Word: humanizes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...human cloning becomes possible--and since the birth of a sheep called Dolly, few doubt that it will be feasible to clone a person by 2025--even the link between sex organs and reproduction will be broken. You will then be able to take a cutting from your body and grow a new person, as if you were a willow tree. And if it becomes possible to screen or genetically engineer embryos to "improve" them, then in-vitro fertilization and cloning may become the rule rather than the exception among those who can afford...
...share this interest in infertile, social sex with a few other species: dolphins, bonobo apes and some birds. But even if sex is too good for human beings to give up, more and more people will abandon it as a means of reproduction. Many people born from in-vitro techniques are themselves infertile--they inherit the infertility from their genetic parents. So infertility is bound to increase, and with it the demand for IVF. Add to this the demand from gay men and women and from those with private eugenic motives--ranging from not wanting to pass on inherited disease...
...Human cloning and designer babies are probably not imminent. Even assuming that the procedures are judged safe and efficient in farm animals, still a long way off, they will be heavily discouraged, if not banned, by many governments for human beings...
...were not for sex, there would be no blossoms and no birdsong. A flower-filled meadow resounding with the dawn chorus of songbirds is actually a scene of frenzied sexual competition. Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at University College London, has pointed out that everything extravagant about human life, from poetry to fast cars, is rooted in sexual one-upmanship...
...women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning," said Aristotle Onassis, who should know. Or, as Henry Kissinger put it, "power is the great aphrodisiac." So where would humans--and human civilization--be without sex? Probably back with the aphids and dandelions, I suspect, procreating effortlessly but building neither empires nor cathedrals...