Chapter 1: Prologue: The Future of Human Nature

This book can’t begin with the tale of the telekinetic monkey.

That certainly comes as a surprise. After all, how often does someone writing nonfiction get to lead with a monkey who can move objects with her thoughts?

If you lunge at this opportunity, however, the story comes out all wrong. It sounds like science fiction, for one thing, even though the monkey—a cute little critter named Belle—is completely real and scampering at Duke University.

This gulf between what engineers are actually creating today and what ordinary readers might find believable is significant. It is the first challenge to making sense of this world unfolding before us, in which we face the biggest change in tens of thousands of years in what it means to be human.

This book aims at letting a general audience in on the vast changes that right now are reshaping our selves, our children and our relationships.

Chapter 2: Be All You Can Be

AT A CERTAIN ANGLE, seated behind the dining room table in her ponytail, khaki slacks and pinstriped shirt, Gina Marie Goldblatt does not appear in any way remarkable.

This particular January, she is a college sophomore home for the holidays from the University of Arizona. In Gina’s serious moments, she wants to go on for a master’s degree in business administration and a law degree and someday run her own company. But this week she’s focused on going skiing with her friends for the first time. So finding a good time to visit with her is an experience in teenage time management. “We’re the most last-minute people you’ll ever meet,” she says of her posse’s complicated lives. To find pattern in the way her crowd swarms, it helps to remind yourself that college kids, like the proteins that underlie much of human nature, really are much more organized than a tangle of spaghetti. There is logic in the complexity. Events do work out

Chapter 6: Prevail

IN NEW MEXICO, El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro—

the course of the Rio Grande. Through the clear, dry air from El Paso del Norte toward the Sangre de Cristo—beyond the cotton, chilis and pecans of its fertile plain and below its gliding sandhill cranes—poke abrupt, strange mountain shapes. Spooky, spiky, funky and wild, they are hard not to imagine as Paleozoic reptiles awaiting the incantation that will bring them back to life. In this very ancient place, along this path of dreams, lies a small town called La Mesilla.

Suggested Readings