War on evil, religious intolerance or transhumanism - What are the world's most dangerous ideas?

The World’s Most Dangerous Ideas is a September/October 2004 special report published in Foreign Policy magazine. Eight notable intellectuals were asked to issue an early warning on the ideas or ideologies that will be most destructive in the coming years.

* War on evil (Robert Wright)
* Business as usual at the U.N. (Samantha Power)
* Transhumanism (Francis Fukuyama)
* Free money (Alice Rivlin)
* Undermining free will (Paul Davies)
* Spreading democracy (Eric Hobsbawm)
* Religious intolerance (Martha Nussbaum)
* Hating America (Fareed Zakaria)

From http://www.reason.com/news/show/34867.html

Transhumanism: The Most Dangerous Idea?

In his Foreign Policy article, Fukuyama identifies transhumanism as “a strange liberation movement” that wants “nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints.” Sounds ominous, no? But wait a minute, isn’t human history (and prehistory) all about liberating more and more people from their biological constraints? After all, it’s not as though most of us still live in our species’ “natural state” as Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. Human liberation from our biological constraints began when an ancestor first sharpened a stick and used it to kill an animal for food. Further liberation from biological constraints followed with fire, the wheel, domesticating animals, agriculture, metallurgy, city building, textiles, information storage by means of writing, the internal combustion engine, electric power generation, antibiotics, vaccines, transplants, and contraception. In a sense, the goal toward which humanity has been striving for millennia has been to liberate ourselves from more and more of our ancestors’ biological constraints.

What is a human capacity anyway? Biologist Richard Dawkins has propounded the notion of an extended phenotype. Genes not only mold the bodies of organisms but also shape their behaviors. Some of those behaviors result in the creation of inanimate objects that help organisms to survive and reproduce, such as beaver dams and bird nests. Our ancestors had no wings; now we fly. Our ancient forebears could not hear one another over 1,000 miles; now we phone. And our Stone Age progenitors averaged 25 years of life; now we live 75. Thanks to our knack for technological innovation, humanity has by far the largest extended phenotype of all creatures on planet Earth. Nothing could be more natural to human beings than striving to liberate ourselves from biological constraints. But Fukuyama would undoubtedly respond that Pleistocene hunter-gatherers are still recognizably human, no different in their innate capacities than people living today. What transhumanists seek is very different. They want to go beyond current innate human capacities. They want to change human bodies and brains.

Let’s say that future genetic engineers discover a gene for suicidal depression, and learn how to suppress the gene, or adjust it. Would fixing it make subsequent generations non-human beings? After all, most people today do not fall into suicidal depressions, and those happy people are no less human than, say, Sylvia Plath. Depression can already be fixed for many people by means of Prozac or Paxil. Surely, taking serotonin re-uptake inhibitors does not make people other or less than human. Sufferers of depression will tell you that the drugs restore them to their true selves. It seems unreasonable to claim that in order to qualify as human beings, we all must have the capacity to succumb to berserker rage or religious ecstasy.

“The first victim of transhumanism might be equality,” writes Fukuyama. “If we start transforming ourselves into something superior, what rights will these enhanced creatures claim, and what rights will they possess when compared to those left behind?” Fukuyama seems to be entertaining an X-Men-like fantasy in which enhanced posthumans seek to destroy unenhanced naturals.
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What do you think are the world’s most dangerous ideas?