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Contemporary writers are advised to be on the lookout for plagiarism. In Britain, the roll-call of those scorched by its toxic flame in recent years includes JK Rowling, Andrew Motion, Ian Mc¬Ewan, Graham Swift, PD James – and the scriptwriters of The Archers, who were accused, improbably, of pinching a plot point from Günter Grass; a description of a character's escape from Nazi pursuers in the second world war, by hiding under a peasant woman's skirts as she laboured in the fields, was a direct lift from The Tin Drum. A BBC spokesman said it was not "plagiarism" but rather an homage, a traditional defence when under attack.
When someone has a hit in the world of books, less fortunate authors often cry foul. When Yann Martel won the Booker prize with Life of Pi, his success unleashed the worm of prize-envy. But the accusations of plagiarism did not stick; he had already acknowledged that the plot of his novel was inspired by ¬Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar.
Amid the cornucopia of Hogwarts, Rowling has been dogged for years by the children's writer Ursula Le Guin's pointed regret that the author of the Harry Potter books was not "more gracious about her predecessors". Le Guin said: "She has many virtues, but originality isn't one of them." Possibly more damaging has been the revelation that the 1986 horror film Troll contains a character named Harry Potter.
In these murky waters, perhaps there's a distinction to be drawn between plots and phrasing. It has often been observed that there is an extremely limited number of basic plots available to the novelist or playwright. Some say 10, some seven, others as few as five. In this constricted imaginative environment, the likelihood of unconscious repetition is going to be extremely high.
What's not in doubt is that, even when a writer believes themself to be writing with originality, he or she is often simply exploring an archetypal story. Jungians make much of this. So perhaps in -judging the sin of plagiarism, there's a distinction to be drawn between copying individual sentences or phrases (obviously wrong) and reinterpreting age-old stories (more understandable).
The Walt Disney Company might not agree. It has somehow contrived to develop a catalogue of animated fairy tales (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Robin Hood) whose exploitation its corporate lobbyists watch over like Fort Knox (forbidding artist Dennis Oppenheim, for instance, from using Disney characters in his sculpture).

This denunciation of young William Shakespeare was a deranged polemic by a dying man, but actually it was not so far from the mark. If all writers are pickpockets, then Shakespeare was an inveterate "snapper-up of unconsidered trifles", like Autolycus in The Winter's Tale. He swiped the best bits of Antony and Cleopatra (notably "The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne/Burned on the water…") direct from Plutarch, and took 4,144 out of 6,033 lines in Parts I, II and III of Henry VI verbatim or in paraphrase from other authors. Apart from A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night, the plots for all his plays were ruthlessly appropriated from other, often classical, sources.
There is evidence that Shakespeare was wounded by Greene's attack, but his heirs blithely followed his example. Milton cribbed from Masenius. Later, Laurence Sterne cribbed from Robert Burton, Samuel Coleridge from Schelling, and TS Eliot from all and sundry (in The Waste Land). JRR Tolkien borrowed heavily from the Norse sagas. Four hundred years later, the Darrieussecq--Laurens row is a stark reminder that plagiarism is one of literature's seven deadly sins, possibly its deadliest.
But why the fuss? Plagiarism is a puzzling vice. No writer, if he or she were honest about it, would ever deny that, when they come across a good thing in someone else's work, consciously or unconsciously they store it up for a rainy day. "Literature," the American journalist James Atlas likes to say, "is theft." He's right. The history of books and writing supports this provocative assertion to the hilt.
Virgil was once spotted scanning a volume of Quintus Ennius. Challenged on this, the great poet replied that he was merely "plucking pearls from Ennius's dunghill", a magnificent retort echoed in Eliot's "immature poets imitate; mature poets steal". No one today remembers poor old Ennius, and I've just lifted this anecdote from Anne Fadiman's essay on plagiarism, "Nothing New Under the Sun". Fadiman, in turn, probably inspired the novelist Jonathan Lethem to write "The Ecstasy of Influence", a magazine article on "cryptomnesia" in which, wittily, virtually every line was stolen, warped or cobbled together from other (acknowledged) sources.

