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Introduction
There is plenty of
controversy over the nature of evolution, in particular about whether
a mechanism similar to Darwinian evolution
might apply in spheres other than the biological. Politics, culture,
society, music, economics and bee-keeping can all evolve, in a general
sense of the word, but can they evolve in a Darwinian way? Since
Darwinian evolution involves the death without issue of unsuccessful
combatants in the struggle to survive it seems hardly possible that
the concept could be usefully applied outside its original sphere.
Most of the confusion is surely terminological. If the word evolution
is taken to mean 'development', then it is fine to use it in all
kinds of contexts, and that is how it will be used here. When Darwinian
evolution is meant, the whole phrase will be used.
Some writers strugggle
towards a general theory of 'evolution', as if Darwinian evolution
might itself be no more than a special case of a grander theory.
That endeavour seems unnecessarily pretentious: change is inherent
in our universe, and the state of everything changes over time,
sometimes for the better and sometimes not.
The confusion is made
worse by the fact that the subject of Darwinian evolution about
whom we care most, that is, Man, has changed as a result of non-Darwinian
evolutionary pressures at the level of the social
group. For a while, some anthropologists held that Darwinian evolution
(anyway, selection) operated at the group level. 'Group selection',
as it was called, had its heyday in the middle of the 20th century.
It is now discredited, but at the time a group selectionnist would
have it that competition between groups was a proxy for competition
between individuals, and that the human
genome could be affected by success or failure at the group level.
Competition at the
group level can certainly sharpen the effect of Darwinian evolution:
if successful social groups require conforming members, then individuals
will become conforming (and did) in order to belong to successful
groups. But the social group is no more than another feature of
the outside world which conditions the success or failure of the
individual. The group developed, and successful groups gave their
members better life and mating chances; no more or less than that.
Group selection theory
had a Lamarckian 1
tinge; and recent work has seemed to show that there are after all
some Lamarckian features of genome development - there are situations
in which the life experience of individuals can feed back to their
DNA. But at the present state of knowledge, these are not sufficient
to derail a predominantly Darwinian view of individual evolution.
These considerations
are highly relevant to a discussion of the workings of human evolution
in the 21st century, since there will be environmental, cultural
and social change at a rate never before experienced - if Lamarckian
evolution had more than a tiny foothold in the human development
process, then this would come to have a major impact on the human
genome, as will appear later. But for now, Lamarck may remain in
the wings.
Evolutionary
Mechanisms Until 2060
The most important
influences on the nature of humans (a broader concept than just
the human genome) during the first half of this century will include
Darwinian evolution, bionics, robotic, gene therapy and manipulation,
and cultural change. These will be briefly characterized, then discussed
in more depth, with particular attention to their interplay with
the globalization process and our groupish natures.
Darwinian
evolution, of course, affects only the human genome. It
is a vexed question as to whether it continues at all in the face
of so many influences tending to equalize the life (and mating)
chances of humans.
Bionics,
encompassing all those artificial devices which might replace or
extend or add to human bodies and minds.
Robotics,
limited in this context to artificial devices separate from humans
which perform tasks requiring quasi-human or quasi-animal attributes.
Gene
therapy and manipulation, referring to processes which
alter the genetic endowment of an individual, before or after birth;
the resulting genetic changes may or may not be transmissible.
Cultural
change refers to the impact of society, in the broadest
sense, on the nature of an individual, whether that impact has a
result in terms of genetic transmissibility or not.
Darwinian
Evolution
It's not a new worry,
that by interfering with the course of nature we are somehow abusing
or aborting the natural course of evolution. It can be traced as
far back as the Renaissance, and probably further. It may be the
case that we are allowing otherwise unviable people to reproduce
through supporting them, but then surely that is more than compensated
for by the fact that we are increasingly able to remedy any lack
of viability, in them or their children, in a variety of ways, including
gene manipulation. But it just isn't true that Darwinian evolution
has been somehow turned aside in a more general sense. Study after
study shows that taller people are more successful in life, including
mating, then shorter people. More than ever, there is a received
idea of what constitutes beauty, and how would this not result in
a gradual trend towards children who are closer to that ideal?
