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

 
9780738200033: Children of Prometheus: The Accelerating Pace of Human Evolution (Helix Book)

Synopsis

}Are we still evolving? Scientists have grappled with this question since the time of Darwin. Now, in this provocative book, biologist Christopher Wills argues that we are not only continuing to evolve but that our pace of change is accelerating. He examines the rapid, short-term evolutionary change taking place in people living at the earths extremes (even as babies, Tibetans can draw in more oxygen than lowlanders), and the new physiology of those who participate in extreme sports. But the more we shape our environment, the more it seems to shape us: Whether the future has us wiring our brains into vast electronic databases, or popping smart drugs that alter the brains very biochemical structure, new environmental pressures are speeding up our evolution in ways that we cannot now predict but that will help us to survive the future. }

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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.

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Wills, Christopher
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ISBN 10: 0738200034 ISBN 13: 9780738200033
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Wills, Christopher.
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Hard Cover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. First Edition. 310pp, index, glossary, notes, bw ills. or boards in jacket. As new review copy with publishers material loosely inserted. Are we evolving into 'something'? And what might we be like a thousand years from now. What will become of our species as more of us wire our brains into vast electronic webs? Or pop smart drugs that alterthe brain's very biology? Or adapt to bizarre conditions on extra solar planets? Size: 8vo. Seller Inventory # 047977

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Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Very Good. First Edition. (1st edition, 1st printing) Large, sturdy book, black spine, gold boards, bright gilt lettering on spine, 310 pages with some illustrations. DJ glossy and colorfully designed with an illustration of evolving primates with a running man at the head of them on front and spine, praise on back. DJ has light crease along top front and spine top, tiny tear with very slight wear at top back tip. Near Very Good DJ/Very Fine book. Seller Inventory # 56821

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