In practice, even though we have billions of nucleotides, our DNA cannot follow billions of genealogical lines. Recombination over 30 — 40 generations does not divide chromosomes down to individual nucleotides. In the medium term, most human DNA is separated by recombination hotspots into lengths of around 50 kilobases. Across very short spans of 30 generations, DNA is for the most part inherited in chunks of hundreds of kilobases or longer. So dividing six billion nucleotides by 50 kilobases yields a number of around 120,000 ancestral lines at most from which any individual inherits his or her DNA. Recombination will increase this number somewhat further and further back in time, but not nearly so fast as the doubling of possible ancestral lines in every generation. This means that the vast majority of your ancestral lines more than around 17 generations ago have left no DNA to you whatsoever.

Granted, this is relative to the massive redundancy in our family trees– humankind is one huge, partially-inbred extended family. I.e.– if you go back 40 generations, you have over a trillion great-great-great-(etc) grandparents. There weren’t a trillion people alive in 1000AD, so a lot of those slots were filled by the same people.

If we grant that this is possible, the only real debate is when. 10 years? 15? 50? 100? The gears of capitalism and human nature ensure that it’ll come, sooner or later. And I think the only way this won’t end in certain disaster is to develop, formalize, and enforce a new social contract regarding human enhancement.

My suggestion? If you want to use biotechnology to make yourself smarter, you also have to use it to make yourself nicer.

If we don’t make this the accepted contract, I fear we’ll ping-pong between two unpalatable scenarios: either open things up to an enhancement free-for-all (and there’s likely a strong correlation between people who most want to be cognitively enhanced and people for whom it’s not in society’s best interests to grant a competitive advantage), or criminalize enhancement (and if we outlaw enhancement, only outlaws will be enhanced).

Here, I am reminded not of the recent past but of a huge change that occurred in the middle-ages when humans transformed their cognitive lives by learning to read silently. Originally, people could only read books by reading each page out loud. Monks would whisper, of course, but the dedicated reading by so many in an enclosed space must have been an highly distracting affair. It was St Aquinas who amazed his fellow believers by demonstrating that without pronouncing words he could retain the information he found on the page. At the time, his skill was seen as a miracle, but gradually human readers learned to read by keeping things inside and not saying the words they were reading out loud. From this simple adjustment, seemingly miraculous at the time, a great transformation of the human mind took place, and so began the age of intense private study so familiar to us now; whose universities where ideas could turn silently in large minds.

Dr. Barry Smith, University of London, while discussing Edge Magazine’s 2009 question, What will change everything?

Edit: a commenter has suggested it was actually St. Ambrose, not St. Aquinas, who first broke this ground.

This has been and continues to be a profoundly useful tool in nearly all subfields of biology. But it was created before we knew anything about genetics, and it’s starting to show its age– especially in the context of single-cell organisms, whose cellular machinery and evolutionary history allow organisms very far apart in the ‘tree’ to readily swap significant amounts of genetic material.[1] This sort of gene swapping, or Horizontal Gene Transfer, as it’s called, happens in plants and animals as well– think of mitochondria and chloroplasts, once organisms in their own right, now mere cellular power plants with much of their original genetic code shuffled into their hosts’ genomes.[2] But as a rule, most HGT happens in the contexts of bacteria and viruses. And HGT is extremely common there.

So we have these concepts of distinct species and this branching tree of life, and they’re incredibly useful when talking about plants and animals, but in the contexts of bacteria and viruses they become rather strained when organisms from very distant branches constantly share lots of genetic code. The core organizing assumption which gives the tree metaphor and our current phylogenic system meaning, that once organisms branch off sufficiently far from each other they can no longer share genetic code, is often false in these contexts.[3] And under many metrics, most of life’s genetic diversity is contained in the bacterial and viral domains, so this is not a trivial problem.

So we can keep trying to extent the current tree metaphor, or we can start looking around for a new model.[4] I think both are worth doing.

So what would an alternative to the Tree of Life look like?

I don’t have an answer to this per se, but it seems to me the way forward is to recognize the core insight of the tree metaphor- to group things that have more shared evolutionary history closer together- but to apply this insight at the level of the gene rather than the organism. Essentially, I think a new system could be built by sequencing everything and having computers crunch the numbers, identify co-evolved gene clouds, highlight the genetic links between organisms, and sort organisms based on these links.

