George Church is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a professor of health sciences and technology at Harvard and MIT. In 1984, Church, along with Walter Gilbert,[…]
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We are a species that is well connected to other species; whether or not we evolve from them, we are certainly very closely related to them. Yet, we have things like spirituality and reason; we have the ability to completely change our environment, to inherit, in a certain sense, things far beyond our DNA as our ideas evolve and undergo a kind of Darwinian selection.
Well clearly we are a species that is well connected to other species. Whether or not we evolve from them, we are certainly very closely related to them. A series of mutations could chain us into all kinds of intermediate species. Whether or not those intermediate species are provably in the past, they could easily be in our future. We are quantitatively not necessarily qualitatively different in that we have spirituality. We have exotic language. We have mathematics. We have the ability to completely change our environment to go . . . to take on . . . to inherit, in a certain sense, things far beyond our DNA and that’s inheritable. And we can see evolution in action as our ideas evolve and undergo a kind of Darwinian selection not at the DNA level. And we can go off into space. So there are many things that make us at least quantitatively different, if not a new species in a qualitative sense.
Recorded on: 7/6/07
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