by Chip Walter
It could be that they are bound to other genetic talents that are extremely important to human survival, like speech and creativity, for example. One current theory is that schizophrenia is a “disorder of language” that represents a trade–off some Homo sapiens made in exchange for the remarkable gift of speech and consciousness the rest of us enjoy. Says Crespi, “You can think of schizophrenics as paying the price of all the cognitive and language skills that humans have.” That may explain why 1 percent of the human race suffers from some form of schizophrenia.
Multiple theories connect schizophrenia and autism to the evolution of our ability to symbolize others and model their behavior in our minds; and our unique talent for symbolizing ourselves by using systems like language to talk to ourselves, imagine what others are thinking and intend, and envision events that haven’t yet happened and never may.
Individually, the origins of both illnesses may be the result of brain development in childhood that misfires. Since the prefrontal cortex is, ultimately, a consequence of neoteny, the precise timing that the development of a modern human brain requires may be the source of both disorders. Some scientists have speculated that in schizophrenics, neoteny is retarded, or processes it sets in motion aren’t completed. It’s interesting that in most schizophrenics severe symptoms don’t show themselves until around eighteen years of age, or older, when the brain has placed the majority of its design in order.
In the case of autism the complex cerebral structures and relationships that make Theory of Mind, language, and symbolization possible could all be affected early in development. We already know the brains of autistic children grow significantly faster and larger than normal between the ages of one and sixteen months of age and remain larger until ages three to four. Researchers have also found that children with autism develop 67 percent more neurons in their prefrontal cortex and have heavier brains for their age compared to typically developing children. It’s almost as if connections made prior to birth and early in life arrive before they can be properly deployed.
With both illnesses something like a genetic wrench seems to have been thrown into the complex developmental processes that construct the foundations of a human mind during those long childhoods that neoteny has made possible. The timing and expression of genes that catalyze the cerebral alchemy of human behavior falter somehow, and once they do, it changes the brain in ways that aren’t easily repaired, at least not based on what we know today.
Still there is a larger point to all of this. Mental illness, a state in which the mind is unable to get a solid handle on what the rest of us generally agree is “real,” could not exist until nature first created a brain that could model the thing we call reality in the first place. That means it takes a human mind to suffer mentally. Cats, dogs, and other primates may endure depression or grow sad, they may develop lifelong fears and strong addictions, but they don’t hear voices, imagine alternate realities, or suffer from an inability to speak or empathize. And they don’t because they never enjoyed those capabilities in the first place and never will.
Further advances in genetics and brain imaging may reveal exactly how mental illnesses like these work and in the process expose to us some of the slick tricks the brain plays to create the illusions of self and reality. These advances already hint that the borders between reality and delusion are slim. Or more accurately, that reality is an delusion, just an extremely useful one. In some ways the brain is like the Wizard of Oz, standing hidden behind a curtain, spinning the wheels and operating the levers that create the illusory symbols that make our “I’ and our reality possible.
All of this happens because of the elegant physical, pharmacological, and electrical interactions of the three pounds or so of wetware you currently tote around in your skull. These trillions of cerebral interactions know nothing of jealousy, love, passion, creativity, or sadness, and yet out of them emerge the threaded experiences we perceive as ourselves living a life connected, to varying degrees, to all the other humans that we encounter every day, day in and day out, until the brain that makes it all possible finally ceases to function.
Once the human brain materialized in the form that we now know, outfitted with its genius for creating and shuffling the symbols that make language, imaginary worlds, and, above all, that phenomenon Hofstadter calls the “anatomically invisible, terribly murky thing called I,” creatures emerged that could dream, act on their dreams, and share them with the other “I’s” around them. And that changed the world.
Our special talent isn’t simply that we can conjure symbols or even weave elaborate, illusory tapestries of them, but that we can share these with one another, roping together both our “selves” and our imaginings, linking uncounted minds into rambunctious networks where thoughts and insights, feelings and emotions, breed still more ideas to be further shared. Creativity is contagious this way, and once a light emerged, it must have gone off like fireworks.
This has made every human a kind of neuron in a vast brain of humans, jabbering and bristling with creativity, pooling, pulling, and bonding ideas into that elaborate, rambling edifice we have come to call human civilization. In this way memesh have traveled along the transit lines of our relationships, some of them seeing their way to reality, others run aground for lack of interest or use, selected out and gone extinct as surely as dodos, dinosaurs, and the flightless crake.
The wheel is a great example of a meme. So are the arch and the soufflé and a catchy tune like “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,” or plumbing, sanitation, myths, and the Pythagorean theorem. Once upon a time, someone conjured up a large, circular thing that helped move heavy loads when paired with other similar circular things, and the idea stuck and was shared—wheel!
As memes spread, they mutate and combine with other memes and snap together in our social worlds as neatly as genes do in the molecular one. They breed only because we humans have the ability to both conceive and duplicate them, using all of the symbols we so ardently exchange.
