Why am I qualified to write this book? I’m a physician, academic and research oriented, but still a physician. My training and practice was in internal medicine and my specialty is medical informatics – using computers for electronic medical records, diagnosis, and other purposes. These do not sound like qualifications for prognosticating on the future of our species. I’ve published over 100 peer-reviewed articles in my field but have never written on this topic before. This book is the result of years of literature research and personal communications with various experts that has occurred after I retired.
The fact of the matter is that there is no expert in this field. There is no field. In order to get to the answers I’ve had to research a broad and diverse range of the scientific and related technologic literature. These include evolutionary biology, paleontology, anthropology, species and speciation, genetics and genomics, epigenetics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, robotics and other related disciplines. All of these have potential impact on the future of our species. There is an increasing confluence of science and technology that is leading to what I am calling a revolution in evolution. There is no one expert nor do I claim to be one. My claim is that I understand science and scientific literature and have an ability to digest complex issues. In medicine, my career combined technology with medical science. That combination is relevant to researching the questions. My goal is to make these issues as they relate to the future possible evolution of Homo sapiens understandable to people who are not experts in any one of these diverse fields. My strength is my ability to do that across many disciplines, which was required to write this book. My unique qualification is that I am not an expert in any one of those fields and therefore have no bias in assessing the many possibilities.
Don Simborg, [email protected]