Where will evolution take us in the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

• Author: Chan, Juliana
• Position: Critical essay

Byline: Juliana Chan and Benjamin Seet

The study of evolution allows us to reconstruct the past and to understand how life evolved from simple to complex organisms. Evolutionary reasoning can help us make sense of the biggest questions in science, from the origin of the universe to the inner workings of the human brain.

But can evolution also give us a hint of what is to come? Will technologies like gene editing make natural selection redundant? Might evolution tell us about the limits of planetary resources and what can be done to avoid environmental collapse, or how human society might evolve?

The late Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner addressed these questions in a year-long lecture series in 2017 that took us on a 14-billion-year scientific odyssey through cosmology, chemistry, biology, paleontology, archaeology, anthropology and sociology.

We captured these ideas in a book, Sydney Brenner's 10-on-10: The Chronicles of Evolution, which offers a glimpse of the future by considering where evolution can take us. Here are the perspectives of three experts from our book, with some of our own.

1. In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, new gene editing tools are likely to overtake biological evolution

   People have always wondered whether evolution is constantly driving onwards and upwards. Is there always going to be improvement? The answer is no-evolution is a progression of form and function, but it is not purposeful.

   Brenner said, "The big lesson to learn here is that in science, only mathematics is the art of the perfect. Physics is the art of the optimal, and biology is the art of the satisfactory: if it works, you keep it; if it doesn't, you get rid of it."

   In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, "satisfactory" may no longer be the status quo. We are now witnessing the most revolutionary stage of evolution, when we give up evolving by biology alone. With new life sciences tools such as CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, we are now able to reshape genomes and alter biological form and function.

   The quest for human perfection through gene editing has already begun. In November 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui claimed to have created the world's first gene-edited babies. In June 2019, Russian scientist Denis Rebikov announced similar plans to edit the DNA of human embryos to confer immunity to HIV. These developments present new ethical challenges and have triggered calls for a global moratorium on heritable gene editing.

   The potential to accelerate and...