Tomorrowland

by Kotler, Steven

  What all this information provided was a population-eye view of life in the nineteenth century, which is what Fogel needed to understand broad trends and reach startling conclusions. The first of those conclusions, which he and Engerman detailed in their now famous Time on the Cross: An Economic Analysis of American Negro Slavery, was that Conrad and Meyer were correct: slavery, while still morally repugnant, was neither as inefficient nor as unprofitable as most historians assumed.

  “As it turns out,” recounts Fogel, “most slaves, especially those on smaller plantations, were fed better and lived in better conditions than free men in the North. This meant they lived longer, healthier lives and thus produced more work. Certainly, it’s an odious conclusion, but it’s right there in the data.”

  And then things got even stranger.

  Around 1988, Fogel began to notice another trend in the data: Over the past three hundred years, but predominantly in the past century, Americans have been growing taller. They have also been getting thicker, living longer, and growing richer. In 1850, for example, the average American male was 5´7˝ and 146 lbs. By 1980, those numbers had jumped to 5´10˝ and 174 lbs. And, as it turned out, it wasn’t just Americans. Working with a team of economists, Fogel expanded this inquiry internationally, and the trends turned out to be global. “Over the past 300 years,” he says, “humans have increased their average body size by over 50 percent, average longevity by more than 100 percent, and greatly improved the robustness and capacity of vital organ systems.”

  From an evolutionary perspective, three hundred years is an eye-blink. A sneeze. Not nearly enough time for these sorts of radical improvements. In fact, according to Darwin’s theory of evolution, none of these developments should even be possible.

  2.

  To understand what should be possible, it helps to understand a little more about Darwin’s theory. For starters, evolution is a search engine, but not a very good one. We’re not talking Google. We might be talking Google drunk, blindfolded, on crutches, and with a frontal lobotomy. This is why the Nobel laureate Francis Jacob described evolution as a tinkerer, not an engineer. Engineers know where they’re going — they have a plan, an aim, an end result in mind. Tinkerers are just fastening parts together, glomming this bit on to that in an exploration of functionality that is both goalless and relentless.

  The realization that evolution’s search engine proceeds blindly, thus gradually, came from Darwin. Before he came along, the assumption was that the process proceeded by huge leaps — which was the only way anyone could explain the sudden appearance of new species. Darwin saw things differently. He had been thinking long and hard about scarcity. He realized that because resources are often scarce, organisms are always in competition with one another. In this endless battle, those individuals who happen to possess some slight innate advantage will flourish, and pass along that advantage to their descendants. By this method, new species could be created — one imperfect change at a time. But this certainly wasn’t going to happen quickly.

  In fact, historically, massive geological shifts — like a meteor impact or an ice age — turn out to be the only way to speed up the process. What these shifts provide is a wedge that opens up novel ecological niches, new possibilities for the search engine of evolution to explore. This fits-and-starts hypothesis — what in 1972 evolutionary theorists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge dubbed “punctuated equilibrium” — helps explain the sudden appearance of new species in the fossil record. But really, there’s nothing all that sudden about it — according to Gould, those periods of punctuation span roughly 50,000 to 100,000 years.

  The point is this: Natural selection is a plodder’s game. It dithers. It wanders. Mildly beneficial mutations do not become radical steps forward overnight. Sure, one individual might be significantly taller or smarter or more long-lived than his peers, but no matter how beneficial the change, extremely long stretches of time are required for it to spread across an entire population. Those are the rules — or, at least until Robert Fogel came along — those were supposed to be the rules.

  3.

  Fogel spent the next two decades trying to figure out why humans were suddenly breaking those rules. He came to believe a steady stream of technological improvement — advances in food production, distribution, sanitation, public health, and medicine — facilitated our rapidly advancing evolutionary processes. “In the past hundred years,” says Fogel, “humans have gained an unprecedented degree of control over their environment, a degree of control so great that it sets them apart not only from all other species, but from all previous generations of Homo sapiens.”

  Fogel’s core idea, which he calls techno-physio evolution and explained most fully in his 2011 book The Changing Body (cowritten with Roderick Floud, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong), is fairly straightforward: “The health and nutrition of one generation contributes, through mothers and through infant and childhood experience, to the strength, health, and longevity of the next generation; at the same time, increased health and longevity enable the members of that next generation to work harder and longer and to create resources which can then, in their turn, be used to assist the next, and succeeding, generations to prosper.”

  These notions are not entirely new. Economists have known for almost a hundred years of a correlation between height, income, and longevity. What had not been properly explained was mechanism, or how this process worked. The idea that humans can take control of evolution’s trajectory has been around since the 1970s, when polio vaccine discoverer Jonas Salk argued that humanity had entered a new era, which he dubbed “meta-biological evolution,” where we have the potential to control and direct evolution (our own and that of other species). Moreover, the now well-established field of epigenetics has shown us that a myriad of factors beyond alterations in DNA can produce heritable change in an organism.

