I'll be away for a while - I must get at least 3 hours of sleep. I'll drop by when I wake and see whether anything nuclear has transpired in the interim.
'what is the law? not on all fours'
I think the biggest failing in human evolution at this point in time is that we save people with more and more infirmities. We need more eyeglasses than would our fore fathers, have not the muscle mass capability of them either and we have become able to survive and reproduce even though we would have been dead at a young age if we lived back oh lets say in 800AD, thanks to modern medicine and not our natural defenses. Our prodgeny are inheriting our worse traits.....and I think what will bring us up from our declining gene pool is our collective human intellect figuring out how to bolster the right genes. this smacks of eugenics to a certain extent, I know, but we are in possesion of an ever increasing handle on the knowlege and technologies that could make the people of the future as rugged as our most primative ancestors and as intellegent as we could possibley imagine, without a lot of worry about our human frailties. Just my $0.02...hope I am not perceived as an 'Mengele' but I think this type of experimentation is paramount to the future I perceive.
I think this will get the fires stoked:
"Years ago, the two applied for a patent for what they called a "humanzee," a hypothetical - but very possible - creation that was half human and chimp."