Sometimes I think about how humans are different from all other life.

And when I ask people about this, I get all sorts of answers. ‘We pollute’. ‘We kill when we are not hungry’. ‘We take more than we need’. ‘We do not live in harmony with nature’. And, of course, my personal favorite, ‘We modify our environment to suit us’.

Yes, we do all of these things. But none of these things makes us unique; all of these things are done by many other organisms. (For one thing, the humble dung-beetle makes a burrow, and lines it with dung. That is a modification of its environment.)

But I’ll tell you how we are different.

Every species has its gene pool. This is the sum of all characters in an organism. If mutations arise, characters change, and absolutely unfavorable traits are continuously weeded out, with certain unavoidable exceptions.

How, you ask?

The most important mechanism is disease. That is Nature’s way of eliminating every undesirable attribute. If a feature is incompatible with life, the organism dies. If a feature makes an organism more susceptible to a disorder, or weaker, organisms with that quality become scarcer and scarcer, and then die out. It is all played out in an elaborate dance of relative reproductive rates and mortality rates and natality rates.

But you see, that doesn’t work any more. For the first time in our history, we have effective medical care, and this is only getting better. ‘Undesirables’ abound in our gene pool because we do something that is distinctive to our species, and to our time. We give life to those that Nature destines for death.

And organic evolution, the eternal progressive movement of life toward perfection is, for us, distorted. Evolution exists and it always will, but it is not now dictated perforce by the selection of the strong, and healthy, but by the selection of widely differing attributes.

This is our uniqueness. This is the only new thing we have created in the history of life.

We have managed to begin the fraying of the chains that bind the tapestry of our existence.

This is our original sin.

Observe, and marvel. We have done what nothing has ever managed to do. This is not something as unremarkable as the birth of a species.

We are witnessing the gestation of a whole new stream of evolution, an evolution devoid of conventional selective pressures, evolution in a form we have engineered.

Si quaeris monumentum, circumspice.