Resistance to disease
has also not gone away as a factor in selection. It is reported
that some individuals are resistant to HIV infection, or that, if
infected they do not develop AIDS. This is a classic example of
selection at work; those with the genetic factors that predispose
towards resistance will survive and breed; others have fewer chances
in that direction. This type of selection would appear to be operating
in richer societies as well as in poorer ones, although it may be
partly negated when individuals are rich enough - or society is
rich enough - to pay for drugs which retard or cure HIV or AIDS.
It may be supposed
that, towards the middle of the century, as improved medical techniques
increasingly offer life chances to everyone regardless of genetic
and environmental factors, Darwinian evolution will become less
of a factor in pure 'survival of the fittest' terms. There is unlikely
to be any cultural resistance to this trend. The impact of genetic
manipulation will be discussed below.
The future for Darwinian
evolution of human cognitive faculties is a
tougher nut to crack. There certainly is a premium on cognitive
ability in the modern world, as there has been for thousands of
years if not much longer, and on the conforming, cooperative and
communicative behaviours that are required for group success. And
no-one could pretend for a moment that the modern world is anything
but more complex and more demanding cognitively than it used to
be. The cult of individuality might
be thought to work in the opposite direction, but that is a superficial
view. At almost all points, the individual interacts with the modern
world through the agency of groups: at school,
in the office, in the army, in sport, in the pub. Even a person
working in an intensely individual way, say, a top golfer, cannot
succeed without her groupish 'support team', the approbation of
her peers, and her fan club. And as pointed out in previous chapters,
globalization and the Internet
will increase, not reduce the opportunities for people to form like-minded
groups.
All of this social
complexity could be expected to work for greater cognitive social
skills, although its impact on marriage and reproductive chances
may be lessened by programmes aimed at reducing social disparities.
Bionic
and genetic techniques to improve (artificially
- whatever that means) cognitive performance may also tend to reduce
the role of 'natural' Darwinian selection, although in terms of
genetic results it may be hard to tell the difference between an
improvement in neuronal memory functioning brought about by genetic
manipulation and one brought about by failure to breed on the part
of people whose memory skills are too poor to allow them to perform
successfully in the world. And if this book is right in supposing
that technology will permit a great expansion of human inter-connectedness
through the creation of shared or collective
cognitive spaces (see Chapter 12), then that will force a rapid
evolution of the necessary cognitive skills in which Darwinian and
'artificial' influences may be hard to disentangle.
As a generalization,
it is probably true to say that Darwinian evolution in the strict
sense will have a decreasing impact on human mutability during the
second half of the century; but it is not clear that this is a very
useful conclusion. What is certain is that the human cognitive apparatus,
as well as our physical bodies, are going to change as never before.
One caveat that must
be entered relates to the possible interplay of Lamarckian
genetic adaptation with the dramatic changes in the human phenotype
that may result from bionic and genetic techniques (see below),
but given the present state of scientific knowledge about genetic
processes, it is impossible to reach clear conclusions in that direction.
Bionics
There has been no objection
so far (how could there be?) to the use of bionic devices such as
contact lenses, hearing aids, artificial hip joints, artificial
limbs, artificial hearts, artificial skin or artificial kidneys
which make up for accidental damage or age- or disease-related deterioration
of the human body, or for birth defects. Every effort is made to
repair such individuals unfortunate enough to have such defects
to give them a reasonable standard of life. There are even Olympic
Games and other competitions for paraplegics.
Until now, the technology
for the creation of bionic replacement parts has been electro-mechanical,
but we are on the verge of being able to 'grow' replacement parts
biologically. A fabricated dog's bladder proved to be viable after
successful implantation. Artificial skin has been demonstrated in
a technology which blends biological processes with non-biological.
The controversy over the use of stem cells will surely be short-lived,
and within a very few years an increasing number of human organs
and tissues will be produced biologically. Hybrid bio-electronic
tissues are also a likely development, initially perhaps for robotic
technologies, but later for use in cognitive enhancement.