This approach could simplify down into or replicate most of our current phylogeny in organisms with low HGT (eucaryotic organisms are mostly isolated co-evolved gene clouds which should be grouped together, and grouped near the other eucaryotic organisms they share recent history with) while leaving the door open to a more elegant treatment of the edge cases of e.g., bacteria and viruses, which may be amalgamations of distinct co-evolved gene clouds with separate evolutionary histories.

But the devil will be in the details, and creating a new phylogeny is particularly tricky in that any sorting algorithm includes contingent assumptions about what sort of answer we want when asking, what is the nature of the relation between organism X and organism Y?

It’s interesting to think about. Realistically speaking, our current phylogeny is much too fundamental to most of modern biology to be replaced anytime soon. But it’ll be interesting to see if and how people attempt to apply the gene-level shared history idea to patch up our current organism-level shared history phylogeny.

Footnotes:

[1] This rampant HGT happens in multiple ways: bacteria can share plasmids, which are sort of modular pieces of genetic function able to be easily swapped in and out. If one strain of bacteria develops resistance to a drug, it may share that resistance to other strains through a plasmid. Bacterial DNA is also less isolated and protected than eucaryotic DNA, so ‘free floating’ DNA is much more likely to be integrated into the cell.

Viruses, on the other hand, exist by hijacking existing cellular machinery to splice themselves into genomes then copy themselves, and evolve resistance by being extremely sloppy in their duplication methods, both of which can lead to significant HGT. As well, viruses are hardly limited to infecting plants and animals; those which infect bacteria and other viruses (bacteriophages and virophages, respectively) can also be vehicles for HGT.

[2] Our genomes are filled with ancient, defunct viruses who spliced themselves into our genes but then couldn’t get out. Recent surveys of the human genome indicate that these defunct viruses take up more space in our genome (2%) than do actual protein-coding genes (1.4%).

Recent research indicates that this has been a useful source of genetic diversity: the mammalian placenta, for instance, repurposes genes originally from an ancient retrovirus to protect itself from being attacked by the mother’s immune system.

[3] That’s the conceptual argument for a new type of phylogeny. The pragmatic argument is that an infectious bacteria or virus’s position on the tree of life does not tell us much about how it spreads, where in the body it can thrive, or how to treat it. It would be nice to have a phylogeny that would naturally indicate such things.

[4] A possible extension of the tree metaphor is put forth by Frederik Cohan of Wesleyan University, who suggests adding an ‘ecovar’ notation (short for “ecological variant”) to bacteria and viruses. As Carl Zimmer so succinctly puts it, “The bacterial strain that caused the first recorded outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in Philadelphia, for example, should be called Legionella pneumophila ecovar Philadelphia.”

Notes:

It may be neither here nor there, but in writing out a wishlist of the perfect phylogenic system, I came up with that it should deal with the following:
– Common descent, evolution of major function, and speciation (as the tree metaphor currently does);
– HGT (specific gene chunks that were transfered, and past lineages & other signifying metadata of those genes);
– Phenotype & function: cellular mechanics/architecture and proteomic profile (trying to classify organisms in terms of what goes on ‘under the hood’);
– Current ecological niche (e.g., Cohan’s ‘ecovar’ notation).

Others’ lists may differ.

KATE KAPLAN

Seventh grader, School of the Future, a New York City public school near Gramercy Park

The city will be all skyscrapers, no more town houses and brownstones. Buildings will connect to each other through an aboveground tunnel system. You’ll no longer have to worry about finding a bathroom; you’ll just carry a small chip with you that can expand into a private portable toilet.

Central Park will be preserved in a bubble to protect it from the adverse effects of global warming. Everything will be shiny and nice and big. The subway cars and stations will have TVs in them. The Empire State Building will no longer be New York’s largest building; it will probably be replaced by a giant Starbucks. Madame Tussaud’s wax figures will have robotic capabilities.

Finally, instead of antidepressants, doctors will make people happy by implanting chips in their heads with comedy routines and programs, like my favorite, “The Colbert Report.”

Well played, Miss Kaplan.

