Joel Garreau’s newest book, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies – and What It Means to Be Human, looks at altering human nature – not in some distant tomorrow, but in the next 10 or 20 years.  For hundreds of millennia, technologies have been aimed at altering the environment in the fashion of fire, agriculture or space travel.  Now, for the first time, efforts are increasingly aiming inward at modifying minds, memories, metabolisms, personalities and progeny.

Garreau’s 1981 book, The Nine Nations of North America, won critical acclaim and was embraced by readers, marketers, political operatives and academics alike, establishing Garreau as one of the world’s most prominent cultural demographers.

In Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, termed a “groundbreaking” work by The New York Times, Garreau explains how cities of the 21st century are not the 19th century versions like downtown Chicago or Philadelphia; rather, they are enormous new centers of commerce like California’s Silicon Valley and the Route 128 corridor outside Boston, shaped by industries that have sprung up in the last 30 years.

Garreau, who attended Notre Dame, has served as a senior fellow at the University of California at Berkeley and George Mason University, and is a fellow at Oxford University's Said School of Economics.