Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- And What It Means to Be Human

Reading Radical Evolution is like reading a "How to" column - you are always surprised what can really be done. The book opens with a number of mind boggling bits of research talking about things from telekinesis to a device that gives soldiers x-ray vision; the funny thing is that these things are really occurring in laboratories as we speak. The purpose of the book is to provide an understandable, digested version of the work that is happening in Futuring land. Futuring, for those who are not in the know, is simply the study of trends and projections in an effort to forecast the future. Much like a meteorologist predicts the weather, futurists attempt to predict the social, political, technological, and economic climate 50 to 100 to a 1,000 years in advance. The book tries to stay neutral, explaining the possible horrors and terrors of advancing technology, but it clear from the first page to the back cover that its author, Joel Garreau, is a big supporter of advancements in technologies. Beyond the first couple examples, he goes further to describing how technologies can affect every bit of our being. Surveying the thoughts and opinions of numerous, credible futurists, he talks about how little robots can allow us to live in to our 200 hundreds and how we may have space colonies on the moon before we know it. The title, Radical Evolution, comes from the idea that through these advancements in technology, we, as humans, are creating a radical chain of evolution that is pushing past any boundaries that nature had set for us. It is even argued that we are actually transcending our humanity through these changes. In the middle of the book he presents a point/counter-point discussion of the future technology, appropriately labeled "Heaven" and "Hell"; the greatest possible outcomes pinned against the most devastating consequences force the reader to ponder the benefits of new technology. As a compromise, Garreau offers a scenario in which humans simply prevail, this is neither a scenario of humanities grandeur or it's defeat, but rather a median between both extremes. Finally, Garreau admits the limited view that even the greatest researchers have in terms of looking at the future. People can make predictions to their hearts content, but in the end chance happenings and unplanned events can transform the course of any one prediction. All that any futurist can do is take the best information available and make a thorough forecast off with that data, supporting the argument until the next trend arrives.

I first read Mr. Garreau's previous book "The Nine Nations of North America." At the time I was trying to decide where I wanted to live. He pegged me like an entomologist peggs a bug with a pin to it's place in the collection. (If you're curious, I found my home in the Big Empty.) Then his next book Edge Cities, about the definition of new and growning centers of culture, business, etc around the edge of the Big Cities that have become too big, too crime ridden, too expensive again helped define what I was looking for. Now he's done this one on what the future may hold. He investigates a lot of leading edge scientific projects and examines what the future may be like if they truly come to pass bringing the 'benefit' that they promise. He then ties these into three senarios that he calls Heaven, Hell and Prevail. His descriptions of where science may be going is great. His forecasts of the future remind me of the old saying that 'Predicting the future is easy, it's being right that's difficult.' Whatever the future holds, it won't be as forecast. It'll be something different. Perhaps, indeed, almost certainly it will contain elements of all three senarios Mr. Garreau is describing. But it will also have big changes forced on it by the every increasing shortage of oil. The AIDS pandemic is just getting a good start, and so far at least I don't see any immediate end. Warfare is changing with al-Qaida on the one hand and the nuclear aspirations of North Korea and Iran. This book is a great attempt at laying out one direction the world can go, it's worth reading for that alone. Just keep an open mind.

Joel Garreau's provocative new book, RADICAL EVOLUTION, begins with a thought experiment. Sometime in the future, your young daughter returns from her first year at law school. She comes home talking not about torts or civil procedure or the Rule in Shelley's Case, but about her classmates. And these classmates, as it turns out, are a bit different. Many of them have been, in some way or another, "enhanced." She ticks off the various ways that the enhancement takes effect --- internal wireless modems that download any piece of information needed directly into the brain, something akin to telepathy, self-healing, and (at least in theory) immortality in its own self. Garreau uses this thought experiment to ask the serious questions about the coming revolutions in genetics and technology that are radically changing human evolution --- and whether such radical changes are beneficial or possibly ultimately harmful to the very idea of humanity itself. My question is more basic: why are all these smart, talented, "enhanced" people choosing to go to law school? Garreau doesn't answer that one (as well he might not). Instead, he makes the point that if anyone in the real world really had these sort of powers, we would actually have a referent for it in the pages of Marvel Comics, in the person of Captain America. Garreau visits the super-secret defense laboratories of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where they're working on super-suits that could do for the soldiers of the future what Captain America got with an exposure to "vita-rays." And since the most well-known product from DARPA research is this Internet on which you are reading this very book review at this very moment, it's a good bet that at least some of the gee-whiz technologies they're working on will pay off, and pay off big. The best and most intriguing parts of RADICAL EVOLUTION are the parts about laboratories and the people who work in them, and the different applications that the new genetic and nanotechnology scientists are coming up with. The research --- which is either promising or horrifying, depending on your point of view of any given issue --- is compelling and important, and could change our world forever. There's no one better than Joel Garreau to explain this. Garreau is an underappreciated national treasure. His first two books were landmarks in their fields. THE NINE NATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA is more timely now than it was when it was published in the early 1980s; it does more to explain the so-called "red state/blue state" divide than pretty much all the political commentary written since the 2000 election. And EDGE CITY described the ongoing revolution in city and suburban planning. RADICAL EVOLUTION purports to do the same for the technologies that promise to change our bodies, our genomes, and possibly even our nature as human beings. That RADICAL EVOLUTION doesn't quite meet the gold standard of Garreau's earlier works may have more to do with