This short essay doesn’t delve into my personal ethics as applied to enhancement– which, I must admit, I don’t have figured out yet. And I’m assuming, for the sake of this essay, that a technological ‘Singularity’ is a feasible outcome of our current technological trajectory, or at least that significant augmentative technologies will become available in the not-too-distant future. This is a purely practical critique of full-speed-head-and-damn-the-torpedoes Transhumanism.

Transhumanism is about using technology to transcend one’s humanity and becoming qualitatively more[1] than what one was born. There are, of course, social downsides to allowing people to do this.

The Equality Objection to Transhumanism: breaking the bonds of common humanity is a serious thing.



First, let’s talk about equality. In the Western public sphere, we tend to treat everyone (save children and mental patients) as exactly identical. Now, the sharp-eyed among you will notice this often doesn’t make a lot of sense– but the current excesses and irrationality involved in treating everyone as exactly identical in the public sphere are much less harmful than the excesses and necessary oversimplifications involved in treating everyone differently with respect to the the perceived value of their capabilities and potentials. More than just as a matter of efficiency or polite fiction, there’s real, generative value in the philosophy of equality, even if it doesn’t completely fit reality at the seams[2]. And I think this broad-sense every-human-is-equal liberalism we’ve built into our culture is really the only buffer we have against really nasty, heartless states of affairs that could arise from the misuse of cognitive enhancement. But I suspect that the very presence of cognitive enhancement may very well erode its own mitigating buffer.

If we look inward, it’s not a large stretch to say we’re a culture worth saving and amplifying in large part because of the liberalism and philosophy of equal worth we’ve deliberately nurtured and woven into our collective self-identity. Insofar as cognitive enhancement increases the cognitive divides within society[3], people will notice and it’ll put an unavoidable culture-wide strain on this philosophical outlook. We’ve spent hundreds- perhaps thousands- of years building, affirming, and lauding our bonds of common humanity and equality, and it’s now Western society’s nominal organizing principle and the glue that holds us together. Technology that threatens to rip this integral part of our social fabric apart is not progress. Or if it is, it must pay (preferably in advance) for the damage it will cause.

Transhumanists see themselves as the “good guys” (and gals… though mostly guys). Given all the good things these technologies can do, I understand why. But I’m not quite ready to grant unconditional “good guy” status as I think there are several stands of naivety that often surface in transhumanist culture, and true ‘good guys’ can’t be naive. In this context, I think transhumanists need to acknowledge 1. the value of our carefully and painstakingly created framework of equality, 2. that transhumanism does indeed violate it, and 3. that this violation of our current social contract is an extremely serious, dangerous thing. And it’s asking a lot, but if transhumanists are going to be at the forefront of dismantling the basis for this social philosophy, I’d prefer that they offer an alternative that people can buy into that has a more nuanced understanding of human identity and human worth in this upcoming age of increasing divides. Ideally something that provides on average as much social cohesion, philosophical coherence, and spiritual nourishment as this philosophy of equality.[4] Because if we mortgage the social bonds of the present in service of the future, that future is likely to fall apart.

I think transhumanists (and people in general) tend to think of society as a somewhat dysfunctional but intrinsically resilient entity. That, for all its warts, modern society has a solid foundation we can depend on while bootstrapping ourselves into a better mode of existence. But I think when transhumanists start to tinker with human nature, we can no longer take this for granted. After all, if you’re undermining society’s organizing principle, even with the best intentions you may break important things and deeply anger many, many people. And can you blame them? For all you’re offering, you’re also dismantling the basis for their belief and identity systems, and at least apparently pushing a system that runs counter to many of our crusading social heroes such as Martin Luther King, Jr.

I understand the promise of transhumanism: literally, to eliminate all suffering. This is not to be minimized. But I think it’s an open question whether moving to a transhuman society will break society in the process.

Of course, it’s unfair to put all of this on the shoulders of transhumanism. The debate of whether we should allow these technologies into society is a probably hollow one: they have so many physical and philosophical beachheads already, and we are such an open, self-directed society that lives and breathes the ideas of potential and progress, that of course they’ll become part of society. Similarly transhumanism, in its better and more public corners, is a movement that very sincerely means well, and it’s less causing the development of these transformative technologies so much as being a cheerleader for their positive uses. And asking the more realistic question of, given that this will happen, how do we make this happen in the best possible way?

But my advice to transhumanists is, do understand that society is a much more fragile thing than you probably realize, and that large parts of society may not greet you as saviors.

