يقوم الكتاب بمسح التقدم البيوتكنولوجى والإمكانات المتاحة له فى ميادين ثلاثة هى الطب والزراعة والصناعة وإستغلال ما يسمى بالعلاج بالجينات وزراعة الأنسجة مما سبب ثورة هائلة فى تلك المعلومات ويتناول أيضاً موضوع الطاقة البيولوجية حيث تسعى لتحويل الشجار إلى ميثانول وهو صورة من الكحول لتصلح لتشغيل محركات العربات الحالية كنوع من الوقود وكلها حالات من النضم الأيكلوجية .
Walter Truett Anderson is a political scientist, social psychologist, and author of numerous non-fiction books and articles in newspapers and magazines.
In his public lectures, he frequently speculates that, if we had a history of every advanced species in the universe, we would find that they all had to pass through two large, difficult and unavoidable transitions: (1) accepting conscious responsibility for the future of all life on their planets; and (2) recognizing that their systems of symbolic communication – such as language and mathematics – don’t merely describe reality, but participate in creating it.
Most of his major writing efforts have engaged one or both of these evolutionary themes. His defining statement on the first was To Govern Evolution: Further Adventures of the Political Animal. Its vision of human impacts on Earth’s life systems had been foreshadowed in his earlier book on American natural history, A Place of Power: The American Episode in Human Evolution, and was further developed in Evolution Isn’t What It Used To Be and All Connected Now. He is now at work on a new book that explores the evolutionary challenges and frontiers of the 21st century.
His major statements on the second (constructivist) theme were Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be and the subsequent anthology The Truth About the Truth. In other books on related subjects, The Future of the Self described changing ways that people are constructing personal identities in contemporary global society, and The Next Enlightenment points out the similarities between Western constructivist thought and Eastern spiritual traditions such as Buddhism.
He is currently President Emeritus of the World Academy of Art and Science (having served as president 2000-2008); a founding Fellow of the Meridian International Institute; a Fellow of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (LaJolla, CA); and a Distinguished Consulting Faculty member of Saybrook University in San Francisco.
The book moved rather slow but was very thought provoking. The author took the time to explain what each new topic was instead of just assuming you knew, and he also discussed the pros and cons of the topic. He added his own opinion along with research and scientific and historical information to add to his argument or show the flip side. Great book.
The title is misleading for this book in that it is only peripherally concerned with Charles Darwin's theory. The subtitle, The Augmented Animal and the Whole Wired World, is only slightly better. The difficulty in naming this book is its interdisciplinary nature. Anderson covers biology, cybernetics, information technology, agriculture, environmentalism, and genetic research. Although all are specialized fields, Anderson shows how they interact with each other cud every one of us. It is an exciting time to be alive, Anderson says.
Like many popular books on science, Evolution Isn't What It Used to Be starts off slowly. Because Anderson cannot be sure of the background that every reader brings to his book, he spends the first half of each section in a survey of one or two of his inter-connected subjects. Interspersed in the survey are some delectable bits of controversy and discovery, but he saves the items that have the most impact for the last sections. Since the book is organized into four different sections, this makes for a thrilling roller coaster ride through some of the most exiting terrain in science today.
In the first 50 pages, I was somewhat bored by Anderson's prose (he is no David Quammen) and slightly skeptical of his early opinions. At the halfway point I realized that I was reading much more smoothly and often nodding my head at the text. When I found myself quoting this book at a business meeting the next day, I knew I was learning from this book.
Anderson's basic thesis is that humans have taken control of their own evolution, and the mechanisms of this control are the convergence of biology and technology, and seen today in the growing field of biotech. I have long thought that information is the opposite of entropy (in a local sense) and Anderson closely dovetails into this idea with his concept of information being the control mechanism by which we modify our biological environment. In a sense we have done this in the past, through the use of corrective lenses and vaccines. But these are only baby steps compared to the strides we may be capable of shortly.
Anderson's personal background is rooted in the environmental movement (which, if you were unaware of it, you find out in the last section), and his moderate stance on certain issues is quite refreshing compared to the demagoguery we are subjected to daily. While you may disagree with his predictions, it is important to think about and discuss them.