The topics:

• Our guests this week were PJ Manney and Tyler Emerson:

  

• What is transhumanism?

• We all agreed that we need more kids interested in science. Some good programs that are already working toward this goal are:
  
  • Knowledge Context, and
    
  • FIRST. FIRST stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.
    
• We mentioned the following books:

• PJ mentioned the Flynn Effect.

• Dean Kamen is trying to bring an invention to market that would produce clean drinking water for the poorest people in the world. The problem - he's having trouble getting investors.

• The panel talked about blade runner Oscar Pistorius as an example of a person who can function better than normal human. Check out the video of this runner at the link.

• The panel agreed that the Transhumanist vision is both individual and global. Transhumanists want to overcome individual limitations - in longevity, health, physical strength, and intelligence. But transhumanists also want to see the world advance societally. The reduction of world-wide poverty, disease, and violence is a large part of this vision.

• The panel talked about how they'd like the world to change. Phil would like to see poverty, at least as we define it now, eliminated. Stephen mentioned world peace. Maybe we're seeing the beginnings of that already.

• One development this week that had the entire round table excited was Craig Venter's completion of an artificial genome. Now that we can write the language of life, many of the visions of transhumanists can be realized.

• In response to Craig Venter's success, Tyler mentioned a landmark conference held by Edge.org entitled, "Life: What a Concept." Here's a quote from Freeman Dyson at that conference:

  Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. It was an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer. The epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended about ten thousand years ago, when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence which we call globalization.

Our front bumper is a sample of Marginal Prophets' "The Difficult Song."

Our exit music this week is from The Gas House Gorillas. The song is "Burglar In The House Of Love."

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