[1] Arguable, of course. Francis Fukuyama has suggested that enhancement technologies would cause us to “no longer have the characteristics that give us human dignity.”

[2] This normative force for equality within society does have its ugly side, e.g., slowing the bright kids down for “No Child Left Behind”.

[3] I think it’s fairly clear that transhumanist technologies will increase the divides within society and corrode our culture of equality: not only will there likely be uneven access to these technologies, and uneven knowledge about them, but there’s a strong status quo bias in the human psyche. These technologies will be new, different, and sometimes very strange. A divide is a divide- and causes problems- regardless of whether it happens by chance or by choice.

[4] The philosophy of transhumanism, though relatively developed and fleshed out, is not the presumptive solution here because it simply hasn’t proven acceptable to the general public. Maybe version 2.0, 3.0, or 4.0 will be the one that finally gains traction and appeals to more than a small subset of the population. But- no offense meant to transhumanists- it’s clearly not there yet.

There’s a growing number of people who believe technology is going to make things Really Different around here. And while they’re still essentially a loose-knit, fragmented movement, they’ve made significant inroads among society’s movers, shakers, and simply rich people.

So what’s all the fuss about? In short, these ‘transhumanists’ (or less rigorously, ‘futurists’) believe that the technological trajectory we’re on is exponential and will result in deep, sweeping, and generally utopian changes to society, to the human experience, and to human nature within most of our lifetimes. The word “transhumanist” refers to “transcending the human state” through technology and becoming, in a very significant way, more than what one was born — and all the transhumanists I’ve talked with are quite serious about it. It may sound silly and it may sound strange, but to this growing group of people it’s a real goal.

But though they have transhuman goals, as a community they’re quite human (sometimes, All Too). They have their own canon, heroes, and subculture[1], even a disillusioned, skeptical counterculture. Overall it’s a fairly diverse group[2]: though they’re generally united by the belief that technology is going to radically change society in as soon as 15 but not more than 40 years, and they have fairly standardized ‘in-group’ terms for upcoming clusters of technology, predictions vary on which technologies will be the primary driving forces, on the nature of the change, on what the most significant technological and social hurdles to a technological utopia are, and on the future of intelligence (i.e., whether computers, enhanced humans, or even “mere” improved computer networks and human-computer interfaces will be the gateway to a ‘Singularity‘).



This movement does have an uphill battle for credibility: not only does it make fairly wild-sounding predictions which lie outside the normal realm of human experience, but most people, if they even take notice of this movement, will tend to dismiss it as a bunch of yammering sci-fi geeks. I think many people instinctually look at transhumanists talking about augmenting their brains with computer chips or uploading their minds into computers much like they do Trekkies arguing about the ins-and-outs of the Enterprise’s teleportation system (that is, as completely irrelevant). This isn’t a wholly unreasonable response: many of the same geek traits (and I use that term endearingly) which give rise to theorizing about the future also give rise to solipsistic pontificating about Star Trek minutiae, and futurists have such a poor track record at predicting the future that the common conception seems to be that we’ll only need to perk up and listen to them once we get our long-promised flying cars.

But- dare I say it- something’s in the air. Something’s different with the intellectual ferment of 2008 futurism. Futurists are starting to bring nuanced, well-referenced, and falsifiable models of technological change to the table, and futurism as a field may finally be mature enough such that futurists actually have a special angle on predicting the future. More and more ‘respectable’ institutions are retaining the services of card-carrying futurists and transhumanists: In addition to shoe-ins like the Army, organizations such as British Telecom, IBM, the FBI and even Hallmark employ full-time futurists. By and large, this group sees themselves as the prophets, architects and philosophers of a coming wave of technology that will fundamentally remake society– and pretentious as this may be, they may be right.

[1] R.U. Sirius, editor-to-be of “H+” (lingo for Human-plus, or ‘enhanced’ human), notes “And it’s kind of become a little religion; we have our own Rapture and our own eschatology and all that sort of stuff.”

[2] Transhumanism covers a sufficiently vast and divisive territory that I think it’s inevitable that the community will splinter into many sub-movements once/if things really get going. If you think stem cells are an incendiary subject, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

For a more detailed outline of the transhumanist argument that technological change is exponential and poised to explode, I’d recommend my review of Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near“.

I’m planning on posting part two of this essay this weekend.

