July 25, 2018

The Future Is Going to Be Great!

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

We are entering an era in which nature vs. nurture is inevitably going to start taking center stage again:

Having read several hundred books on this topic, I used to write a fair amount about it. But then I stopped. It wasn’t worth it because most people haven’t read several hundred books on the topic and are more interested in the political implications of genes and upbringing than the actual scientific facts.

But it’s not going to be avoidable for much longer. I haven’t kept up with the latest research in detail, but there’s no question that geneticists are plugging right along regardless of what political activists think of them. And they’re discovering gene complexes for all sorts of interesting things, right along with genetic codes that control how and when and if various personality traits get expressed by those gene complexes. We’re still a long way away from understanding how all this stuff interacts, but by “long way” I mean maybe a decade or so. That’s not really so long.

So prepare yourself for a few things:

  • We will discover the genetic wellsprings of things like memory, artistic talent, mathematical ability, extroversion, laziness, aggression, ability to swot up foreign languages, and a hundred other things. And that’s not even counting fast-twitch muscles, balance, speed, stamina, and other traits that make great athletes.
  • Thanks to CRISPR (or perhaps CRISPR+) we’ll be able to fine-tune these abilities in babies. Maybe in adults too. The era in which we argued about the ethical implications of this stuff will be over. We’ll just do it and see the results.
  • How much does parental upbringing affect any of this? I’m going to put my money on “not much,” but it’s hardly worth making guesses anymore. In a decade or two we’ll know.
  • How much effect does the entire environment outside the womb have starting with the day a baby is delivered? I’m going to put my money on “some,” but that’s as far as I’ll go.
  • The effects on social justice will be profound. Once it becomes irrefutable that certain people just flatly have more talent than others, and furthermore, that they can probably buy even greater talents, the philosophical justification for paying the talented more than the untalented disappears. In what way do the talented deserve any more money if we can literally draw a map showing where their talents are located on their genomes and where their ambition, focus, and zeal for hard work comes from?

Anyway, get ready for all this, is all I’m saying. It’s not so far away. And shortly after that, the robots are going to take over and nobody will care about jobs anyway. And while we’re on the subject, we’ll all be disease free and able to live more or less forever, if we want to.

This is all about 30 years away if we can manage to avoid killing ourselves or frying the globe. That’s not too much longer to wait, is it?

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate