Monday, March 14, 2016

As if we weren't flawed enough already......


"The real question," he says, "is what the evolutionary pressure of these therapies might me.  Would faulty genes become more prevalent, because they could be fixed?  I wear contact lenses, but if I were a caveman and my eyesight was as bad as it was when I was five, I would have been in serious trouble.  Now it doesn't matter.  We could replace our defective parts, live longer, and feel healthier."  Then he adds a provocative afterthought:  "Yet physically we could be much weaker and more flawed genetically."

-Diane Ackerman,  The Human Age:  The World Shaped By Us

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