Specialisation
“Don’t you find it funny that in each one of those movies, they describe the aliens as just humans but better?” Jack said and shoved another bunch of popcorn into his mouth.
Vel picked up the remote and pressed the pause button. Jack looked at him and saw the grim expression.
“Uhm… oh… sorry,” Jack said, stopped moving his hand towards the popcorn bowl, and just stared.
“No,” Vel said, “I don’t find it funny at all. It is the burden of my home.”
“What do you mean by burden? I know where you come from. Weren’t you specifically selected and bred to be better?””
“Yes. And that’s the problem. The first group taken were a group of humans selected for their desirable traits. Not a lot of diversity. And they were given the tools to be even more specialised. The next groups to come were forced into this specialisation. And this was about a thousand years ago. You can do the math from there. So, while I am stronger than the average human and with better reflexes, and while I can set your pillow on fire by concentrating hard enough, we lost a lot of potential along the way.”
“Potential? My kindergarden teacher told me I had potential. When I was 15 I realised that word didn’t mean much.”
“Not that kind of potential. I’m talking about actual genetic potential. Do you know what Eugenics is?”
“Uhm… yeah. That’s the idea that you can selectively breed humans to be better and improve the race by discarding the ‘unwanted’.”
“Close enough. Eugenics was built on the concepts of evolution only replacing natural selection with human selection. The people who did it thought that if they got rid of the ‘mutations’, they could breed a super-human. But they forgot the other essential part of evolution: diversity and random change. If you take that away, if you eliminate anything outside of your simple frame, you lose the driving force. And you don’t even know what you’re missing. Our… ‘benefactors’ made the same mistake. They picked the intellectuals and the driven and gave us a purpose. And we hurled towards that purpose for over a thousand years now. So, yes, we are more technologically advanced and genetic improvements made me ‘better’. But what did we lose along the way?”
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