Sooner or later, the
line will be crossed (if it has not happened already and we just
haven't heard about it) and people with money to spare will start
improving themselves in order to be stronger or cleverer or just
to live longer. Sportspeople already try to do this with the use
of substances such as steroids, many of which are banned. That is
quite a primitive approach to the problem. By mid-century we may
expect that people who can afford it will have access to a range
of bionic implants. Some possibilities which come to mind would
be:
- hearts which will
last indefinitely, along with plaque-eating nanobot generators
which will keep arteries and veins clear of fatty deposits;
- permanently-fitted
self-lubricating vision-enhancement lenses connected to natural
tear ducts, giving improved daytime vision, improved resolution
of images, and a degree of night-time vision;
- cochlear implants
connected to neural circuits giving improved frequency response
and the 'babel-fish' language translation facility mentioned in
previous chapters;
- for sports-people,
hybrid bio-synthetic parallel muscular tissue working with and
improving the performance of key muscles in appropriate parts
of the body.
These are physical
improvements. Equally or even more important will be bionic cognitive
improvements; examples might be:
- lexical implants
connected to appropriate neural circuits giving improved memory
retention and immediate access to key data-bases relevant to a
person's particular interests;
- implanted neuronal
pathways improving the functioning of consciousness
and other areas of the psyche.
In future, the boundaries
between humans and robotic devices will become blurred, to put it
mildly, because of the possibilities (already demonstrated) for
mental control of external or artificial devices by the human mind
through nerve-like and/or wireless communication.
In
2006, Sony patented an idea for transmitting data directly into
the brain, with the goal of enabling a person to see films and play
video games in which they smell, taste and perhaps even feel things.
Sony's technique would be surgically noninvasive, but would fire
pulses of ultrasound at the head to modify the firing patterns of
neurons in targeted parts of the brain. The aim, it says, is to
create “sensory experiences”, ranging from moving images
to tastes and sounds.
A
Sony Electronics spokeswoman said that the work was a “prophetic
invention” and no experiments at all had been performed on
it. “It was based on an inspiration that this may someday
be the direction that technology will take us,” she told the
New Scientist.
Separately,
researchers have demonstrated a technique called transcranial magnetic
stimulation, which uses magnetic fields to induce currents in brain
tissue, thus stimulating brain cells.
In
2003, Researchers at Duke University Medical Center 2
taught rhesus monkeys to consciously control
the movement of a robot arm in real time, using only signals from
their brains and visual feedback on a video screen. The scientists
said that the animals appeared to operate the robot arm as if it
were their own limb. See Appendix Five
for a fuller account of this research.
The
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Munich
has directly interfaced nerves and electronic devices using a chip
designed by Infineon which allows neurons to grow in proximity to
electronic sensors. And the implants used in Parkinson's disease
sufferers communicate with neurons which accept their signals as
if they had originated in the original, now-damaged neurons. Control
software for these implants is updated from outside the patient.
Based on such evidence,
two-way communication between the human brain and external devices
(and, indeed, other human brains) in a way that bypasses existing
sensory channels seems a near-certainty within
twenty years at the very outside, and probably much sooner. Once
a human can communicate directly with the cognitive space of a quasi-human
external device, or with other human psyches, immense possibilities
open up for enhanced group
activity. Humans are already well equipped by evolution to handle
collective planning, analysis and behaviour; it will no doubt be
a stretch for our current brains to encompass a dramatically wider
set of cognitive inputs, enabling and even requiring faster mental
processing, but there is no reason to suppose that we cannot learn
and improve in this direction, as we have done in the past.
It's
possible that some or even many countries will legislate to prevent
'self-improvement' and the use of non-organic implants other than
in strictly therapeutic situations, but surely this will be a lost
cause. Unless legislation applies to all countries, there will always
be alternatives for people to go to. In the end, there is no avoiding
global legislation, in this sphere as in so many others.
Therefore eventually
there will be global Codes of Conduct to
establish ethical guidelines for the use
of such devices and technologies in competitive situations, and
to protect the interests of those who cannot afford self-improvement.
The IOC will create a parallel 'Bio-Olympics'
for various categories of improved sportspeople, with strict rules
about the specification of implants. FIFA will
have a 'Bionic League' alongside the World Cup. And so on.
Many people will continue
to want to make a distinction between 'curative' and 'improvement'
uses of bionic technologies (and the same
arguments apply to gene therapy and genetic engineering, dealt with
below). But this is an impossible distinction to sustain. If one
person is weaker than another one, is that not, in the language
of 'human rights', somehow unfair? (Of God?
Of scientists? Of the European Union?) How could you ever deny access
by a physically weak billionaire to muscle strengthening drugs and
implants, if that is what she wants?
