The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.

John Fowles
About This Quote

The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity. This is a quote by Bill McKibben, an environmentalist and author of the books The End of Nature and Oil. This quote is part of an article he wrote for The Nation magazine. To understand this quote, it's important to know the context in which it's written.

When you look at human civilization, you can see that we are made up of two classes: our present-day selves and our prehistory. Our present-day selves are completely different from prehistory humans because we have the ability to think and act in new ways. Evolution has made us more like our prehistory selves than like our past selves (and this doesn't mean that we should worship the past selves because they were under other circumstances).

We are all living in "in vitro" because this is one of the ways that evolution works. It does not change us immediately; instead, it changes us through small steps over time.

Source: The Tree

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