The voice we had begun to hear in our heads—perhaps fifty thousand years ago—was a harbinger and a catalyst, the first step we needed to take before we could attempt to direct our own lives, fashion memes, and then transform them (for better or worse) into reality. At first the sharing must have been slow. It takes time for ideas to be passed along and built upon in a world where only a few tens of thousands of symbol–making creatures live. Still, compared with the geologic and genetic measures of time that preceded it, these changes came swiftly, and they gathered speed exponentially. Inside of forty thousand years agriculture and animal domestication were widely adopted, then came settlements, villages, and towns. Cities in Mesopotamia and the Middle East arose a mere nine thousand years ago. Despite wars, famine, disease, and natural disasters, we have surged forward since, inventing science, a global economy, vast communication systems that exchange thick streams of media, immensely complex governments and businesses, all of them, in their way, ceaselessly shuttling the proliferating agglomerations of human thinking around the globe every day—a humming and titanic network consisting of seven billion symbol–makers busily exchanging their symbols. Thanks to us they move from one mind to another as surely as genes move and mutate from one person to another.
Was the emergence of a brain—shaped in childhood and capable of symbolizing its owner—the final piece in the human puzzle, the last brick that completed the construction of what we today call truly “human”? Was this the evolutionary act that made civilization possible? We will never know for certain because we weren’t around at the moment of modern human awakening.
Trying to figure out how that white light of the first symbolic insight came together is a lot like reverse engineering some alien engine we have found in a desert, fully operational, but without a manual. My guess is we will never fully comprehend how we turned the corner to become the human beings we are today. The brain itself may be the issue. Maybe the mind that it makes possible will always find its
elf just short of grasping how it creates its illusions, or why. Too much is at work in the unconscious, too much unavailable mystery. It doesn’t mean we can’t try, though, the way phycisists have tried to approach absolute zero. By definition it is impossible to get to a place where there is nothing, but we can keep working to get closer. As with the quest to reach absolute zero, maybe we can only ride upon the illusions it conjures and see where they lead. At least until a new kind of human evolves.
Epilogue: The Next Human
The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past, fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.
—Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey
In the Bay of Naples, not far from the shadow of Vesuvius, swim two seemingly unremarkable creatures, a common sea slug, and a jellyfish, called a medusa. The jellyfish, researchers know, carelessly bob through the upper waters of the bay and after birth quickly mature into full–grown, elegant adults. The sea slug’s larvae also contentedly ride the water’s currents, apparently happy to live the lives that such snails generally do. You wouldn’t think that these creatures could possibly have anything to do with one another, but it turns out they are intimately and strangely connected.
Marine biologists first saw this connection when they noticed that full–grown versions of the snails had a small, vestigial parasite attached near their mouth. Nothing you would immediately notice. But when they did notice it and looked further into the whole affair, they made their remarkable discovery. It seems that as the slug larvae bob through the bay, they often become entangled in the tentacles of the medusa and are then swallowed up into its umbrella–shaped body. At this point you would assume that the larvae would soon be done in as nice morsels by the predator jellyfish, but, that is not how it goes. Instead, and astonishingly, it is the snails that begin to dine, voraciously—first on the radial canals of the jellyfish, then on the borders of the rim, and finally on the tentacles themselves, until the medusa disappears altogether and is replaced by rather a large slug, with the small bud of a parasite attached to its skin right near its mouth.
Lewis Thomas, the fine physician, researcher, and essayist, told this story in his wonderful 1970s book The Medusa and the Snail to illustrate how peculiar and connected life on earth is. It certainly does that, but I’m recounting it here because in the eccentric relationship of these two creatures lies the echo of what the future holds in store for the human race.
Usually at this point in a book like this, the inevitable—and heavily loaded—question arises, what next? Where will human evolution take us now after our long and astonishing adventures? Are we still evolving? And if we are, what will the next act look like? Can we expect ever–enlarging brains to cram themselves behind alienlike foreheads? Or will our noggins contract to the size of a walnut, shrunk down by media overload and pharmaceuticals (the dimensions of the human brain have diminished 10 percent over the past thirty thousand years)? Or perhaps we will grow weak, fat, and small of limb, vaguely resembling Jabba the Hutt, while simultaneously sprouting an extra digit or two to better handle all of the texting we do? It might even be possible, as one scientist has speculated, that we will diverge into two subspecies, one fit and beautiful and the other overweight and slovenly, a kind of real–world version of the Eloi and Morlocks in H. G. Wells’s Time Machine, except without the cannibalism and enslavement, we hope.i
Evolution, as the past four billion years have repeatedly illustrated, holds an endless supply of tricks up its long and ancient sleeve. Anything is possible, given enough millennia. Inevitably the forces of natural selection will require us to branch out into differentiated versions of our current selves, like so many Galápagos finches … assuming, that is, that we have enough time to leave our evolution to our genes. We won’t, though, and none of these scenarios will come to pass. Instead, we will come to an end, and rather soon. We may be the last apes standing, but we won’t be standing for long.
