Biotechnology or Bust: Adapting to Our Unnatural World
There is an unspoken crisis unfolding quietly across the globe. It’s not a virus, not a war, and not a sudden collapse—but a slow, inevitable mismatch between biology and environment. Environments changed quickly, the result of incessant human technological progress. Biology did not.
Humans are exquisitely adapted for an ecosystem that no longer exists, and the result is a growing tide of dysfunction—metabolic, neurological, reproductive, psychological—that cuts across all demographics and disguises itself as normal life. Call it maladaptation. History is full of stories of environmental adaptation, and the consequences for the organisms that find themselves on the wrong side of progress.
The natural human environment—the one that shaped our physiology, psychology, and genetics for hundreds of thousands of years—has vanished. In its place, we inhabit a hyper stimulating, sedentary, toxic, calorie-dense, light-drenched, stress-saturated world that selects not for reproduction, wisdom or strength, but for…. What exactly? Resilience to dysfunction?
This is in fact evolution in motion—but it doesn’t feel like it. Chronic disease, infertility, depression, and cognitive decline don’t appear to us as nature’s selection mechanisms. They appear as suffering. And make no mistake: the modern human environment is a selective pressure. It is killing some, disabling others, and reshaping the genetic and epigenetic legacy of future generations in ways we scarcely understand. But unlike historical selection events—plagues, famines, predators—this one is man-made, continuous, and global. And it isn’t going away.
If we do nothing, the result will be a slow but devastating filter. Only those with rare resilience—genetic, behavioural, or accidental—will thrive. The rest will struggle.
But our friends in the biomedical sciences may be a beacon of hope.
The most compelling hope lies not in returning to some lost Eden, but in consciously adapting—biotechnologically. Understanding the biological mechanisms of maladaptation—insulin resistance, circadian disruption, mitochondrial dysfunction, hormonal imbalances, neuroinflammation—is key. And this understanding opens the door to something extraordinary: the ethical use of biomedical technologies to reverse or prevent decline, to restore function, to optimize healthspan rather than merely treat disease.
This is functional medicine – even if we didn’t know it.
Tools already exist: wearable tech, digital diagnostics, peptide therapies, red light therapy, epigenetic reprogramming, metabolic interventions, and cell-based therapies. These cannot be gadgets for the affluent. They represent a bridge—perhaps the only bridge—between our evolutionary past and the future we’ve built for ourselves. A future that no longer fits our biology.
The choice before us is stark. Either we allow nature to run its course—to select, to filter, to remove the unfit—or we intervene with wisdom, compassion, and innovation. The first path leads to suffering. The second offers a deeply humane solution. To assist biology in adapting to the environment we so depend upon.