietzsche and the transhuman condition, “technology is constitutive prosthetic of the human animal”, or the ontogenesis of the human is dependent on the technics and artificial instrumentation that survive well beyond the individual and are part and parcel of human culture. The emergence of the human represents an extended process of bio-technogenesis or a ‘creative evolution’ of biological and technological forces, where natural selection has been guided by the natural history of technics and technical interventions. Thus, Bergson has argued that Homo sapiens can be seen as Homo faber because it is a by-product of tools and technology. Similarly, Nietzshe claimed that the human is a transitional figure, “something to be overcome”. Is technology simply an extended phenotype, the result of our hardwired genetic impulse to constantly remake our world? Or is technology interwoven in nature’s design through what the anthropologists call ‘material culture’? While the answers to these questions may not be easy to grasp, recent scientific discoveries have put humans within striking distance of being able to re-engineer human biological destiny.