It is not the purpose
of this book to explore the ethical fogs that swirl around the use
of technology to change humans. It's impossible to know where to
start in such discussions. The standpoint here will be that, if
something is technically feasible, then within very wide limits
it will happen. All that will be attempted here is to try to guess
the time-scale of application of such advances. Of course, technologies
that would be harmful to humans, such as the mass production of
bionic hornets carrying doses of polonium 201 and which could be
created by some ex-KGB madman in a James Bond-style Pacific atoll,
are and will remain against the law.
Robotics
Running alongside the
development of bionic improvements to the human body and mind will
be the development of robots. Robots need to be considered in tracing
the future course of human evolution because they will come to be
viewed in many respects as supplementary to our existing bodies
and minds.
So much attention has
been paid to the likely nature of robots in literature (science
fiction) and movies, that they have become a part of folk psychology
even before they exist. Everyone thinks they know what robots will
look like, what they will be able to do, their probable use by governments
to oppress people in general or just to control and 'take out' criminals.
Many people probably even know the laws of robotics as laid down
by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in 1950.
It is normally assumed
that robots will be given physical skills and mentalities comparable
to those of humans, but this is far too simplistic an assumption,
especially given the hodge-podge of behavioural traits humans have
developed, ranging from murderous aggressiveness to altruism.
At the physical level,
there may well be considerable similarities, at least at first.
Although non-humanoid intelligent robots already exist in environments
such as automotive manufacturing, it is likely that most robotic
development will parallel human forms in its early stages, since
robots are most often conceived as machines which will extend the
reach of existing humans. That suggests a lot of commonality between
the design and control of robotic elements such as fingers, joints,
limbs, and of course their sense organs: sight,
hearing, touch and taste. It may be expected therefore that where
parallels exist, robotic devices will largely mirror bionic ones,
or vice versa. Robotic joints will look like human ones, especially
bionic human joints.
Designing the cognitive
equipment of humanoid robots will pose greater challenges. Although
much progress has been made already in terms of understanding what
one might call the flow charts of human decision-making - the interaction
of sensory input with data-bases held in the brain, the carrying
out of a decision process, and the implementation of the decisions
made through efferent nerves (or through speech
- an alternative way of giving commands to an external unit), it
would not be right to say that the 'wiring diagrams' of the processes
involved in the brain have been deciphered to a point at which they
could be copied for robotic purposes.
Nor can it be assumed
that they ought to be copied, even if they were known. The
human brain is a mish-mash of component sections, many of which
came into existence long before primates existed, and some of which
have been re-used or developed for newer purposes. Although nature
does reach the most efficient solution to cognitive problems, it
only does that within the existing structure of the brain. Even
if a robotic control function is exactly equivalent to a human control
function, it doesn't necessarily follow that it should slavishly
follow the neural structure of the equivalent function in a human
brain. In addition, robotic control functions will often deliberately
not follow human control mechanisms.
Deciding whether to
map the groupish skills and attributes of
humans onto robots will be a particularly ticklish process! For
example, the possibility of damage to con-specifics is taken into
account in human decision-making, whereas robots (according to Asimov's
laws) should put the integrity of humans at the forefront of their
decision-making. On the other hand, it is easily imaginable that
a robotic designer might want to build reciprocal
altruism into a robot programmed to deal with children. Even then,
of course, filleting out reciprocal altruism in a human brain may
or may not ever be possible in neural terms (too early to say).
It may be that, once the relationship of such a trait as reciprocal
altruism has been adequately mapped in terms of its functional connections
to other cognitive attributes, it will be necessary only to duplicate
those connections in terms of robotic electronics. On the other
hand, it may be simpler to define a trait such as reciprocal altruism
in behavioural rather than neural terms, and design it into the
robot in that way. For some traits, there may turn out to be no
distinction between behavioural and neural mappings, which would
be helpful!
Those who fear that
robots might 'gang up against us' are probably wide of the mark;
but one can see that designers would be tempted to arrange that
humanoid robots would view their own con-specifics as 'machines'
rather than having humanoid characteristics, and to avoid building
affiliative drives into robots. Such issues are explored further
in Chapter 12.
