Children of Prometheus: The Accelerating Pace of Human Evolution (Helix Book) - Hardcover

Wills, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0738200034 ISBN 13: 9780738200033

Publisher: Perseus Books, 1998

Synopsis

Are we still evolving? Or has our mastery of the environment stopped natural selection in its tracks? In Children of Prometheus, biologist Christopher Wills gives a surprising answer: that the evolution of Homo sapiens is actually accelerating. To make this controversial case, Wills takes us to the far reaches of the planet. To the Tibetan plateau, where the severe climate has prompted rapid, short-term evolutionary change. To Africa, where human-caused ecological upheaval continues to spawn ever more virulent strains of infectious diseases - diseases which in turn affect the evolutionary course of their hosts. To the hushed corridors of Whitehall, where job stress is taking some British civil servants to an early death. In each of these cases - and in the many others that Wills examines - our power over nature has done nothing to halt evolution's unrelenting march. Spurred by a rapidly changing environment, and acting on our ever-expanding gene pool, natural selection will likely take us even deeper into uncharted territory. And Wills offers an exciting glimpse into this fascinating and frenetic future. What will become of our species as more and more of us wire our brains into vast electronic webs? Or pop "smart drugs" that alter the brain's very biochemical structure? Or adapt to bizarre conditions on extrasolar planets?

About this title

Review

Ever since Darwinian evolution first became the common currency of discussion, scientists and lay people have worried that the human race has ceased to evolve, has stagnated and will degenerate; the standard response to these worries has been to point to the atrocities committed in their name in the shape of the Holocaust and various eugenic programmes of sterilisation which ended up defining unfit as meaning poor and black:

"Galton, like most of his contemporaries, was what one might term a genteel racist. He took it for granted that some races were superior and some were inferior. Yet if he is able, from his vantage in heaven, to observe what has happened to his ideas in the ninety years since his death, I feel sure that he must be truly horrified. Even today, racists and supremacists of every stripe (the stripes are usually but not always pale ones) continue to cite Galton to support their belief in the intellectual degeneration of people unlike themselves. They persist even in the face of strong evidence that our species seems, if anything, to be getting smarter over time."

In Children of Prometheus, Christopher Wills goes considerably further and argues vehemently that, in terms of geological time, human beings have developed at a super-charged level; our invention of culture means that there is a process of feedback at work which ensures that we are evolving continually. In particular, twentieth century technologies of mobility and speed are shuffling the human gene pool as it has never been shuffled before. The presence in the human genome of a variety of two- edged adaptations that have some positive aspects, but manifest most often as genetic disorders, is evidence of this rather than of any degeneration. We have only to look at the range of variations among human beings and compare it to the far smaller range of variation in the other great apes to see natural selection continually at work. --Roz Kaveney

About the Author

British-born Christopher Wills is Professor of Biology at the University of California.

About this edition

• Publisher: Perseus Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0738200034
• ISBN 13: 9780738200033
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320