Plagiarism: in the words of someone else… there's little new in literature
TS Eliot: 'Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.' Photograph: Al Gretz/Hulton Archive
When the French novelist Camille Laurens lost her son in childbirth in 1995, she responded with a moving account of her trauma, Philippe, which touched a nerve with her public. A few years later the infinitely more successful Marie Darrieussecq published a novel, Tom Est Mort, the story of a woman whose baby dies after a terrible birth agony. Laurens, in a fury, accused Darrieussecq of "psychological plagiarism". Ever since, these two writers have been at each other's throats, trading elevated Gallic insults, to the scandalised fascination of Paris.
In the latest twist, Darrieussecq has published not just another novel but a scholarly treatise about literary theft in general and Laurens in particular. Darrieussecq, who is also a psychoanalyst, claims that her rival was trying symbolically to "assassinate" her with accusations of plagiarism and that, unconsciously, she was exhibiting "a crazed desire to be plagiarised", a savage dig at the senior woman's faltering career.
All very thrillingly French, you might think, but you would be wrong. In the bitter history of plagiarism, there is an equally vicious exchange from the records of Elizabethan literary London that leaves Laurens and Darrieussecq very much in the slow lane.
In 1593 Robert Greene, a prominent playwright and braggart, the author of Orlando Furioso and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, was dying in penury at the age of 32. But before his inevitable rendezvous with the churchyard near Bedlam, in Bromley, Kent, he dashed off a pamphlet, A Groat's-worth of Wit Bought With A Million of Repentance, in which he settled some old scores.
Having accused Christopher Marlowe of atheism, Greene then turned his attention to the literary jack-of-all-trades whose outrageous success really stuck in his throat. This "rude groom" was not merely too full of himself ("in his conceit, the only Shake-scene in the country"), he was a provincial arriviste and inveterate plagiarist, "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers".

Yet transhumanism seems almost misanthropic in its zeal. Proponents appear to argue that if human beings as we know them are eliminated, so much the better. We're a pretty rubbish species anyway, so if our successor species is better, why worry about preserving the one we have? Take Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading. Having implanted several electronic devices into his body, he has begun to claim (perhaps hyperbolically) that he is the world's first cyborg—part human, part machine. “I was born human,” he says, “but this was an accident of fate, a condition merely of time and place. I believe it’s something we have the power to change.”
I'm not sure what to make of all this. But perhaps we are too ready to dismiss innovations such as superintelligence as distant possibilities. We may also be too quick to underestimate the pharmaceutical and genetic technologies that could impact who and what we are in the nearer future. For that reason, it is worrying that Bostrom admits that transhumanists haven't given much thought to the question of what sorts of modifications would simply enhance us and which would be so transformative as to, in effect, destroy humanity as we know it and create a new transhumanity in its place.
It's time that changed. There are questions about what it means to be human—and what we might want to protect from innovation—that need answering. To paraphrase Marx, until now, the philosophers have only interpreted the self; the point now is how, if at all, to change the self.

Are you horrified, excited or both? There's more. Perhaps the most extraordinary possibility arises from the fact that, as Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist, puts it, the self is simply the personalisation of the brain. You are the individual you are because of the unique set of connections forged in your cerebrum. This means you are like a piece of software running on an organic brain, but which could, in principle, be run on a silicon computer as well. Rather than being housed in a brain and body, you could in effect “upload” yourself to a computer and live there in a virtual reality.
Bostrom sees no reason why uploading human experiences into a virtual realm should present a problem, in principle. "We know the atoms of your body are swapped out over a lifetime,” he explains. “You wouldn't benefit if you could somehow wrap yourself up in plastic and prevent the atoms from being exchanged.” He suggests that the uploading scenario is not so different from an accelerated metabolic process, where the atoms in your body are substituted for other atoms. Indeed, uploading would have the advantage of conferring on you virtual immortality. As long as you made sure you were “backed up” often enough, it wouldn't matter if the particular computer you were running on broke. Your service provider would just reload you onto a new one and you'd pick up where you left off.
To show why we should not be alarmed by this prospect, Bostrom offers an analogy: suppose that last night, while you were sleeping, a scientist had replaced your brain with a computer that had been programmed with all of the information that was contained in your brain. When you woke up, you would have no idea that this happened. It would seem that you were the same person who went to sleep the night before. Whether your thoughts came from an organic brain or a computer programmed to behave like one, Bostrom says, “It's not clear to me how that would matter at all."
But wouldn't uploading flesh-and-blood humans into synthetic virtual worlds, where they would be turned into super intelligent fast-thinkers, transform us into completely different creatures? Would homo sapiens be replaced by homo apparatus? Bostrom is unconcerned. He reminds me that humans already undergo a “profound” transition when we age from childhood to adulthood. "We have vastly greater capacities as adults than as children,” he explains. “Our whole mental lives are different, our preoccupations.” Yet we don't view it as bad for a child to grow up, so perhaps we’re more open to radical transformations than we might believe.

