Designing Dystopia

The Transhumanist Temptation to Play God

A recent book from Sophia Institute Press provides a handy primer for a rapidly growing and ominous mindset of our era, transhumanism. In The Transhumanist Temptation: How Technology and Ideology Are Reshaping Humanity—And How to Resist, a thoughtful young writer named Grayson Quay looks at how the idea of transcending our humanity originated and how it impacts our social and political life today.

The term transhumanism was popularized by British scientist Julian Huxley (1887–1975), a grandson of T. H. Huxley (also known as “Darwin’s bulldog”). In a 1957 essay, he expressed a thought that many intellectuals shared—that we humans have...