The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution (review)

Approximately 5 million years ago, mutations occurred in the genomes of the hominid lineage that forever separated us from our primate cousins, the chimpanzees and bonobos. Those random, minute DNA changes carried us down a unique evolutionary road in which the brain, intellect, and language took on a level of importance never previously seen. The aftereffects of those changes still remain today, and are being felt more than ever, as the world we live in becomes more and more the product of human thought.

Whether this has been good or bad depends on one's perspective. By some standards the evolutionary trajectory that we have taken has been a striking success. Three hundred thousand generations after this split we find our nearest primate relatives, now perhaps only a few tens of thousand in number, struggling to hang on in a small, isolated geographic region in Central Africa. In contrast, we are flourishing both in numbers and in our spread to the distant reaches of the earth and beyond.

But such a view tells only part of the story and, like many evolutionary adaptations, our remarkable brains have come with a price. These powerful survival tools, while clearly helping us meet the immediate challenges of life, are also driving us into territory that is both foreign to our nature and dangerous. While our brains have generated ideas, concepts, and insights that have proven extremely effective at aiding our survival, they have also produced a rapidly changing, technology-based world that now threatens to overwhelm us. The rate of change in society and the world, at bottom driven by our brains' abilities, is growing so fast that we can barely, if at all, adjust.

To be sure, this dramatic new acceleration has been appreciated before. One of the first clear statements of the problem is the now classic work by Alvin Toffler, Future Shock. His was a detailed warning of how, as the rate of change became too fast, we would not be able to adapt adequately. More recently we have been warned by Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems, about the dangers of technology run amok, and that computers, robotics, and genetic engineering are moving us down a dangerous path.

At the same time we are facing this concern, we are being confronted with unsettling insights about ourselves—who we are—and about the nature of life, that are again due to our intellectual power. It has told us things that are at once both distressing and that no other species knows: that someday each of us will die, that we are not the center of the universe but only one of millions of species that have spent time on this planet, and that we are products of a random, indifferent process that, while marvelous and beautiful in what it has created and can create, doesn't care about us and, in fact, doesn't "care" about anything. The convergence of an increasingly technology-based world that is changing at unprecedented rates and of a discomforting world-view that is very different than the one we have depended on for thousands of years is now taking place, and with unpredictable consequences.

The Shattered Self, by Pierre Baldi, a Professor of Information and Computer Science and of Biological Chemistry, is the latest book to point out the startling new capabilities and possibilities, both good and bad, that our species has now brought forth. Unlike previous works, Baldi's is more descriptive than prescriptive, leaving it to the reader to decide if these new developments are beneficial or detrimental. What he does not hesitate to do, however, is to describe what extraordinary possibilities are now in reach or at least on the near horizon.

The Shattered Self describes a myriad of technological advances that we have achieved or are at least quickly nurturing along. It points out...