By, say, 2030, the
functional cognitive structure of the human brain will be well understood,
although some 'wiring diagrams' will not yet be mapped, not least
because they are dynamic. The issue of the
extent to which words are stored in terms of related images or non-linguistic
patterns will have been resolved, and appropriate results will have
followed in terms of robotic and bionic cognitive devices, and the
control of them. The main lines of the cognitive structure of 'human-friendly'
robots (ie robots which need to communicate in more than a superficial
way with humans) will have been laid out.
During the period from
2030 to 2050, it is to be expected that humans will become able
to communicate with quasi-human robotic intelligences using wireless
or magnetic technologies, or just using a cable link, by-passing
their normal sensory channels. It will probably be possible for
a human to 'inhabit' a robot's psyche, using
its consciousness, its cognitive tools and
its sensory equipment as if they were her
own. The opportunities that this will offer, particularly for expanding
human groupish behaviour, are explored in
later chapters.
Alongside humanoid
robots, other types of robot will be attracting increasing attention
during the early decades of the 21st century. The automated roving
scouts of search engines on the Internet
are already called 'bots'; of course they are purely disembodied,
electronic robots. Some of the uses for which robots with specialized
and distinctly non-human cognitive structures (not to mention physical
or electronic forms) will be developed might include:
- Robots for aerial,
nautical and subterranean warfare;
- Robots for extra-terrestrial
uses (this has already happened, to a degree);
- Robots for intelligent
construction work;
- Robots for automobile
maintenance;
- Robots for undersea
and underground mining;
- Robots for agricultural
production management;
- Robots for literary
or historical research;
- Robots for therapeutic
(diagnostic, medical and surgical) purposes;
- Robots for teaching.
Of course this is not
a complete list. And it might be that some of these robots will
be given quasi-human appearance, although they are probably going
to be better at what they do if they are equipped with specialized
cognitive structures that are designed from the ground up rather
than being based on human originals. Humans did not evolve to carry
out any of the tasks listed above, even if they have become adequately
good at some of them. It may also be that robot designers will choose
or be required to include robot-human communication interfaces to
allow humans to 'interfere' in the robot's own decision processes
if necessary. Robots, however specialized, are also going to need
to be aware of humans as part of their environment, and treat them
appropriately; but that doesn't mean they have to learn to smile,
unless we want them to!
By 2050, all of this
will have happened, although neither robots nor bionic super-people
will be run of the mill. There is more, however. To get a full picture
of how people and their robotic inventions may look by 2050, it
is necessary to take into account
Gene
Therapy And Manipulation
These subjects are
a key part of any discussion of future human evolution, leaving
aside possible Lamarckian effects, because
it will become impossible to differentiate between 'natural' and
'artificial' biological processes at the genetic level. The 'tweaking'
of genetic formulae for plants such as wheat to produce improved
varieties, and the introduction of genetically-manipulated disease
resistant strains of domestic animal, however much resistance they
have encountered from 'whole earth' activists (and is it really
so different from the domestication of wolves?) are evidently the
forerunners of comparable improvements to the human genome. This,
and its ethical consequences, will be dealt with more thoroughly
in the next section; but here we just need to note that there is
no conceptual difference between the alteration in an embryo of
the gene that expresses for Huntingdon's chorea and the introduction
of a genetic sequence which lengthens the bones of the foot and
may produce lots of 'Thorpedos' (the Australian Olympic swimming
medallist who has unusually large feet).
Genetically engineered
drugs are already in common use, although they were controversial
at first. Genetically-engineered human insulin was approved by the
USA's FDA in 1982; genetically engineered human growth hormone as
replacement for a drug that was previously extracted from human
cadavers was another early use. In 1986 the FDA approved the first
genetically engineered vaccine for humans, for hepatitis B. Since
these early uses of the technology in medicine, the use of genetic
engineering has expanded to supply many drugs and vaccines, as well
as its use in the food chain, which remains controversial in many
parts of the world, although no longer among scientists.
Gene therapy, in the
sense of the delivery of 'good' or 'curative' dna into humans in
order to cure or ameliorate genetically-caused conditions, is also
already widely practised. It affects only the 'somatic' dna rather
than the 'germ-line' dna, and is therefore not transmissible to
children. It is a blunt weapon, and perhaps will never be otherwise,
because of the difficulty of replacing all of the errant dna in
a body on a continuing basis. For some localized conditions affecting
only specialized types of cell, that can happen, but in most situations
treatment has to be ongoing and is never more than partial.
