There is increasing concern expressed by a wide range of commentators that human nature is in the process of being irrevocably changed by technological advances that have either actually been achieved or are in the pipeline. According to a multitude of op-ed writers, cultural critics, social scientists and philosophers, we have not faced up to the grave implications of what is happening. We are sleepwalking and need to wake up. Human life is being so radically transformed, in particular by advances in biomedical science, that our very essence as human beings is under threat.

Of course apocalypse sells product and one should not regard the epidemiology of panic as a guide to social or any other kind of reality. The fact that one of the most quoted panickers about the future is Francis Fukuyama, who has got the past wrong (The End of History) and the present wrong (recovered neo-con Pentagon hawk) should itself be reassurance enough.