February 10, 2015|9:03 am

In 2000, Craig Venter, along with Francis Collins, joined then-president Clinton in announcing the mapping of the human genome.

Since then, Venter has been a leader in the field of synthetic biology, a multi-disciplinary field related to genetic engineering.

And what he recently told the Wall Street Journal sent chills down my spine. Venter said, "We're going to have to learn to adapt to the concept that we are a software-driven species and understand how it affects our lives. Change the software, you can change the species, who we are."

The Journal's selected headline of the article described how we can now "control our evolution," which because evolution is supposed to be an unguided process, must be a misnomer. What Venter was actually describing would be better characterized as playing Creator to everyone else's Adam.

Humans, by the way, have quite a history of trying to reinvent our species. The Communists spoke about building the "New Soviet Man," a "selfless, learned, healthy and enthusiastic" person who would help build the Utopia described by Karl Marx. Fascism spoke of a "New Man who is a figure of action, violence, and masculinity," free from the taint of individualism.

Well, both failed, but not before causing previously unimaginable suffering.

Now it's scientism's turn to take a crack at reinventing the human species. And fittingly for a worldview that holds that empirical science is the only measure of truth, its approach is to reduce people to biological machines and see if they can produce something new by swapping parts and tinkering with the "software."

These efforts are known as "transhumanism." The goal of transhumanism is to "fundamentally [transform] the human condition by developing technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities."

For a long time, transhumanism was thought to be a kind of fringe movement, the stuff of science fiction movies. But now you have Venter, who is as significant as it gets in the field of genetics, talking about "changing the software." Transhumanism is not fringe anymore: It's mainstream. In fact, just last week the British Parliament approved a procedure to create babies with genetic material from three different parents!

Read more here:

When Adam Plays God: Why Transhumanism Won't End Well