Learning To Live With Disease

Noah Millman honors Darwin and reviews The 10,000 Year Explosion. Millman:

Darwin’s idea was simple and explosive, with repercussions that we are still assimilating. The deepest of these is the very conservative conclusion that victory in biological war is impossible. We cannot defeat disease, for example, merely hold it at bay, because our most successful efforts are precisely those that put selection pressure on microorganisms that will result in new diseases able to thwart our countermeasures. It remains to be seen whether we will be able to defeat our own weedy nature or whether we will ultimately return to the Mathusian world from which we only recently emerged.