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whereupon the more they need new knowledge just to stay alive.
Take away electric power from a tribe of Australian Aborigines, and little or nothing will happen. Take it away from residents of California, and millions will die. So to understand why humanity has come to relate to the environment in this way is more than a rhetorical question. Greed demands an explanation. The Ratchet should be constantly re-examined, and new choices considered.
You may alter the biological nature of the human species in any direction you wish, or you may leave it alone.
Is genetic change still occurring in the old-fashioned way, or has civilization brought it to a halt?
Is natural selection still operating to drive evolution?
no evidence exists that the human genome is changing in any overall new direction.
malign forces imposed in the past. We do not, for example, appear as a species to be acquiring genes for larger or smaller brains, more efficient kidneys, smaller teeth, greater or lesser compassion, or any other important adjustments in body and
brachycephalization.
The change is due principally to the slightly higher survival rate of round-heads, and not to the influx of brachycephalics from outside Poland.
blood types, disease resistance, aerobic capacity, and the ability to digest milk and other foodstuffs.
produce more heat shock proteins
not directional change,
chiefdoms and states spring into existence, expand like hungry two-dimensional amoebae, and vanish as others
Europeans conquered the New World and transported African slaves to its shores.
drive evolution of the human species as a whole in one direction or another.
It also increases the range of individual variation within the populations and across the entire species.
Yet the average differences between people in different localities around the world, not very great to start with, are narrowing.
Variance increases,
Continued over tens or hundreds of generations the present rates of emigration and intermarriage could in theory eliminate all population differences around the world.
Possessing exact knowledge of its own genes, collective humanity in a few decades can, if it wishes, select a new direction in its evolution and move there quickly.
“volitional evolution”—a
humanity will be positioned godlike to take control of its own ultimate
shared with all other organisms, human populations were also subject to stabilizing selection;
conscious control over their heredity,
It will not last enough generations to have an important impact on heredity of the species as a whole, because the knowledge that made it possible has brought us swiftly to the brink of the third period,
volitional evolution.
gene therapy,
Each such gene is carried in single or double dose by thousands to millions of people around the world,
In most cases the genes are recessive and loaded in single dose;
How much should people be allowed to mutate themselves and their descendants?
Fair enough, but what about altering genes in order to enhance mathematical and verbal ability? To acquire perfect pitch? Athletic talent? Heterosexuality?
If such engineering for long life proves even just partly successful, it will
decommission
tempered by ethics and political choice.
In other words, true conservatism, an idea that can be applied to human nature as well as to social institutions.
Neutralize the elements of human nature in favor of pure rationality, and the result would be badly constructed, protein-based computers.
THE PROBLEM OF collective meaning and purpose is both urgent and immediate because,
It springs from the clash of two opposing human self-images.
Cultural. Indeterminately flexible, with vast potential. Wired and information-driven. Can travel almost anywhere, adapt to any environment. Restless, getting crowded. Thinking about the colonization of space. Regrets the current loss of Nature and all those vanishing species, but it’s the price of progress and has little to do with our future anyway.
Biosphere
In 1600 there were only about half a billion people on Earth, and in 1940, 2 billion.
Perhaps the deserts and nonarable dry grasslands can be irrigated to expand agricultural production.
arithmetical riddle of the lily pond. A lily pad is placed in a pond. Each day thereafter the pad and then all of its descendants double. On the thirtieth day the pond is covered completely by lily pads, which can grow no more. On which day was the pond half full and half empty? The twenty-ninth day.
Scapegoats are identified, sometimes other political or ethnic groups, sometimes
Endless stand-by schemes are already on the board. Conversion of nitrogenased petroleum to food is one remote possibility.
forces upon Earth, and do it with minimal prosthetic dependence. That, in essence, is the ethic of sustainable development.
elegant cabinet specimens of applied mathematics, largely ignore human behavior as understood by contemporary psychology and biology.
The weakness of economics is most worrisome, however, in its general failure to incorporate the environment.
and agricultural produce, but those of other countries as well. And now the globalization of commerce, accelerated by technology and the liquidity of paper assets, has made the mass transfer of material assets far easier. The wood products of Japan are the destroyed forests of tropical Asia, the fuel of Europe the dwindling petroleum reserves of the Middle East.
In national balance sheets economists seldom use full-cost accounting, which includes the loss of natural resources. A country can cut down all its trees, mine out its most profitable minerals, exhaust its fisheries, erode most of its soil, draw down its underground water, and count all the proceeds as income and none of the depletion as cost. It can pollute the environment and promote policies that crowd its populace into urban slums, without charging the result to overhead.
