Steven Pinker
A couple of weeks ago, I had a lucky occasion to attend Steven Pinker’s lecture at MaRS. (See an introduction to Steven Pinker’s body of work on this Blog and see Lincoln’s post for another take on this event.)
While answering one of the questions from the audience, Steven suggested that the consensus opinion of modern scientists is that our biological evolution is over. We conquered nature, filled all ecological niches and control our biological destiny.
But what about the evolutionary pressure that we impose on ourselves through technology? Just in the last 100 years we’ve been haphazardly introducing known mutagenic factors into our lives: nuclear radiation, chemicals and rapidly spreading viruses that we transport with travel. Paradoxically, to cope with these ecological pressures we need to invent more technology and generate more knowledge.
A recent discovery in mapping autism risk loci is just one of many examples of how our expanding knowledge paves the way for dealing with the expanding menu of modern health problems.
(Example: This Globe and Mail story, “Canadian breakthrough offers hope on autism” points out that, once considered rare, autism disorders seem to have risen dramatically over the last two decades.)
Veronika Litinski provides advisory services to entrepreneurs and high growth companies, with a special focus on life sciences markets, specializing in corporate finance and business development.
