Mutants!

The recently-released X-Men: First Class (which, for the record, was an excellent film) depicted genetically unique ‘mutants’ with skills so amazing that some of their members saw themselves as a new and improved species. It’s wonderful to think that a lucky few might one day be able to create magnetic fields with a wave of our hand, or hypnotize with a stare, but sadly these things are not even physically impossible, but evolutionarily impractical. Even if nature dictated that it was time for one man to shoot high-powered lasers from his eyes, what evolutionary purpose would this serve?

Thinking a little about that, we’re led to an even bigger question: in what way could humans keep evolving? It sounds like an incredibly pompous question, especially coming from a person that could be outrun, outswam, outflew, and outlived by many other members of the animal kingdom. Yet there is some logic behind it. Humans are unique from any other animal through the way that they utilize the environment around them; more often than not, instead of adapting to it, we make it adapt to us. 

In Soviet Russia...

This makes the human race an incredibly flexible, intelligent, and often destructive animal, and makes evolution, in a strange sense, unnecessary. In fact, one man believes that humans now have more control over their future than nature intended. Dr. Harvey Fineberg, President of the Institute of Medicine, advocates that humanity now has three choices when it comes to their evolution: 

1. Stop evolving completely
2. Evolve naturally
3. Control the next steps of evolution ourselves

Choices one and two seem to be the most plausible; the full stop of evolution is impossible, but the human race seems to be on a path to slowing it down considerably for generations to come, at least in any dramatic sense. For anything drastic to happen to the human genome, something would have to place humans in a situation that a. prevented us from modifying the environment or b. set us in an environment that was so foreign, we didn’t know how to change it to meet our needs. 

For the record, this did not happen. But if it did, the Soviets probably would have grown moon-gills by now. 

This leaves choice three, working to pave our own evolutionary path. The Human Genome Project, started in 1990, sought to identify and catalog every gene in the human body. It took around $2.7 billion and the better part of 13 years, but they finally completed it in 2003. This was considered a giant step in science; knowing how our DNA turns us into the humans we are is like having, in the Genome Research Institute’s own words, “all the pages of a manual needed to make the human body.” That’s a big book.

That book, though, has gotten a lot cheaper. Today, one can have their entire genome mapped in a week for around $20,000, giving that person a glimpse into something more personal than they could ever see before. It’s estimated that, in a few years, information will be worth around $1000. This information could be used to know what your weaknesses and strengths are, what your ancestors were like, and how your children could be better than you (or at least have the potential). 

In reality, the human race has already started down this path. The ability to predict a child’s sex has led to higher female birth rates in America, and higher male rates in China. Researchers like Frances Arnold have already started modifying organic proteins to make them stronger and more useful in certain situations. Shinya Yamanaka and his team have genetically modified skin cells into stem cells, for possible production into entire organs. With a little bit more knowledge, it would be entirely plausible to know how one’s child would turn out before they, well, came out. It might be a little unorthodox, but evolution will happen one way or another.

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