Existing gene therapy
could therefore be seen as a stop-gap measure pending the application
of germ-line therapy at the embryonic stage. The problems in introducing
germ-line therapy are by now at least as much ethical
as practical. What is acceptable today in therapeutic terms, such
as in vitro fertilization and the
selection of early-stage embryos to head off diseases and to select
the sex of a child, stops short at the 'improvement' of the human
genome on a more systematic basis.
The techniques for
more direct interference with the dna of an embryo already exist,
however, and have been tested in animals. See Appendix
Five for a fuller account of the current state of such technologies.
Scientists and legislators
are hesitating before permitting changes to be made to human embryos.
Many of them are completely against it, so that while it seems a
certainty that it will come to pass, it is difficult to know the
time-scale.
It
will take perhaps another 15 years (until 2020, say) for medical
researchers to establish safe in vitro fertilization practices,
based on statistical studies; but after that it will be hard for
governments to justify holding back permission for remedial dna
manipulation. The mechanism of expression of the various genes and
accompanying 'nonsense' dna, mitchondrial filaments, etc, will have
been worked out to a high degree by 2030, at least as regards those
attributes which are particularly desirable or undesirable.
Given
the impossibility of distinguishing between what is remedial and
what is 'improvement' (as explained above in the 'bionics' section)
it will then be only a matter of time before 'improvement' becomes
routine, at least within the parameters of what is normal. Such
attributes as height, eye colour, size of organs (you can guess
which will be the most popular), propensity to obesity, propensity
to drug addiction (these last two presumably remedial), facial symmetry,
hair colour and texture, bodily hair growth, length of fingers,
width of palm (for pianists), might all be mutable via reasonably
straightforward genetic adjustment.
No
doubt some form of supervisory body will come into existence which
will arbitrate over doubtful cases, and set the limits to what is
permissible and what is not; and no doubt over time the boundaries
will stretch. It will be hard to prevent people from achieving cheaply
through dna manipulation what they could achieve through bionic
implantation, although the latter will be ethically much easier
to defend. Improved eyesight for instance, could probably be delivered
either way, but surely it's cheaper just to tweak the dna than have
a US$30,000 operation to instal a corneal implant?
It
is a less straightforward question, given the present state of our
knowledge, whether the role of dna mechanisms in the formation and
expression of social behaviour could or should be directly manipulated.
This issue is addressed in the next section.
Cultural
Change
If one thing can be
said with certainty about the cultures of most societies in the
modern world, it is that they are more prescriptive than they used
to be. It's true that in the Middle Ages people led highly circumscribed
lives; but that was mostly due to lack of opportunity rather than
to specific prohibitions issued by the Church or the folk-mote -
the only two ethical arbiters at the time. Although
the Church has declined in influence, and the folk-mote is just
a folk-memory, contemporary society is riddled with prohibitions,
guidance, rules, laws, customs, preferences etc, and far from all
of them originate from government.
This enveloping apparatus
of conformity sits, oddly, alongside a much increased variety of
cultural achievement. And there is no reason to think that the trend
towards a rule-based cultural environment will abate. The
earlier chapters on various dimensions of globalization show how,
on the contrary, the regulatory and ethical framework of our society
will become ever more complex and sophisticated.
On the bright side,
diversity of cultural expression seems welcome in our world. A few
years ago, who could have imaged the Guinness Book of Records, the
world of beach volley-ball, or MySpace, or Napster, or skate-parks,
or Get Me Out Of Here, I'm A Celebrity? And it's not all low-brow:
wrapping buildings, performing Bach's cantatas in 380 different
churches across Europe on the correct feast-days, Hoffnung's Concerto
for Vacuum Cleaners, Dame Edna Everege (OK, middle-brow), Joan Rivers,
pickled sharks, the Santa Fe opera festival . . . it's an endless
and growing list.
All the faculties of
people are being stretched in amazing directions. Instant global
communications, intense competition across all or most of humanity,
insatiable appetite for sensation and entertainment, and very big
piles of money all combine to drive out the boundaries of our culture
- it's a kind of cultural Big Bang.
