It's often been said that philosophy lags behind science. Bertrand Russell's "The ABC of Relativity," for example, was published in 1926, 21 years after Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity.
We'll give them a break, those poor philosophers. It must be hard to come up with the philosophical implications of, say, quantum mechanics, when only a specialized handful of physicists themselves can understand it. Yet there is one area where the philosophers are well ahead of the scientists, and that is one where we would expect them to have the edge. It is when we think about what it means to be human.
Philosophers have had a good 3,000-year start on scientists here. In fact, scientists are only just beginning to develop the techniques that will enable them to alter human life. But philosophers, principally bioethicists, are ready to jump into the fray, as we saw last week when Science published the latest stem-cell research.