A startling thought, this, but all of the gears and levers of evolution indicate that when we became the symbolic creature, an animal capable of ardently transforming fired synapses into decisions, choices, art, and invention, we simultaneously caught ourselves in our own cross–hairs. Because with these deft and purposeful powers, we also devised a new kind of evolution, the cultural variety, driven by creativity and invention. So began a long string of social, cultural, and technological leaps unencumbered by old biological apparatuses such as proteins and molecules.
At first glance you might think that this would be a boon to our kind. How better to better our lot than with fire and wheels, steam engines, automobiles, fast food, satellites, computers, cell phones, and robots, not to mention mathematics, money, art, and literature, each conspicuously designed to reduce work and improve the quality of our lives. But it turns out not to be that simple. Improvements sometimes have unintended consequences. With the execution of every bright new idea it seems we find ourselves instantly in need of still newer solutions that only seem to make the world more kerfuffled. We are ginning up so much change, fashioning thingamabobs, weaponry, pollutants, and complexity in general, so swiftly, that as creatures genetically bred to a planet quite recently bereft of technical and cultural convolutions, we are having an exceedingly difficult time keeping up, even though we are the agents of the very change that is throttling us. The consequence of our incessant innovating is that it has led us inevitably, paradoxically, irrevocably, to invent a world for which we are altogether ill fit. We have become medusae to our own snails, devouring ourselves nearly out of existence. The irony of this is Shakespearean in its depth and breadth. In ourselves we may finally have met our match: an evolutionary force to which even we cannot adapt.
We are undoing ourselves because the old baggage of our evolution impels us to. We already know that every animal wants power over its environment and does its level best to gain it. Our DNA demands survival. It is just that the neoteny that has made us the Swiss Army knife of creatures, and the last ape standing has only amplified, not replaced, the primal drives of the animals we once were. Fear, rage, and appetites that cry for instant gratification are still very much with us. That combination of our powers of invention and our ancient needs will, I suspect, soon carry us off from the grand emporium of living things.
The best evidence that we are growing ragged at the hands of the Brave New World we have busily been rolling off the assembly line is the growing numbers of us who freely admit to being thoroughly stressed. A recent study reported that the United States is “a nation at a critical crossroads when it comes to stress and health.”j Americans are caught in a vicious cycle: managing stress in unhealthy ways while assembling insurmountable barriers that prevent them from revising their behavior to undo the damage they are inflecting on themselves. As a result, 68 percent of the population is overweight. Almost 34 percent are obese. (This is rarely a problem in hunter–gatherer cultures.) Three in ten Americans say they are depressed, with depression most prevalent between the ages of forty–five and sixty–five. Forty–two percent report being irritable or angry, and 39 percent nervous or anxious. Gen Xers and so–called Millenniums admit to being more stressed about personal relationships than even their baby–boomer parents. It’s so bad that the results of our anxieties have found their way into dental offices, where dentists now spend far more of their time treating patients for jaw pain, receding gums, and worn teeth than they did thirty years ago. Why? Because we are tense and anxious, grinding our teeth down to nubs as we sleep.
Stress, as the experience of lab rats everywhere has repeatedly testified, is a sign that a living thing is growing increasingly unfit for the world in which it lives, and as Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace astutely observed more than 150 years ago, when a living thing and its envir
onment are no longer a good match, something has to give, and it is always the living thing.
How are we handling our stress? Not too well. Rather than relaxing or getting more exercise when pressures mount, studies show that we instead skip meals, spend more time online or in front of the TV, then overeat and lie awake at night perfectly prepared to enter the next day bleary–eyed, short–tempered, and exhausted. What triggers this behavior? Those old primal drives and appetites we struggle so mightily to ignore.
Which returns us to the question, what next?
Our demise doesn’t have to be a Terminator–style annihilation that leaves the world emptied of all humans, postapocalyptic cities stark and decaying with the smashed remains of our cultural accomplishments. It may be more of a butterfly–like metamorphosis, a transformation in which we step over the Rubicon of our old selves and emerge as a new creature built on our own backs without ever realizing, at least early on, that we are no longer the species we thought we were. Did the first Neanderthal know that he, or she, was no longer Homo heidelbergensis? Those passages are made gradually.
Perhaps we will simply morph into Cyber sapiens,k a new human, infinitely more intelligent than you or I are, perhaps more socially adept, or at least able to juggle large tribes of friends, acquaintances, and business associates with the skill of a circus performer. A creature more capable of keeping up with the change it generates. To handle the challenges of time shortages and long distances, Cyber sapiens may even be able to bilocate or split off multiple, digital versions of themselves, each of whom can blithely live separate lives and then periodically rejoin their various digital selves so that they become a supersize version of a single person. Imagine being able, unlike Robert Frost’s traveler in his poem “The Road Not Taken,” to choose both paths, each with a separate version of yourself. It makes you wonder if something essential in us might disappear should such possibilities come to pass. But then, perhaps, that is what will make the new species new.