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It’s well known that Jeffrey Epstein was a super-wealthy pedophile with an extraordinary network of powerful friends: tech billionaires, politicians and academics. But few people know that he was also a transhumanist — someone who believes that we should use advanced technologies to reengineer the human organism, thus creating a new “posthuman” species to rule the world.

Transhumanism, despite the idealistic ring that “humanism” brings to its name, is a radical version of eugenics. In the 20th century, eugenicists argued that if selective breeding can create new subspecies of domesticated animals, like the many varieties of dogs that roam our houses, then it can also create new varieties of optimized human beings. Transhumanism goes a step further, by aiming to create an entirely new species — posthumans, whom transhumanists imagine as being superior to humanity as we know it.

The contemporary transhumanist movement is deeply problematic for a variety of reasons. In addition to promoting a form of eugenics — which would be bad enough — one finds toxic attitudes like sexism, racism, ableism, classism, elitism, misogyny and xenophobia...