We often consider the birth of human civilization and the origins of knowledge the beginning of a completely new chapter in the story of biological progression.  Humans developed many new technologies; such as complex means of communication, informational storage, and acquisition of metabolic energy.  Popular belief holds that human engineered technology falls outside of the realm of the biological forces that have been acting on the earth for nearly five billion years. Furthermore, popular belief contests that the tools of human technology are unnatural, and after their inception evolution ceased to act on Homo sapiens and their nonbiological counterparts.  The notion that evolution ceased to pressure changes in genetic frequencies and alter traits of populations over time is largely correct. However, a different, greater force continued to work on the world-- including the ancestors of today’s megacivilization-- despite our desperate attempts to overcome nature.  An alternate theory regards this force as a different sort of evolution in which the currency can be organic, inorganic, physical, or abstract in nature; a force that serves to move things towards ever increasing complexity and intelligence.  The application of this framework to transhumanism provides plausible responses to many popular questions and objections to transhumanist technologies which call into question the nature of progress, freedom, and technology itself.

            Debates concerning technology often focus on the usage of tools by humans and other vertebrates and fail to distinguish between-- despite the lack of fundamental differences-- genetic capabilities such as catalytic polypeptides, photosynthesis, and opposable thumbs and extrabiological capabilities such as writing, division of labor, or microprocessors.  In both cases, they serve as resources for increased fitness that have transmissible and transformable elements.  Resulting from their interchangeable utility, both genetic and technological capabilities function as memes according to the concept originally presented by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1).  Dawkins put forth that memes, which are transmissible units able to be imitated, function analogously to genes (1).  Dawkins contends that memes 'evolve' in a parallel fashion to Darwinian theory.  This act of evolving, known as memetic evolution, entails “variation and selection” forcing the “functional and structural” complexity of systems to change over time (2).  Dawkins originally framed memes in the concept of social evolution and the evolution of ideas, but in the past 30 years the concept of memes has been applied to numerous disciplines and concepts.  I contend that all technological extensions of humans, including science, medicine, knowledge, and engineering are concepts generated by variation and selective retention rooted in pressures to improve survival.  In the long-run these adaptations act to increase complexity, intelligence, and other faculties that enhance the long term fitness of our species.  Since extrabiological memes can be readily transferred within human populations outside of the organic transfer of information associated with genes, the evolution of these memes can occur at startling rates and with unparalleled efficiency.  If a meme evolves through a process of variation and selection that serves to increase the complexity and long term survivability of humans, then the long-term well-being of the species will be enhanced through the development of that meme.  The finite dimensions of our organic composition inhibit potential for limitless progression, therefore to exceed biological boundaries through transhumanism allows for unlimited, controlled advance.  Through the application of these evolutionary principles, I will show that transhumanism results in continued individual freedom and autonomy, decreased suffering and hardship, and increased standards of health and wellness optimal for the entirety of humanity.

            Apart from humans, nearly all living things apply all of their time, energy, and capabilities to the battle against nature for nutrients, reproduction, and necessities for survival.  Within the past several thousand years, we have developed exceptional ways of combating nature by increasing our efficiency and productivity through the implementation of technological memes.  This optimization of tasks vital to survival generated excess capabilities leading to the inception of a myriad of complex memes such as social order, culture, religion, and individuality.  Opponents to transhumanism fear that the loss of these memes would destroy a component of our essential to our humanity.  Memes do not make us human; we, as technological animals, established these memes because they served a purpose.  We created them because they helped us to survive.  If at any point we find that certain memes are no longer necessary for our continued viability, then clinging onto them only serves to decrease our ability to move forward in any direction; a conceited desire for individuality did not accompany the evolution of multicellular life forms or tissue differentiation.  Nature does not favor vanity; the system only rewards forward motion towards complexity.

            On the road to complexity through transhumanism, technological advancements drive the memetic evolution of humans to a point increasingly independent of biology and dependent on the products of human faculties.  This inversion of priority causes a subsequent decline in individual freedom accompanying the development of increasingly intricate technologies.  However, we must allow this evolution to ’work’ to increase our complexity and capability “to build the better future,” since “human effort would also be pointless if a better future were inevitable by historical destiny, or vouchsafed by supernatural intervention” (3).  Our resources are limited; our populations grow towards instability, and our future is always uncertain.  Undoubtedly, a constant conflict exists between the level of complexity required to meet immediate and future demands and our desire for autonomy as we exchange freedom for ability through a system of conjectures and refutations that induces memetic evolution.

