The Abolition of Man

We're the most powerful species. We're the catalyst for thousands of extinctions, the wanton indulgence of self-interest at the expense of insignificant insects and rodents. Our ancestors climb trees, but we saw them down with our beacons of intellect and replace the natural world with our perceived paradise, a conglomeration of skyscrapers, complex social contracts and cubicles for the human geniuses who drive it all. Evolution has granted us the greatest wonders yet bestowed upon an organism (how many species can pick up a pen? how many species have the capacity for self-reflection?), but evolution has similarly granted man's microscopic foes the insidious weapon of drug-resistance. "MRSA is a strain of staph bacteria that does not respond to penicillin or related antibiotics" and has consequently become "responsible for more deaths in the United States each year than AIDS."

In football locker rooms, the hidden shelters behind the cultural achievement of centuries of games and spectacles, players battle against the lining of their jerseys, the sweat in their helmets and the microbes that teem in the humid mire. The bacteria is most easily transmitted by contact, either direct (person to person) or indirect (two people sharing something, like a towel, without ensuring hygienic quality).

We created the disease. For all of the benefits of medicine and imposed antibiotics, all advances have an undeniable and monolithic setback, which is that bacteria are natural organisms, too, and can undergo mutations that make them impervious to our genius manifest. As we come to rely upon vaccinations and pills to ward off death, the emergence of bacteria that surmount our defense becomes potent a fortiori.

We're not any better than bacteria. We function in accordance with the same laws that they do. As we transcend the limits of our capacities by inventing inorganic means by which to do so (such as manufacturing medicine to unnaturally empower our immunological response to malignant organisms) we are supplying those very organisms with the means by which to assault us more effectively. Perhaps as we progress in technological feats we are actually not progressing, but on the contrary inviting disaster and the shipwreck of our monuments by voicelessly taunting bacteria and viruses to try to hurt us now.

One of my favorite songs is entitled "The Abolition of Man," and the final couplet goes like this:

The abolition of man is within the reach of science,
But are we so far gone that we'll try it?


Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/us/19staph.html?_r=1&ref=us&oref=slogin