As we discussed in Chapter 1, the animal world is really a world of strands of genetic code, each in a never-ending quest for immortality. Animals are just the biological containers that genes use as temporary homes during this quest. And to control their containers, genes have their animals running on primitive automated software.

the past, we humans learned to control the world outside us, but we had very little control over the world inside us. We knew how to build a dam and stop a river from flowing, but we did not know how to stop the body from aging. We knew how to design an irrigation system, but we had no idea how to design a brain. If a mosquito buzzed in our ear and

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