  Fogel, though, goes farther by going faster. “It’s a ‘whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts’ argument,” he explains. “We’re talking about an incredible synergy between technology and biology, about very simple improvements — pasteurization, a general reduction of pollutants, cleaning up our water supply — producing heritable effects across populations faster than ever before. Think about this: humans are a 200,000-year-old species. When we first emerged, our life span was twenty years. By the turn of the twentieth century, it had become forty-four years. We advanced by twenty-four years over the course of 200,000 years. But today, it’s eighty years. These simple improvements doubled our longevity in a century.”

  University of Munich economist John Komlos explains further: “Evolution designed us to be quite plastic: Our size expands in good times and contracts in bad. As opposed to being hardwired and unable to adapt to environmental conditions, this [flexibility] provided an evolutionary advantage. The gain in body mass that Fogel observed began in the 1920s — when people started working more sedentary jobs, driving automobiles, and listening to the radio — then started skyrocketing in the 1950s — with the introduction of television and fast food — and today has become an obesity epidemic. All in eighty years. We didn’t know this much change was possible this quickly; we didn’t know that extrinsic factors could make this kind of difference. Techno-physio evolution shows that economics has an impact at the cellular level — that it goes bone deep.”

  4.

  Since Fogel first began this work, his ideas haven’t stayed balkanized in economics. Everyone from cultural anthropologists to population geneticists have begun investigating the phenomenon. In a summary article published in February of 2010 in Nature Review Genetics, an international team of biologists argue that the interplay between genes and culture (with culture including things like economics and technology) has profoundly shaped evolution, especially when it comes to the speed of the process. “Gene-culture dynamics are typically faster, stronger, and operate over a broader range of conditions than conventional evolutionary dynamics,” writes lead author Kevin Leland
, a biologist from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, “leading some practitioners to argue that gene-culture co-evolution [sometimes called dual inheritance theory] could be the dominant mode of human evolution.”

  In a very real sense, the process Leland calls gene-culture evolution and Fogel dubbed techno-physio evolution are just examples of punctuated equilibrium by a different name, with culture rather than catastrophe providing the new niches. The main difference is in frequency. Naturally occurring geologic events are historically rare occurrences. Technological progress, meanwhile, is ever-accelerating.

  This is no small detail. In recent years, researchers have found that the same exponential growth rates underpinning computing (Moore’s Law, for example) show up in all information-based technologies. Thus fields with a huge potential to drive techno-physio evolution — artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biology, robotics, networks, sensors, etc. — are now advancing along exponential growth curves. Consider genomic sequencing, long touted as the “essential tool” needed to move medicine from standardized and reactive to personalized and preventative. In 1990, when the Human Genome Project was first announced, the cost of this tool was budgeted at $3 billion — about as far from personalized medicine as one can get. But by 2001, costs were down to $300 million. By 2010, they were below $5,000. In 2012, the $1,000 barrier had fallen. Within ten years, at the current rate of decline, a fully sequenced human genome will price out at less than $10. If standardized and reactive medicine managed to double human life span in a century, just imagine how far personalized and preventative medicine might extend that total.

  Fogel’s work documents how an increase in control over our external environment impacts our biology. But the fields that are now growing exponentially are cutting out the middleman, allowing us to take direct control over our internal environment. “Exponentially growing technology changes the evolutionary discussion,” says molecular geneticist and Autodesk distinguished researcher Andrew Hessel, “because, if you follow those patterns out, you very quickly see that this is the century we take control over our genome. Just look at the technologies surrounding reproduction: fetal testing, genetic screening, pregnancy monitoring, genetic counseling. When I was a child, Down syndrome was a real problem. Today, roughly 90 percent of all fetuses with Down syndrome are aborted. Play these patterns forward and we aren’t long from the day when we’re engineering our children: choosing skin color, eye color, personality traits. How long after that until parents are saying: ‘I bought you the best brain money can buy — now why don’t you use it?’ ”

  5.

  Of course, this massive acceleration of natural selection raises additional questions — like how much does it take to create an entirely new species? Dartmouth neuroscientist Richard Granger, who works on brain evolution, doesn’t think it will take much.

  “Think about dogs,” he says. “Used to be they all looked like wolves. Now they don’t. In just a few thousand years of messing around with their genes, humans have created canine breeds that are completely physically incompatible — a Great Dane and a Chihuahua could not produce offspring without help. How much longer until they’re genomically incompatible? There’s nothing surprising here. When you start messing around with genes you get radiation [rapid, radical change]: It’s true in dogs, and it’s true in humans.”

  Think of it like this: When a subset of a population is isolated from their ancestry, as this subset rushes to fill new — competitor-free — niches, the result is rapid evolutionary change, or allopatric speciation. But the exponential changes occurring today are examples of what could be called technopatric speciation, a process that occurs when a species is technologically isolated from their ancestry. Either way, the results are the same: rapid radiation.

