The Transhumanists might say that Stalin was just ahead of his times when he ordered his scientists to create a half human/half ape species to be warriors.
It wasn’t just Stalin. In our own time, Joseph Fletcher, who bioethics historian Al Jonson has called the “patriarch of bioethics” urged the creation of a half ape/half human sub caste to do our menial labor: “Chimeras or parahumans might legitimately be fashioned to do dangerous or demeaning jobs…Hybrids could also be designed by sexual reproduction, as between apes and humans…If women are unwilling to gestate hybrids animal females could.” (The Ethics of Genetic Control, pp.172-173).
Now, the transhumanists want to use biotechnology, nanotech, and every other kind of tech to create a “post human species.” This is a return to the concept of the super man, but Stalin and Fletcher illustrate that such technologies could also be turned to less utopian purposes.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist
It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation…
The Possibility of Possibility
"Might could” is a Southern expression meaning “maybe I could” or “I might be able to,” conveying…
The False Promise of No Contact
Around the time nineteen-year-old Alice began cutting ties with her family, she announced on social media that…
