Market-Driven Evolution: Redesigning Lifeforms to What End?

Expressions of life in its myriad forms were once driven solely by natural selection in both competition and cooperation with other lifeforms bounded by environmental conditions. Generations of human intervention have yielded to what Charles Darwin called, “artificial selection”, often overriding natural selection. This book focuses on how evolution is now governed increasingly by human preferences which are driven by market forces. Recent transformational events in the bioethical, legal, and technological spheres are covered here. The range of emerging biotech issues in these chapters are but a sample of potential opportunities and consequences with any number of other wild card scenarios left to the imagination of the reader. Hence, this is why the title of the book is a question.