No longer, he said, would a person’s physical and psychological attributes be subject to the capricious whims of nature.In his 1957 essay “Transhumanism” (a term Julian Huxley coined), he laid out his ideas, writing that “the human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself – not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity.” Once man took hold of his biological destiny, he “would be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Pekin[g] man,” Julian Huxley wrote, referring to the name given to the 750,000-year-old fossils of one of our prehistoric ancestors.A COST TO SOCIETY?But like Julian’s brother Aldous Huxley, those who oppose radical enhancement say the road to transcending humanity is paved with terrible risks and dangers, and that a society that embraces enhancement might lose much more in the bargain than it gains.“I think that the enhancement imperative, where we’re going to overcome all limitations including death, seems to me to be a kind of utopianism that we’ll have to break a lot of eggs to realize,” says Christian Brugger, a professor of moral theology at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver.