INTRODUCTION

About 13 000 years ago the human species, in what is today Turkey, took a bold step away from the natural practice of hunting and gathering for food, along the pathway towards the modern miracle of agriculture. It started with the unnatural selection of a species of grass with nutritional and utilitarian characteristics that were desirable for humans. The consequences of this massive technological leap have been reverberating ever since. Although its significance was certainly not evident at the time, this first step involved the deliberate, planned large-scale modification of the environment for the benefit of Homo sapiens, and indirectly a handful of other animal and plant species of immediate value to the human architects of this change, and to the disadvantage of virtually all other species. Other technological innovations have continued along this road, and modern debates concerning environmental degradation, genetically modified crops, nuclear technologies and global warming should all ask the question, ‘Should we have started along the road of technological progress at all, those 13 000 years ago?’ Once on this pathway, experience has shown that further progress(ion) is cumulative and unstoppable, simply because the benefits for humans, or at least for the vast majority of them, are undeniable. Given the limited natural ecological carrying capacity of the unmodified environment, a hunter-gatherer mode of existence was arguably capable of supporting a few hundreds of thousands of humans world - wide, perhaps even a few million, so the additional six billion or so humans alive today owe their very existence to technological progress. Sadly but not surprisingly, the rest of the biosphere has fared rather less well than this new growth that has emerged in its midst.

Today, humankind is poised at the brim of another possibly massive step in human development – the deliberate, planned modification of the human species itself by unnatural selection. The consequences for the bio sphere and humankind itself could exceed even those of that earlier step, 13 000 years ago. Should we go there?