            A simple analogy will express this loss of freedom for a greater gain by comparing the maintenance and repair of a Model-T Ford with a new Ford automobile.  Those opposed to transhumanism argue that nearly anyone could repair the Model-T, but today repairing a modern car requires special tools and expertise; this decreases freedom.  Critics of transhumanism extrapolate this case and fear that as technology develops humanity will/has become overly dependent on technology. This dependence, they contend further, will be critical when the technology replaces essential components such as the heart, hand, or brain.  I would, however, elaborate on the freedom the modern car grants the owner: fewer breakdowns, the ability to travel hundreds of miles without stops at speeds over one hundred miles per hour, with increased comfort, and with dramatic gains in fuel economy.  The fact that consumers drove the changes in the automotive market that led to the exchange of decreased ease of repair for increased performance illustrates the paradigm of variation and retentive selection that will be echoed in human-machine and organic-synthetic interfacing technologies.  These variations over time resulted from competition of various ideas in a free market economy, and the selection results from the ever-changing needs of consumers.  Although I acknowledge that as technology moves to higher levels of intricacy through evolving memes individual freedom will decrease in some respects, I still contend that the transhuman possesses an overall greater fitness essential for prolonged perpetuation and the potential for the continued adoption of new memes.  The mechanism for the continued adoption and evolution of memes is indispensable, since merely maintaining a particular level of capabilities constitutes a diminishing viability.

            Author Lewis Carroll might have described this decreased viability best in 1872 through a conversation between Alice and the Red Queen in his classic work Through the Looking Glass, "here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place” (4).  Over 100 years later, Leigh Van Valen applied this so-called Red Queen Hypothesis to systems undergoing evolution.  Through careful analysis of fossil records, he showed that a species needs continuous development to remain fit relative to other species which continue to evolve (5).  A species that retards its rate of adaptation risks extinction (5).  Although humans have developed memes to overcome nature in many ways, we do not exist in a vacuum without competition.  Humans and pathogens are locked in a constant arms race: we develop memes for immunity and treatment of disease while bacteria, viruses, and parasites are constantly evolving their improved memes for pathogenesis.  Technologies dramatically affecting our ability to resist evolving pathogens without exposing underlying congenital disease lie at the core of transhumanism-- which seeks to constantly raise standards of health to a level considered “better than well” (6).  The concept of well or healthy continually shifts through discreet steps to a state unfathomable in the time of Carroll.  Technologies such as vaccines, antibiotics, and organ transplants caused tremendous shifts in the way we view illness and recovery to a state of 'good' health.  Illnesses which were previously considered a death sentence have virtually disappeared.  Developing technologies promise the ability to better detect and remedy deviations from any physiological state, implying the impending ability to control our bodies as we see fit.  A conservative position of halting or slowing down this advancement decreases our survivability and thus has the real possibility of leading to our extinction. This is so because emerging and evolving pathogens will continue to evolve and improve in their lethality, despite the best intentions of the careful and the cautious.  In a system which values continued existence above all else, the view that the standards of health today are sufficient for tomorrow is unacceptable because a static view of health and wellness serves to decrease the global community's fitness via the effect of Van Valen's Red Queen Hypothesis.  Transhumans will surpass dated concepts of health and through this transcendence seek to end hardship, pain, and suffering through the advancement of evolving technology.

            Pain exists as a residual meme of early biological evolution in the same way arguments against the eradication of suffering exist largely as relics from conservative religious positions concerning the usage of surgical and obstetric anesthesia.  Concerning the use of anesthetics, conservative Christian authorities asserted that pain existed for religious reasons and served positive purposes. One example of this is the Church of Zurich, which claimed in 1847 after the use of ether in the labor of Queen Victoria that “pain is a natural and intended curse of the primal sin…any attempt to do away with it must be wrong" (7).  Years later, in a diverse world, after a general acceptance of pain as a tangible neuropathy rather than an abstract religious concept, conservatives still hold that pain is essential to learning, development, and humility.  But just as Galen the Greek Physician stated that "pain is useless to the pained," emotional and physical pains are equally useless to the transhuman (8).  Humans use pain to trigger responses to dangers or damages to the body such as to fight, to flight, or to cease contact, but the transhumans do not require pain to avoid these obstacles, since memes will/do exist for improved awareness.  Pain is only useful in that sense that it is a striking departure from normal feeling which triggers a genetically programmed response; the senses require a only a gradient of feeling to detect danger or damage to the body...    An engineered sentience living in ultimate bliss possesses the ability to learn and potentially avoid stimuli in the future that elicit a non-painful, but unique sensation.  Only a deviation from normal feeling or a concrete cue from an extrabiological device is necessary; painful manifestations are not.  The memetic concept of caution and avoidance of danger is better served by a more sophisticated meme for perception.