The
rules however will proliferate as fast as the experiences. What
does this say about human evolution? First of all, with a look back
to the 'bionic' and 'genetic' dimensions of evolution in earlier
paragraphs, it says that individuals wanting to push the boundaries
of achievement and experience will want the very best and most elaborated
bodily, sensory and cognitive equipment with which to do it, so
that they will constitute an unstoppable force towards the development
and use of new technological possibilities.
Secondly, it says that
there will be pressure for 'standardization' of citizens because
of such phenomena as 'political correctness', the desire to control
errant behaviour such as violence, racism or paedophilia, and the
array of phobias that society is building up directed towards smoking,
drinking, obesity and drug-taking. There are already plenty of studies
that seek to link such behaviours to chromosomal 'abnormalities'
or anyway particular features of a person's dna; and pressure for
behaviour to carry appropriate financial penalties. It
will be a short step from refusing free public treatment for smoking-related
diseases (already creeping in) to compulsory gene therapy for damaging
addictions, to a generalized pressure on parents to ensure that
their children-to-be do not have the propensity to drink, smoke,
drug or abuse other children.
The
development of technologies permitting intensified communication
between people, as outlined in earlier sections of this chapter,
and in the previous chapter, will also bring a need for improvement,
in this case at the cognitive level. Internet-inspired
collaborations affecting many aspects of life, some
of them currently under nation state control, and the development
of direct brain-to-brain or brain-to-robot communication, perhaps
in shared cognitive spaces, will generate demand for faster and
broader psychological performance. The development
of the brain is guided by an intricate interaction between the genome
and a child's environment, but beyond question, there will be ways
in which dna can be changed to favour desired outcomes. Some of
these are explored in the next chapter.
None of the changes
outlined above will require public legislation - although there
well may be some. Once the technologies exist, they simply require
cultural pressure, which is even more effective. The
result will be a further reinforcing of the rightfulness and usefulness
of therapies which improve the life chances of individuals in our
particular world - and that means eugenic tampering with dna.
Once the Rubicon is
crossed in terms of the acceptability of eugenic engineering, culturally-driven
'improvement' of the human genome will surely follow, again starting
with free public programmes to improve cognitive functioning, including
for instance the teachability of children
(no more dyslexia, no more hyper-activity attention deficit - no
child left behind!), and ending with major global programmes for
the elimination of some agreed-upon undesirable human characteristics
and the enhancement of other, more desirable ones.
Perhaps this is a frightening
prospect. But is it more frightening than the prospect of more Hiroshimas,
Biafras, Darfurs, Gulags or Kristallnachten? This book doesn't have
an answer for such questions; but one day they will have to be asked
and answered.
Summary
The combination of
technological possibility with consumer demand and cultural pressures
will ensure that major change will occur in the human genome during
the remainder of this century. And these changes will increasingly
come about because of the conscious will of individuals and society,
rather than as the result of Darwinian evolution as such.
By the end of the century,
human genetic variation will be greater than it is now on the dimension
of desired characteristics, but narrower than it is now on the dimension
of 'undesirable' characteristics such as vulnerability to disease
or propensity to 'antisocial' behaviours.
Theoretically, humans
will already be effectively immortal in bodily terms through a combination
of bionic prostheses and genetic adaptation to ageing processes.
Robots
will equal or exceed humans in terms of most types of cognitive
ability; but the distinction between humans and robots will be more
or less academic in the sense that humans will be able to inhabit
the brains of robots through wireless or magnetic links, making
them (the robots) no more than extensions of the human brain, on
a level with an arm or a leg. Such developments are explored in
the next two chapters.
Footnotes:
1.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, 1744 - 1829, French naturalist, is remembered
for his evolutionary work and in particular for his now discredited
theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. He proposed
that changes taking place in life (prior to breeding, evidently)
due to the effect of environment or the over- or under-use of particular
organs are preserved by reproduction to new individuals which arise.
Darwin's work however showed that the primary principle of evolution
is selection, and Mendel demonstrated the mechanisms of genetic
selection. Lamarck's theory was therefore abandoned, although very
recently it has begun to seem that some of the mechanisms of genetic
inheritance at the level of DNA may be open to change during the
lifetime of an individual.
2.
Nicolelis, M , Carmena, J, and Henriquez, C (2003) Monkeys Consciously
Control a Robot Arm Using Only Brain Signals, article published
online in the Public Library of Science (PLoS)
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