The most energetic proponents of these changes are known as transhumanists. One of the first to use this term in its current sense is Max More, the head of Alcor, one of the world's leading providers of cryogenic services. They work to freeze dead human bodies in the hope of being able to revive them in the future, when technology is advanced enough to do so. He describes transhumanism as a school of science dedicated to advancing “the evolution of intelligent life” beyond its current human form and limitations, “guided by life-promoting principles and values.”
Transhumanists embrace our mutability as an opportunity for improvement, even if that means we may one day be replaced another superior species. An intellectual leader of the movement is Nick Bostrom, who heads the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. In a remarkably matter-of-fact way, Bostrom describes to me some of the changes he anticipates and what they might mean.
One of the milder transhumanist ideas is to speed up the brain. This would be like putting a faster processor in a computer to improve its performance. But a potential byproduct of packing in more information per second would be to slow down the perceived passage of time. This is the way it is for children: every stimulus is new, so each minute is more jam-packed with information, which makes it feel like time is just dragging by. If your mind is working ten-times faster, then you are aware of ten-times more information in the moment, so time seems to pass ten-times slower.
It is impossible to imagine what life would be like after such a change. Walking a mile would feel like walking ten, eating lunch might take what seems to be three hours. Bostrom says there are ways to deal with this. "You wouldn't have to speed it up right away,” he says, referring to the human brain. “You could perhaps take small steps to modify that in ways you found desirable. You could continue to grow over years and decades, try out new capabilities."

What does it mean to be human? Julian Baggini meets with scientists who aspire to take evolution into their own hands ...
Special to MORE INTELLIGENTLIFE
Many dystopian writers have imagined worlds in which a singular "human nature" has bifurcated or splintered into a plurality of human natures. They have portrayed societies in which the genetically modified rise above their inferior, natural cousins ("Gattaca"); or different castes of human are selectively bred for accomplishing different tasks ("Brave New World"). In some cases humans from working and middle classes evolve over millennia into two different species ("The Time Machine"), or they experience a reality that is entirely virtual ("The Matrix").
These dystopias are readily imaginable only because at some level it is obvious that human nature is malleable. There is no reason in principle why creatures like ourselves might not become radically different over time. Until recently, such mutations were simply abstract possibilities, limited to the power of gods, sorcerers and novelists. But lately we have begun to consider the possibility that technology might change us more in a generation or two than evolution has done over millions of years.
We already have some technologies that alter how we think and feel. Anti-depressants and treatments for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) change us as much as they cure us. Students and executives are already popping drugs such as Adderall, monadafinil, donepezil and Provigil as neuroenhancers, to boost memory during exams or to maintain concentration through periods of intense work. Pharmaceutical companies are now working on the "female Viagra", designed not to correct physiological malfunction but to change the very pattern of our desires. But pretty soon any agonising over interventions like these might seem rather quaint—like worrying about the odd pothole the day before a city is bombed into oblivion. There are much bigger changes afoot.
With psychoactive drugs, prosthetics and genetic enhancement, we are already able to fashion the fabric of the self in much more radical ways than our ancestors ever could. As we learn more about how to change and enhance our brains and bodies, we are about to gain even more power over who and what we essentially are. We are moving to a time when we are no longer satisfied with trying to understand human nature; we are now moving to prescribe it.

Once upon a time, there was a fox named “Gon”. He didn’t have family. He was living alone and he felt loneliness. Because he often stole vegetables and did a lot of mischief, villagers hated him. One day, Gon saw a young man called “Heijyu “catching fish by using a net in the river. There was a basket that kept the fish on the shore. Gon didn’t feel hungry that moment but he liked to do something mischievous, so he began to release fish. Finally, the moment he tried to release the eel, Heijyu noticed it. Gon ran away with keeping the eel around his neck. Ten days had passed since then. Gon heard a gossip from sparrows that Heijyu ‘s mother had passed away. Gon felt sympathy to Heijyu because he was alone like him. Gon thought. Heijyu’s mother must have wanted to eat eel. Gon started regretting what he had done. After that, Gon began to deliver chestnuts and mushrooms to Heijyu’s home while he was out for his job.　At first, Heiju was suspicious and wondering who was delivering food every day. However, eventually he thought God had pity on him because he is living alone. Heijyu thanked God and prayed every night. Gon was a little bit unsatisfied. Gon wanted to become friends with him deep in his mind but he couldn’t’t unveil his identity.　He continued delivering the mushrooms and chestnuts every day. One day, Heiju came home early from work by chance. At that moment, Gon came out of the house. Heijyu thought a fox came to steal something from his house. And Heijyu fired his gun at Gon. Heijyu went into his house and he was so surprised to see a lot of chestnuts and mushrooms. At that moment, he realized that　not God was sending food but it was Gon.
“It was you who delivered chestnuts!”
Gon nodded with closing his eyes and died in Heijyu’s arms. Heijyu kept crying for several hours.

