Harald, as always, pushes the envelope and asks questions in regards to my previous post and subsequent comments. I've fisked responses below; his questions are trenchant and deserve more than a mere comment.
>Part of this seems to be about unforseen consequences of medical treatments, that could be solved by looking at the whole being. Could this be a result of the ongoing specialisation in science? Should scientists be more like a homo universalis? Is this still possible with the huge amount of knowledge we've gathered? Or would you have to have some post-human brain upgrades to do that?
I suspect the problem I discussed is the same one that affects most of the sciences. You're partially right in suggesting it could be the effect of specialisation; the other challenge is the lack of making connections to the whole. We don't have a field which concentrates on putting all the science we have together into a matrix; we only have people working in isolated nodes. It really won't take a post-human to see this; we can see it now. What we need, though, is a framework to address this gap in assembling our knowledge, a Human Menomic Mapping project of sorts, parallel to the Human Genomic Mapping project. It always comes down to money in the end; who will build the business case, who will buy it?
>On the one hand you seem to reject the influence of our biology on us but you also seem to reject our attempts to manipulate it. Is that what you mean by wanting to have your cake and eating it too?
I believe we can and should manipulate our biology, but we must recognize constraints AND ACT RESPONSIBLY. We can't act in a vacuum and assume there are no repercussions. Take the "glo-fish" hitting the market here in the U.S.; Cool, some scientist said, I can make a fish glow in the dark! Cool, said a marketer, I can sell a fish that will glow in the dark! Cool, says a kid, I can buy a fish that glows in the dark. Not one of these people asks themselves whether this is a responsible thing to do; they just go ahead and act on their impulse, as if Cool was enough justification. What happens when that fish is released into the wild by some kid who's tired of their pet? Did anyone run a simulation to check the impact on the environment? We've repeatedly seen examples of unintended consequences from accidental releases (zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, for example, or snakehead fish); what of GMO fish?
Note Marya Morevna's comments regarding hormone therapy related to fertility treatments. Assuming hormones may not impact the immune system as much as the reproductive system, is it at all possible that the increased rate of birth defects among children conceived via in-vitro methods is related to an out-of-sync maternal immune system? Is it responsible to our human genome to perpetuate possible mutagenic or tetragenic practices on our own kind without resolving this question? Are practitioners in reproductive science simply acting in a vaccum, specializing on their isolated node of knowledge when they should be working more closely with the broader matrix of medical knowledge?
(I can't help but think of a co-worker who endured five different in-vitro implantations which all failed because of a high T-cell count...$50,000+ in expenses for naught. They may simply have been fighting her immune system. What would $50K have done for other children in need of adoption? What did the physical and emotional pain of these processes purchase for this couple?)
>Why shouldn't parts of our human nature be unimportant or aberrant? It's possible we've overlooked things (science has many questions yet to answer) but why can't a part of our human nature be the equivalent of an appendix?
We only perceive the appendix (or wisdom teeth or baby toe) as unimportant; they're not aberrant, they are there for some purpose which no longer exists, not unlike the more fully repressed ability of a walking stick insect to grow and use wings. We must realize that tweaking what we perceive as unimportant may have a cascade of unintended effects, since we cannot know what influences encouraged the repression/expression of genes. See the glo-fish above as well; the insertion of a gene from an unrelated genome may have unintended effects that do not manifest themselves until 50, 100, 1000 iterations. We didn't write the original code; we may be able to read it, but we can't entirely know how the code was written and where the halts are in the system.
>Aren't you using the word 'human' in the same way some people use 'natural'? (as in; anything that's not natural is bad?)
"Natural" and "human" are not mutually exclusive terms. But at what point do we cease to be human, natural or otherwise? There was a point at which our ancestors became "erectus", even though that point was over a period of many generations. This transition will be far more abrupt if we use active intervention rather than passive intervention in manipulating our genome. At what point are we no longer "homo erectus"?
>Will post-humanity not broaden the definition of what is human? Or will we call them uebermensch? Or even untermensch?
See "homo erectus" versus "homo habilis" and "australopithecus" -- which would we call "human"? all of them? and is this based only in passive evolution?
Plenty more questions here. Fewer answers.
This is really looking more like a conversation about Post-Humanism than Holistic Feminism, yes?
12:19:10 PM 
