Ultimately, this intelligence allowed us to overcome the limits of biology. Modern medicine has tamed many of the beasts that killed our ancestors so early and so often. Accordingly, as medical standards of care began improving in the mid-nineteenth century, the human population exploded. Along with this explosion came the sinister handmaidens of success: resource scarcity, war, and environmental degradation unlike any our species has ever seen. So we now have the opposite problem: too many people, rather than too few. Nothing says “poor design” quite like uncontrolled and unsustainable
...more
