Page 381,
"It would be foolish, therefore, to herald yet once more
the birth of a "new man" (unless, now that the genetic
engineers are at work, we mean that in a frightening, strictly
biological sense). The idea suggests a prototype, a single ideal
model that the entire civilization strains to emulate. And in a
society moving rapidly toward de-massification, nothing is more
unlikely.
Nevertheless, it would be equally foolish to believe that
fundamentally changed material conditions of life leave personality
or, more accurately, social character, unaffected. As we change the
deep structure of society, we also modify people. Even if one
believed in some unchanging human nature, a commonly held view I do
not share, society would still reward and elicit certain character
traits and penalize others, leading to evolutionary changes in the
distribution of traits in the population."
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