Words&Dirt

“The strange and terrible thing coming clear to her about that world of the future, as she now pictured it, was that she would not exist there. She would only walk around, and open her mouth and speak, and do this and do that. She would not really be there. And what was strange about it was that she was doing all this, she was riding on this bus in the hope of recovering herself. As Mrs. Jamieson might say––and as she herself might with satisfaction have said––taking charge of her own life. With nobody glowering over her, nobody’s mood infecting her with misery.

But what would she care about? How would she know that she was alive?”

––Runaway: Stories, by Alice Munro, pg. 34

“Since most Eurasian populations have been agricultural for at least 5,000 years, or around 200 human generations, we should be well-adapted to agricultural lifestyles. And indeed the health and athletic performance of people under 30 years of age, when on agricultural diets, suggest that they are indeed adapted to the agricultural lifestyle.

So why have so many obtained health benefits from adopting paleo diets and lifestyles? This anomaly led me to a key insight. The declining forces of natural selection don’t just lead to aging in all non-fissile animal species. They also scale the evolutionary response to an environmental change with adult age. One or two hundred generations of living agriculturally were enough to adapt young people to that way of life. But not enough to adapt older people from those same populations. At later ages, we are still not sufficiently reconstructed by evolution to thrive on diets that predominantly feature foods derived from grasses (grains, rice, corn) or milk (milk, cheese, yogurt, cream).”

–– “Immortalist Fictions and Strategies,” by Michael R. Rose, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, eds. Max More and Natasha Vita-More, pg. 201