In the last five years there emerged a rather crass and quite transparent euphemism for creationism. Intelligent design didn’t fool anyone and simply highlighted its perpetretrators as devious as well as asinine. Is the same true of ‘transhumanism’.

The word eugenics is so irrevocably associated with nazi germany that it is easy to see why it is so little used. The question that has been bothering me concerns our motives for using the term transhumanism. It is legitimate to demand higher ethical standards than the first eugenicists but it is odious to propagate the lie that transhumanism is something different. Perhaps we should define transhumanism as ‘ethical eugenics’ and make our intentions clear. The World Transhumanist Association uses the word ethical prominently on the front page of their website. But perhaps there is a more significant difference between the scope of the two terms.

Transhumanism encompasses the human machine interface and the possibility for a complete revolution in how our consciousness is stored. In some ways it represents a more ambitious and potentially more dangerous project than eugenics.