Transhumanism: most dangerous idea in the world?

Nick Bostrom, from Oxford University's new Future of Humanity Institute, gave a lecture at the RSA last night on the possibility of transhumanism. He puts it this way: curing all cancer and heart disease won't add even ten years to the mean human lifespan, despite taking huge research projects. Delaying or curtailing aging could make a difference on a different scale of magnitude altogether. Also, consider the relatively small tweaks that seem to have taken a chimp-like primate to a planet-conquering hominid. He asks if there are more such tweaks that can be made, and suggests we would be mad not to try. Francis Fukuyama, by contrast, (he of 'The End of History') has called this the most dangerous idea in the world, because of its potential to divide humanity, joined by an indefinable x-factor of human-ness, into tribes of superior and lesser kinds, after the manner of Brave New World, or the false scientific racism that interested the Nazis so much. Unclear that this would happen, because the danger would come from engineering sub-humans, not super-humans. If we accept that all humans now pass some threshhold, we would have to re-engineer types that we thought did not. More likely we would progress animals to some intermediate state - superchimps that we could use as servants or send to difficult locations - or robots with AI. Neither case seems worrying in Fukuyama's sense. On the other hand, consider how, while markets in many ways are very effective mechanisms for setting prices, discovering useful information and driving up standards, there are situations where mass choosing seems to arrive at a non-optimal result, precisely in the areas that transhumanism comes to play. Consider control over reproduction. The choice to have a baby or not is a new and powerful one. It has had a very good press for a long time. Now however it is becoming clear in Europe and particularly in Russia where abortions exceed live births that it has produced a continent that cannot sustain its own population. Equally, in China and probably elsewhere too in Asia, the power of parents to select gender (often crudely through infanticide in the face of the one child policy) is producing a population skew, with many more boys than girls born and reared. This seems an obvious worry. The problem is that individual choice seems the only mechanism available. It must be better than control by the state in these intimately personal areas. And outright bans do not seem possible, except as a braking manoeuvre. In fact, looking more closely at the worrying instances given, it says more about how state intervention distorts the marketplace for reproduction than the inability of parental choices to aggregate into social wisdom. Europe's welfare state has made children a bad bargain when you can assume that leaning on someone else's is a possibility. Russia's kleptocratic, anarcho-capitalist, post-commnist malaise has left family integrity battered and broken. China is suffering the law of unintended consequence for a brutally centrist policy. Perhaps the lesson of transhumanism as a foreseeable prospect is that the state needs to get out of the way if individual reproductive choices are not to accumulate, propped up by state support, into unsustainable positions.