In summer 2002, I was at the Cheltenham Festival of Science. Lots of biologists presenting, for sure. But… one very popular event was a presentation by three famous astronomers: ‘Is There Life Out There?’ I prefaced my first question to them by a little imaginative scenario: three biologists discussing the properties of the black hole in the middle of our galaxy. It was very clear that the astronomers really believed that they could discuss ‘life’ professionally, whereas everyone saw biologists talking about black holes as absurd.

Physicists sometimes seem to think they’re the superstars of the academy (especially, say, compared to sociologists). Does doing all that rigorous math and modeling give one a special license on truth or just go to one’s head? As the son of a physicist, I have no comment. :)

Several years ago, Satoshi Kanazawa, then a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, analyzed a biographical database of 280 great scientists–mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists. When he calculated the age of each scientist at the peak of his career–the sample was predominantly male–Kanazawa noted an interesting trend. After a crest during the third decade of life, scientific productivity–as evidenced by major discoveries and publications–fell off dramatically with age. When he looked at the marital history of the sample, he found that the decline in productivity was less severe among men who had never been married. As a group, unmarried scientists continued to achieve well into their late 50s, and their rates of decline were slower.

“The productivity of male scientists tends to drop right after marriage,” says Kanazawa in an e-mail interview from his current office at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom. “Scientists tend to ‘desist’ from scientific research upon marriage, just like criminals desist from crime upon marriage.”

Kanazawa’s perhaps controversial perspective is that of an evolutionary psychologist. “Men conduct scientific research (or do anything else) in order to attract women and get married (albeit unconsciously),” he says. “What’s the point of doing science (or anything else) if one is already married? Marriage (or, more accurately reproductive success, which men can usually attain only through marriage) is the goal; science or anything else men do is but a means. From my perspective, scientists are no different than anybody else; evolutionary psychology applies to all humans equally,” he adds.

The New York Times recently tracked the progress of Dmitri Belyaev’s epic fox domestication experiment. The result:

After 40 years of the experiment, and the breeding of 45,000 foxes, a group of animals had emerged that were as tame and as eager to please as a dog.

As Belyaev had predicted, other changes appeared along with the tameness, even though they had not been selected for. The tame silver foxes had begun to show white patches on their fur, floppy ears, rolled tails and smaller skulls.

One possibility is that a handful of genes — perhaps even just one — underlie all the changes seen in domestication. A structure in the embryo of all vertebrates, known as the neural crest, is the source of cells that constitute much of the face, skull and pigment cells, and many parts of the peripheral nervous system and endocrine system. If the genes in the neural crest cells were delayed just a little in coming into action, a whole range of tissues could be affected, including the maturation of the adrenal glands that underlies the first fear response of young animals.

There’s much more in the article and follow-up Q&A;, including some speculation on how similar domestication processes might have been involved in human evolution.

John Hawks raises a question about why domestication is possible at all, from the viewpoint of genetic variation:

The rats and foxes haven’t so much undergone genetic changes as simple enrichment of alleles that are already common. Which means that they may have unusual phenotypes as a result of these alleles being coincident at high frequencies, but those alleles already are doing something in normal, wild (and mostly solitary) animals. This doesn’t mean that the tame phenotype should already exist — even if all these alleles are independently common, if there are enough of them they may never all be present in any single wild individual.

So the interesting question is why these alleles that permit domestication in combination should already be common.

Domestication may involve multiple vectors, but a delay in the development of the neural crest appears to be a centrally important factor in this fox experiment. Now, given that humans have undergone some level of “self-domestication,” could we extend this result to humans? Could delaying the development of the neural crest in humans delay the whole maturation process, as is suggested by some parts of Baelyav’s fox results? And what might that mean for us today? Is there still significant genetic variation here- i.e. are some individuals or groups of people more “genetically domesticated” than others?

Mycomplete speculation here is that a high concentration of these genes selected for in domestication might result in a prolonged childhood and adolescence and lead to the existence of geeks (and perhaps a certain sort of intellectual in general). Geeks seem to hit their peak later in life and are often described as relatively non-aggressive, eager to please, late bloomers, lifelong learners, and even eternal kids (though they don’t seem to have floppy ears or rolled tails!).

Anyway, this story- and the research that comes from it- will be something worth watching.