Sublime

Two prominent philosophers proved to be especially influential members. The first was Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor who is the contemporary successor to John Rawls in defining the concept of justice. At the time, he was writing an essay titled “The Case Against Perfection: What’s Wrong with Designer Children, Bionic Athletes, and Genetic

gain-of-function experiments deliberately engineer pathogens to be more lethal or infectious, or both. In nature, viruses usually trade off lethality for transmissibility. The more transmissible a virus, the less lethal it often is. But there is no absolute reason this must be so.

“To defeat the human need for face-to-face contact, our technological marvels would need to defeat millions of years of human evolution that has made us into machines for learning from the people next to us,” Glaeser writes.”

Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, and author of the best basic explanatory tome on Darwinism, Why Evolution Is True

the pathogen theory, espoused by such mainstream scientists as Gregory Cochran.

In August 2013, I happened upon a paper titled “The Silent Fire: ODAP and the Death of Christopher McCandless,” by Ronald Hamilton, which appeared to solve the conundrum. Hamilton’s essay, posted online, presented hitherto unknown evidence that the wild potato plant was in fact highly toxic, contrary to the assurances of Treadwell, Clausen, and

The state hopes to regulate the biochemical pursuit of happiness, separating ‘bad’ manipulations from ‘good’ ones.

He knows only that these people—the tiny few immune to consensual reality—have a secret he needs to understand.