At about six years old, the Zoque babies, in pre-Mayan southern Mexico, would be taken to cave temples high up in an almost inaccessible cliff face, where priests would eat their brains through small precise holes drilled into their rectangular skulls. A woman in Kosovo, interviewed by the western media, told how the Serb soldiers shouted "You're not human" as they set about massacring people. I wonder how much the mass production and commodification of chicken's eggs has contributed to the concept of the embryo that we so blithely bandy about in our discussions of reproductive technology. Will human birth, I wonder, soon come in a newly marketed Free Range pack. Dehumanisation, indeed, comes in many, many forms. Lang's robot-Maria, then, and Leret's updated version of her, herald Stelarc's post-humanism just as they themselves were heralded by Shelley's Creature and the Kabbalists' clay Golem. The postmodern liminal habitat in which we both have and are our bodies, which exist because we do them, is gradually becoming a newly post-human habitat in which doing our bodies will be a much more conscious and designed ontological activity, and our bodies may extend to include non-organic mechanical devices self-defined as a part of ourselves. Post-evolutionary experiments will be undertaken by those with the hubris and the governmental or corporate muscle to do so, Stelarc and Kac will mirror their efforts to us in their art, and the poor, the hungry, and the planet's ecosystem will continue to pay the price.

"O brave new world, that has such people on't."