Where will evolution take us into the fourth industrial revolution?

The study of evolution allows us to reconstruct the past and understand how life has evolved from simple organisms into complex organisms. Evolving reasoning can help us make sense of the biggest questions in science, from the origins of the universe to the inner workings of the human brain.

But can evolution also give us an idea of ​​what will happen? Will technologies like gene editing make natural selection redundant? Could evolution tell us about the limits of global resources and what can be done to avoid a collapse of the environment or how human society could evolve?

Sydney Brenner, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, addressed these issues in a series of one – year conferences in 2017 that took us on a 14 billion year scientific odyssey across cosmology, chemistry, biology, paleontology, archeology, anthropology and sociology.

We captured these ideas in a book, 10-on-10 Sydney Brenner: The Chronicles of Evolution, which offers a glimpse of the future by considering where evolution can lead us. Here are the views of three experts in our book, with some of ours.

1. At the Fourth Industrial Revolution, New Gene Editing Tools Will Probably Exceed Biological Evolution

People have always wondered if evolution is constantly evolving up and up. Will there still be improvements? The answer is no: evolution is a progression of form and function, but it is not intentional.

Brenner said: "The big lesson to remember here is that in science, only mathematics is the art of the perfect." Physics is the art of the optimal, and biology is the # 1 "Satisfactory art: if it works, you keep it, it is not, you get rid of it."

In the fourth industrial revolution, "satisfactory" is perhaps no longer the status quo. We are now witnessing the most revolutionary stage of evolution, when we give up evolution by biology alone. With new life science tools such as CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, we are now able to reshape genomes and change biological form and function.

The search for human perfection through gene editing has already begun. In November 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui claimed to have created the first babies in the world to be modified by a gene. In June 2019, Russian scientist Denis Rebikov announced similar plans to modify the DNA of human embryos in order to confer immunity to HIV. These developments present new ethical challenges and have sparked calls for a global moratorium on hereditary gene editing.

The potential for accelerating and leading the course of biological evolution raises other issues, the most urgent of which is how to manage collateral changes in the environment. The Court of Justice, the highest court in the European Union, decided in July 2018 that gene-modified cultures should be subject to the same strict rules as conventional genetically modified organisms.

Breeders and scientists have described the EU decision as too strict, as it forces all CRISPR-Cas9 foods to go through a lengthy approval process, which essentially puts an end to research on Edition of genes in agriculture.

2. The arrival of the Anthropocene could lead to a global tipping point

The massive volcanic eruptions that erupted 252 million years ago triggered the Great Dying, a massive extinction event that destroyed 96% of marine life and 70% of all vertebrates on Earth. Some 186 million years later, a giant asteroid hit the Earth, causing catastrophic climate changes that ended the era of dinosaurs.

As explained by the anthropologist J. Stephen Lansing, there is a growing consensus that the arrival of humanity has also ushered in a new era called the Anthropocene. Unlike every era, time or earlier era, the climate and environment of the Anthropocene would be primarily influenced by human activity.

The advent of the Anthropocene could also bring the Earth to an imminent tipping point – a nonlinear change known to ecologists as a regime change, where the effects are not proportional to the cause.

Plastic is a possible tipping point. According to the status quo, the ocean should contain more plastic than fish by 2050, which will have indescribable effects on the fish themselves and on the humans who eat them. Aside from the plastic, new evidence shows that there could be a slowing of the meridian circulation in the world, the great treadmill of the ocean responsible for transmitting heat and nutrients to the ocean. 39, planetary scale.

Rapid urbanization could be another critical point, minimizing the impact of climate change and the acidification of our oceans. In 2014, the G20 countries agreed to invest USD 70 trillion in new infrastructure by 2030, which represents 25 million kilometers of additional roads and hundreds of additional dams, of which 90% will be built in the tropics.

But there are still few signs of hope in this era of the Anthropocene and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Take the problem of the depletion of the ozone layer, initially rejected by the sector players. Rigorous scientific evidence then convinced world leaders to recognize the problem and act decisively, making the Montreal Protocol to ban ozone-depleting chemicals the first treaty in the world to be ratified universally. .

3. It is necessary to be humble in the fourth industrial revolution

For the good part of human civilization, most people believed that the future was pre-ordained by the gods, fate or other forces of the universe and that only prayer could change his destiny. It was not until the mid-eighteenth century that people understood that the future could be different from the past and that their fate could be in their hands.

This new way of looking at the future, to see it as a broad, open horizon rather than a circular loop, has a lot to do with science and technology, according to social scientist Helga Nowotny.

But the focus on technological innovation, or even its obsession, could make us forget that social innovation is just as important. The more we create technological innovations, the more we need social innovations to accompany them.

The field of medicine, for example, is currently experiencing an incredible technological disruption. But its full potential can not be achieved without equally innovative changes in the management of health systems and the delivery of health care. Advances in our ability to leverage big data have brought us into the realm of smart devices and artificial intelligence, but have also changed our view of privacy and security.

In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Nowotny warned against the fact that we had to avoid hubris – the overestimation of our ability and our excessive dependence on a single solution, that is to say. it is a technological or economic solution that does not take into account the complexity of the environment. societal systems.

The humble view recognizes that technology, science and culture must evolve together and that life will continue to change in an unpredictable way that we can not fully control. We have the privilege of being the only species on Earth able to see the evolution of the interior. This requires us to think about what we are doing with evolution, because it is our own choices that will guide our evolutionary destiny.

---

---