From Karen Rodgers
The conclusion to Henry Harpending’s review of Spencer Wells’s Pandora’s Seed was chilling: “governments should close international borders to migration and impose a draconian policy of family limitation like China” (5 June, p 42).
Sustainability and orderliness can be achieved through rational argument and consensus. Where they are imposed from above and raised to the level of absolute values, the result is sterility: the destruction of all individuality, creativity and self-determination. Such action would be the end of that which makes us human and makes life worth living.
I begin to wonder whether the scientific legacy of our own generation to our children will not be greater freedom and a better life, but rather an existence in a dystopia too awful to imagine.
Cambridge, UK
