Directing our own evolution

Stem cells have cured sickle cell anemia in mice.

Hold on to your hats, with at least one of your three hands, because we are about to direct human evolution. The rate of which has already been increasing over the last few millennia.

This is to be both celebrated and feared. Celebrated because it will rapidly take us into the unknown, and we are, after all, adventurers; to be feared because we are going someplace we have not been before, and we will not know our destination until after we have arrived.

This is very much like driving to a new town using only the review mirror to decide how to crank the steering wheel.

But the point is, in the past evolution has had a rate based somewhat on the random effects of change within a dynamic environment, where the feedback was based upon a shortening or lengthening of life span.

Sickle cell anemia is a lousy, painful disease, but confers some resistance to malaria, common in areas where the sickle cell trait is most common. An interesting thought might be to wonder if malaria will be more common if sickle cell is reduced through genetic engineering. One might assume that the advantage of resistance resulted in the increase of sickle cell trait. Those without it died.

That’s how evolution works, in fruit flies, tomatoes or men.

But it seems that evolution has been speeding up, at least in humans. According to research published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and referenced by the BBC (read it here), in the last 5,000 years human genetic change “has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period.”

“Five thousand years is such a small sliver of time,” said co-author Professor John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It's 100 or 200 generations ago. That's how long since some of these genes originated, and today they are [in] 30% or 40% of people because they've had such an advantage.”

And now, ladies and gentlemen, we have introduced something new, something very powerful: pre directed evolution. Because we can imagine and dream, and because we have or soon will have the technology.

We may decide that we want to go somewhere genetically, a decision taken as a community, society, race or a species, or by a despot, and we now have the tools to go there fairly quickly. If not the master race, maybe just a marginally better one.

The last phase of “natural evolution” perhaps moved us from being animals to becoming humans.

The next phase will result in our becoming ... something else.