A world without mosquitoes, Nature Washington DC, part 4
Without mosquitoes, thousands of plant species would lose a group of pollinators. Adults depend on nectar for energy (only females of some species need a meal of blood to get the proteins necessary to lay eggs). Yet McAllister says that their pollination isn't crucial for crops on which humans depend. "If there was a benefit to having them around, we would have found a way to exploit them," she says. "We haven't wanted anything from mosquitoes except for them to go away."
Ultimately, there seem to be few things that mosquitoes do that other organisms can't do just as well — except perhaps for one. They are lethally efficient at sucking blood from one individual and mainlining it into another, providing an ideal route for the spread of pathogenic microbes.
"The ecological effect of eliminating harmful mosquitoes is that you have more people. That's the consequence," says Strickman. Many lives would be saved; many more would no longer be sapped by disease. Countries freed of their high malaria burden, for example in sub-Saharan Africa, might recover the 1.3% of growth in gross domestic product that the World Health Organization estimates they are cost by the disease each year, potentially accelerating their development. There would be "less burden on the health system and hospitals, redirection of public-health expenditure for vector-borne diseases control to other priority health issues, less absenteeism from schools", says Jeffrey Hii, malaria scientist for the World Health Organization in Manila.
Phil Lounibos, an ecologist at the Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory in Vero Beach says that "eliminating mosquitoes would temporarily relieve human suffering". His work suggests that efforts to eradicate one vector species would be futile, as its niche would quickly be filled by another. His team collected female yellow-fever mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti) from scrap yards in Florida, and found that some had been inseminated by Asian tiger mosquitoes (Aedes albopictus), which carry multiple human diseases. The insemination sterilizes the female yellow-fever mosquitoes — showing how one insect can overtake another.
Given the huge humanitarian and economic consequences of mosquito-spread disease, few scientists would suggest that the costs of an increased human population would outweigh the benefits of a healthier one. And the 'collateral damage' felt elsewhere in ecosystems doesn't buy much sympathy either. The romantic notion of every creature having a vital place in nature may not be enough to plead the mosquito's case. It is the limitations of mosquito-killing methods, not the limitations of intent, that make a world without mosquitoes unlikely.
And so, while humans inadvertently drive beneficial species, from tuna to corals, to the edge of extinction, their best efforts can't seriously threaten an insect with few redeeming features. "They don't occupy an unassailable niche in the environment," says entomologist Joe Conlon, of the American Mosquito Control Association in Jacksonville, Florida. "If we eradicated them tomorrow, the ecosystems where they are active will hiccup and then get on with life. Something better or worse would take over."

Most mosquito-eating birds would probably switch to other insects that, post-mosquitoes, might emerge in large numbers to take their place. Other insectivores might not miss them at all: bats feed mostly on moths, and less than 2% of their gut content is mosquitoes. "If you're expending energy," says medical entomologist Janet McAllister of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Fort Collins, Colorado, "are you going to eat the 22-ounce filet-mignon moth or the 6-ounce hamburger mosquito?"
With many options on the menu, it seems that most insect-eaters would not go hungry in a mosquito-free world. There is not enough evidence of ecosystem disruption here to give the eradicators pause for thought.
At your service
As larvae, mosquitoes make up substantial biomass in aquatic ecosystems globally. They abound in bodies of water ranging from ephemeral ponds to tree holes2 to old tyres, and the density of larvae on flooded plains can be so high that their writhing sends out ripples across the surface. They feed on decaying leaves, organic detritus and microorganisms. The question is whether, without mosquitoes, other filter feeders would step in. "Lots of organisms process detritus. Mosquitoes aren't the only ones involved or the most important," says Juliano. "If you pop one rivet out of an airplane's wing, it's unlikely that the plane will cease to fly."
The effects might depend on the body of water in question. Mosquito larvae are important members of the tight-knit communities in the 25–100-millilitre pools inside pitcher plants3,4 (Sarracenia purpurea) on the east coast of North America. Species of mosquito (Wyeomyia smithii) and midge (Metriocnemus knabi) are the only insects that live there, along with microorganisms such as rotifers, bacteria and protozoa. When other insects drown in the water, the midges chew up their carcasses and the mosquito larvae feed on the waste products, making nutrients such as nitrogen available for the plant. In this case, eliminating mosquitoes might affect plant growth.
In 1974, ecologist John Addicott, now at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, published findings on the predator and prey structure within pitcher plants, noting more protozoan diversity in the presence of mosquito larvae5. He proposed that as the larvae feed, they keep down the numbers of the dominant species of protozoa, letting others persist. The broader consequences for the plant are not known.
A stronger argument for keeping mosquitoes might be found if they provide 'ecosystem services' — the benefits that humans derive from nature. Evolutionary ecologist Dina Fonseca at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, points as a comparison to the biting midges of the family Ceratopogonidae, sometimes known as no-see-ums. "People being bitten by no-see-ums or being infected through them with viruses, protozoa and filarial worms would love to eradicate them," she says. But because some ceratopogonids are pollinators of tropical crops such as cacao, "that would result in a world without chocolate".