This is a particularly problematic kind of rhetoric, especially in the context of his other comments about policy options. According to Metzl, the outcome could only be that your country would fall behind the rest of the world, and its leaders would have to “adopt the language of Nazism.” Here’s another example, both nastier and more important: If your individual nation-state were to forbid the genetic enhancement of human embryos, enforcement would require conducting pregnancy tests on “all women of fertile age coming into your country,” followed by prenatal genomic testing for any pregnancies and, if necessary, exile of anyone found to be carrying an enhanced fetus. That’s a trivial example of a technique he uses throughout: the superficially plausible extrapolation. Well, except that eggs would undoubtedly be a far smaller part of our diet. To satisfy the modern global demand with the un-hacked chicken, he estimates, would require about 775 billion of the creatures! “Imagine how people would feel? Earth would become a planet of chickens.” The wild type produced about an egg a month, he tells us, whereas selective breeding over thousands of years brought us chickens with about 25 times the productivity.

In the book, which has a similarly pre-determined endpoint, Metzl leads us through a broad-brush history that includes the way we have already “hacked” species such as the humble chicken.

At which point, he steps back and solemnly intones that we all, collectively, need to ask and answer essential questions that will lead to “monumental decisions about our genetic future.” He doesn’t immediately say “yes.” Instead, he moves smoothly into what is clearly intended to be seen as a kind of Socratic dialogue, leading the woman and the rest of the audience in the direction he wants them to go: support for the practice of engineering children. Would you genetically engineer your own kids? On page 2, he tells the story of how, after “many years” of “writing and lecturing about the future of human reproduction,” he was frozen into silence by one simple question, asked by a woman in the audience: Metzl is a technophilic inevitabilist, a well-informed but glib enthusiast. The author is convinced that we humans are software and ready for an upgrade. However, it doesn’t take long for the reader to realize that the title does, in fact, sum up the book. Hacking Darwin sounds good if you don’t think about it. The problems with this book by Jamie Metzl begin with the title, which name-checks one of the most famous scientists in history and links him with either computerized theft or a crude temporary fix.

Hacking darwin book