Charles Darwin is celebrated for describing “natural selection”, the way organisms evolve through random small changes that fit them into particular environmental niches. But the 19th-century English naturalist was also fascinated by the far faster but more limited process of “artificial selection”, through which people could create new varieties of animals and plants by selective breeding. Darwin himself bred fancy pigeons. Yet, as he wrote in On the Origin of Species, the range of forms that “may be effected in the long course of time by nature’s power of selection” is infinitely greater than “feeble man” could achieve.
Humanity is about to reverse that hierarchy of power, argues the molecular biologist and entrepreneur Adrian Woolfson in On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence. His book’s title indicates its ambition to propel Darwin into the 21st century, showing how new technologies such as genome engineering and artificial intelligence could combine to create forms of life that lie beyond the biochemical constraints inherited from more than 3.5bn years of natural evolution.
With the assistance of AI, our ability to manipulate life’s structures could become virtually limitless