               Therefore, transhumanists as well as modern Abolitionist or Hedonist groups strongly advocate the banishing of suffering, including somatic pain as well as emotional pain.  Transhumanists hope to achieve this end by going beyond the biological borders of Homo sapiens.  Although justifications for such advocacy are diverse, this evolutionary approach bases its argument in the fact that suffering results from the inability to overcome elements of nature. That element may be disease, acquisition of resources, or reproductive perpetuation. In my conceptualization, this lack of control forces a sentience “to tolerate” or “endure” such an element (9).  Control over our environment enhances our fitness since a species with more means of control is more suitable to survive deviations from homeostasis, “greater control variety implies greater fitness” (2).  In this way, movement towards the elimination of suffering, pain, and unhappiness parallels evolution towards advancement and increased survivability through increased control.  In an attempt to gain such control, humans have developed memetic tools “such as technology, social organization, and rational thinking” which gave us “greater power in the world” in addition to greater control (7).  Transhumans hope to use this power to fulfill progressive aims in the future.

            Amelioration of suffering and facilitation of the emancipation of humans from the bondage of hunger, pain, disease, disability, and death are truly progressive aims, aims which transhumanists believe to be realistically achievable and of paramount importance.  These concepts were completely alien to our not-so-distant ancestors, and are barely recognizable to us today.  Humans can scarcely imagine a time before civilization, before fire, before tool use, at a time before divergence between human evolution and the evolution of all other living things.  In this time, moral institutions of humans had yet to evolve, and natural laws ruled as the supreme agents governing evolution, survival, and extinction.  Biological progression towards fitness through improved memes for survival exists as 'good' within a utilitarian framework of morality: the maximization of welfare is an objective moral good, and biological progression leads to this maximization through the rationalization and optimization of processes.  We are nothing more than technological animals.  We invent technologies to achieve our desires, and there is no deep reason why we should ever stop doing so, even if we transform ourselves, and create new desires, in the process” (3).  Humans have overcome biological evolution through the use of technology, but the transhuman will have developed memes to overcome biology entirely as a method for superior survival.  Over time, this combinational effect of many triumphs resulting from our ability to integrate technology and biology will propel humans into a future with great promise of and great hope in the inevitability of a better world for unborn generations.  We have always overcome our condition, whether that condition was hunger, cold, or fear; accepting that the world in which we live is sufficient stands in opposition to the very fabric of our being, which desires continued progression towards complexity leading to our continuation.  In this way, the technoconservatives who wish to halt, slow, or regulate progress are the unnatural, dangerous, and soon to be extinct creature, existing separately from a humans or transhumans, who are truly technological animals.  Perhaps David Zindell, a science-fiction writer far ahead of his time, described our nature as technological animals best, “‘what is a human being, then?'  'a seed.' 'a... seed?' 'an acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree'” (10).

References

1. R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976), pp. 194.
2. F. Heylighen, The Evolution of Complexity (Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1996).
3. G. Jordan, J. Evol. and Tech. 15, 55 (2006).
4. L. Carroll. Through the Looking Glass. (Macmillan, London, 1872), pp. 46.
5. L. Van Valen. Evol. Theory 1, 1 (1973).
6. N. Bostrom et al. 1999, The Tanshumanist FAQ. http://www.transhumanism.org/resources/faq.html
7. S. Barker, Harper's New Monthly Magazine. 31, 453 (June 1865).
8. Early Arguments Against Anaesthesia in Surgery, Dentistry and Childbirth[www.general-anaesthesia.com]
9. Suffering -- Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Suffering&oldid=58925927]
10. D. Zindell, The Broken God (Harpercollins, New York, 1998).