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Embedded in the history of the gene is “the quest for eternal youth, the Faustian myth of abrupt reversal of fortune, and our own century’s flirtation with the perfectibility of man.”

If the 1500-character limit allowed, I could offer other examples, but instead, one word: Lysenko, who insisted that if genetics didn't support Stalinist dogma of the perfectibility of man, genetics must bow to dogma.

Progressives were empiricists, who believed in the perfectibility of man and society, and saw government as a positive force to accomplish that goal, unlike today's Republican Party.

Voltaire, the ultra-rationalist who argued that the perfectibility of man was the true paradise, also made a commercial fortune and urged the Russian empress, Catherine the Great, to teach enlightment to the Poles and Turks at the barrel of a gun.

This principle of the endless perfectibility of man has something in it very accordant with reason; and if this perfectibility be considered as a mere possible disposition of the human mind, there is doubtless much truth in the theory, but it must be borne in mind that the corruptibility of man is quite as great as his perfectibility.