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Last week we heard from Dr. Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology, who bragged that his company was bringing "some science, some reality" to the debate over human cloning. Those who object to human cloning, in other words, are simply out of touch with reality.

Not all scientists—not even a majority, one hopes—would endorse Lanza's boast. But many would. To any moral objections that might constrain their research, they have an all-purpose answer: "We now know."

We = the experts, the scientists, the Masters.

Now = the enlightened present, as opposed to the superstitious past.

Know = beyond question, beyond doubt; anyone who disagrees with us is foolish, wicked, or insane.

The Astonishing Hypothesis is that "You," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

—Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul

The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficent oxygen.

—Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

"In mid-continent Europe," writes Alexander Marshack in The Roots of Civilization,

below the northern ice, in the corridor stretching from Czechoslovakia through Poland into the Ukraine and eastward to Siberia, was a vast forestless tundra of flat land, rolling hills and passes, and cold rivers and streams along which the herds of mammoth fed, migrated, and roamed.

Hunting these herds around 27,000 B.C. was an exceptionally skilled and intelligent Homo sapiens. In skeleton and brain capacity he was a modern man, in culture he was an astonishingly sophisticated human.

But these people, our ancestors, didn't know what We Now Know. They prepared their dead for burial with care, "with ornament and ceremony," as if for a journey.

The central act of preparation for death in the Roman church of antiquity was the reception of the Eucharist under one or both forms as a "viaticum"—that is, a provision for the journey to the other world. A person would receive the body and blood of Christ while on his or her deathbed, as close to death as possible. … Among Roman pagans the Latin term viaticum, related to the Greek epodion, had referred to the practice of placing a coin in the mouth of the dead as payment to Charon, who ferried shades over the river Styx to the underworld.

—Frederick S. Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval England

In 1935, James Glass tells us in Life Unworthy of Life, Dr. H.E. Kleinschmidt, the director of the U.S. National Tuberculosis Association, visited a race hygiene exhibit in Berlin. Glass quotes from Kleinschmidt's enthusiastic report:

Eugenics charts and family trees abound. Sad galleries of unfortunate biological misfits—idiots, people with heritable deformities, incurable criminals—drive home the logic back of the new sterilization laws. The anti-Semitic policy is meticulously explained. … [The exhibit] serves also to help people discriminate between sound and unsound health advice; to distinguish between scientific medicine and quackery. Above all, it impresses upon even the most casual the "Wonder of Life." Admiration for the marvel of the human body, reverence for the mysterious thing we call life, is worth cultivating in this surfeited generation.

Within a very short time after Kleinschmidt's visit, scientific medicine took a great leap forward. The rounding up of the Jews and other biological misfits created a truly vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules, accessible to study as never before:

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December (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45