  Right now, humans are the only hominid species on earth, but this wasn’t always the case and, as these techno-physio trends continue to unfold, it seems unlikely to remain the case. Juan Enríquez, founding director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School, believes we’ve already fractured our species. “We’re now no more than a generation or two away from the emergence of an entirely new kind of hominid,” he says. “Homo evolutus: a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over their own evolution and the evolution of other species.”

  The standard science fiction version of what happens after we take control of our evolution usually runs along eugenic lines — leading toward efforts to build a master race. But the situation is nowhere near that straightforward. Seemingly unambiguous genetic goals — like trying to make people more intelligent — not only involve millions of genes, raising the specter of easy error, but might involve conditional relationships. For instance, our intelligence might be tied to memory in ways we can’t yet decode, so trying to improve one’s ability might inadvertently impede the other.

  Moreover, without some form of top-down control, there’s little proof that human desires will be uniform enough to produce a master race. “Sure,” says Hessel, “we may begin optimizing ourselves and engineering our children, but it’s unlikely this will occur in a uniform way. We’re still human. So we’re going to engineer our children based on our egos, our creativity, our whims — this pretty much guarantees all sorts of wild varieties. It’s highly improbable that all of these varieties will be able to interbreed successfully, not without the use of technology. That’s when we really splinter the species; that’s why Homo evolutus could easily end up the parent to a Cambrian explosion of subspecies — a radical explosion of entirely new breeds of humans.”

  Science is not always factually accurate, but it’s usually directionally accurate. It is the result of torturous investigation, vociferous argument, and hard-won consensus. One of the best tests of veracity is when conclusions reached in multiple fields begin to strongly overlap. And that’s exactly what’s happening here. Fogel got the process started, but today, researchers from nearly a dozen different arenas have all lit onto the same conclusions. We have stepped on the gas of natural selection, turbo-boosted evolution, and are now speeding toward the end of an era — the era of Homo sapiens, which is, of course, the only era we have ever known.

  In short, we started out us, but we’re becoming them.

  Vision Quest

  THE WORLD’S FIRST ARTIFICIAL VISION IMPLANT

  I spent over a year exploring the cutting edge of artificial vision research for this story. I had all my facts. I was set to start writing. Then my editor received a postcard in the mail from a mostly unknown and somewhat controversial vision researcher. Essentially, all it said was: “Hello, I’m William Dobelle, I’ve built an artificial vision brain implant. It’s about to be installed in a human being, come check it out.”

  Neither of us knew what to think. Certainly, I didn’t believe such a technology was possible. After a year spent delving into the field, no one I had met along the way was even close to a workable device, forget about one that could be installed in humans. But due diligence is due diligence, so I got on a plane.

  Staggering doesn’t come close to describing what I found when I landed. Day one: I met a blind man. Day three: He could see well enough to drive a car around a crowded parking lot.

  According to the World Health Organization, there are 285 million visually impaired people on the planet — most of whom can be helped by this kind of innovation. But the crazier part is what comes next. Dobelle built an implant that restores normal vision, but devices capable of augmented sight — eagle eyes or eyes that see colors outside of our visual spectrum or eyes that have microscopic abilities — are not far behind. We are arguably less than a decade away from talents lifted straight from the pages of comic books. No, staggering doesn’t even come close.

  1.

  I’m sitting across from a blind man — call him Patient Alpha — at a long table in a windowless conference room in New York. On one end of the table there’s an old television and a VCR. On the other end are a couple of laptops. They’re connected
by wires to a pair of homemade signal processors housed in unadorned gunmetal gray boxes, each no bigger than a loaf of bread. In the corner stands a plastic ficus tree, and beyond that, against the far wall, a crowded bookshelf. Otherwise, the walls are white and bare. And when the world’s first bionic eye is turned on, this is what Patient Alpha will see.

  Our guinea pig is thirty-nine, strong and tall, with an angular jaw, large ears, and a rugged face. He looks hale, hearty, and healthy — except for the wires. They run from the laptops into the signal processors, then out again and across the table and up into the air, flanking his face like curtains before disappearing into holes drilled through his skull. Since his hair is dark and the wires are black, it’s hard to see the actual points of entry. From a distance the wires look like long ponytails.

  “Come on,” says William Dobelle. “Take a good look.”

  From a few steps closer, I see that the wires plug into Patient Alpha’s head like a pair of headphones plug into a stereo. The actual connection is metallic and circular, like a common washer. So seamless is the integration that the skin appears to simply stop being skin and start being steel.

  “It’s called a percutaneous pedestal,” Dobelle tells me.

  All I can do is stare. This man has computer jacks sunk into both sides of his skull.

  On the far side of the pedestal, buried beneath hair and skin, is the wetware: a pair of brain implants. Each one is the size of a fat quarter, a platinum electrode array encased in biocompatible plastic.

  Dobelle has designed a three-part system: a miniature video camera, a signal processor, and the brain implants. The camera, mounted on a pair of eyeglasses, captures the scene in front of the wearer. The processor translates the image into a series of signals that the brain can understand, then sends the information to the implant. The picture is fed into the brain, and, if everything goes according to plan, the brain will “see” the image.