Glassing the Orgachine

by David Marusek

  A far-voyaging entity, such as this one, tends to travel light and to remember things only as needed.

  Jace: And you’re remembering it with those purple tulips of yours?

  Found One: Right.

  For much of the history of biologic life on Earth, all knowledge was local. That is, contained in the cells of organisms themselves. Furthermore, it was instinctual. That is, fixed, inborn, and the synthesis of countless generations of trial and error.

  Consider the common spider. The mother spider spins an egg sac out of silk containing hundreds to several thousand fertilized eggs. She may stow the sac someplace safe or carry it around with her. When the tiny spiderlings hatch, they remain dormant in the sac until one fine spring day when they spill out in all directions. They climb blades of grass or fenceposts or any tall structure and tilt their spinnerets to the sky. The breeze draws a dragline of silk from their spinnerets and lifts the spiderlings into the air, transporting them far from their place of origin to start their independent lives.

  From its first moment after leaving the egg sac, a baby spider is a fully functional, albeit immature, independent creature that knows everything it will ever need to know, which is a lot: how to coordinate all those legs, how to molt its exoskeleton to make way for a larger body, how to hide, what’s good to eat and how to consume it, who and what to avoid.

  It knows how to weave an intricate web to capture its food without ever having seen or experienced an existing web. It knows the best places to construct its web for maximal effect. It knows how to immobilize the prey that it catches, how to inject it with digestive enzymes, how to slurp up the result. Eventually, it knows how to attract a mate and reproduce. The male even knows how to offer itself to the female as food, for the good of their young.

  The baby spider needs no lessons from its parents or other spiders to learn any of this. All of this considerable knowledge and more comes preloaded in a tiny dab of neuronal cells that make up its brain. This is local knowledge at its simplest.

  Yet, however impressive this preloaded, instinctual knowledge may be, it’s dangerously slow to adapt to environmental change. Consider the housefly batting itself against your windowpane. It wants to forage for sustenance. It must find nourishment before its limited stock of stored energy is depleted. Everything it senses tells it that it should be able to simply fly through this portal. It can see the sky and clouds and trees and lawn and the alluring pile of dog droppings on the sidewalk outside. And yet, every time it tries to exit, it bangs its head against an invisible barrier. What does it do? Does it stop to assess its predicament? Does it try to piece together a new strategy for escape? No, that’s outside its cognitive parameters. Dealing with glass is not part of its evolutionary repertoire. Its store of local knowledge fails it. So it will continue to bat itself against the windowpane until it drops in exhaustion and dies belly up on your windowsill.

  As the size and complexity of animals increased, as well as their social interactions, so too did the size and complexity of their brains. So much so that an animal fetus’ brain could not contain all of the knowledge it would need during its life. There were too many variables to consider and too many skills necessary for survival than could be stuffed into a brain capable of passing through the bottleneck of the birth canal (or fit into an egg that itself must pass out of the skeletal cage). Thus animals discovered learning and proximal knowledge. Instead of preloading the fetal brain with a comprehensive set of the knowledge necessary for meeting every challenge in life (an increasingly impossible task), natural selection fashioned brains that were primed with tools for localizing proximal knowledge. That is, sharing the knowledge possessed by its parents and peers. In other words, babies learned how to learn.

  Learning, for the most part, builds upon, extends, or replaces preloaded knowledge. While a predator might enter the world with the knowledge of how to chase a fleeing object and how to deliver a killing bite, the young animal must still learn what objects are appropriate to chase and bite and what objects must be left alone on pain of injury or death.

  A songbird is born with the ability to sing, but until it hears the song of an adult of its own species, it doesn’t know what to sing. Birdsong is often a mating signal, and the young bird must learn its species-specific song. It typically learns this song from neighbors, not its parents. If it fails to localize this proximal knowledge during a critical developmental stage in its youth, later, when it matures, it may fail to attract a mate. It falls out of the gene pool, the ultimate fail.

  While the discovery of learning vastly bolstered an animal’s repertoire of knowledge and life skills, it came at a cost. Babies were no longer completely independent at birth. Rather, they had to survive a period of dependency while their bodies matured and they localized the facts of life from their parents, elders, and peers. And parents (often only the mother) could no longer cut and run as soon as they spawned, but had to hang around for weeks or months to protect, feed, and teach their youngsters.

  In a brutish world, the period of pregnancy, birth, and dependency is a vulnerable time for mother and offspring alike, and survival places a high premium on keeping it as brief as possible. Thus a fine balance was struck between the advantages of knowledge and their costs, and this balance was maintained for much of the history of life on Earth.

  One kind of animal evolved a new organ to make it possible to rear its young while on the move. These are the mammals, to which you belong. You are called mammals because you have mammae — breasts — which in the female function to provide complete nourishment, immunological protection, and digestive factors for a voracious baby or babies during their first months of life. What a marvelous innovation you mammals have evolved, the ability to transform a variety of foods — fruits, bark, roots, bugs, krill, flesh — into a consistent, high-caloric, nutritious liquid containing everything a growing brain and body needs.

  And then, about 2.8 million years ago, your closest ancestors formed a separate branch in the hominid family, doubled down on the pursuit of knowledge, overturned the status quo, and eventually underwent your first singularity.

  Jace: Wait. Singularity? As in the rapture of the nerds? When Skynet wakes up and machines rule the world?

  Found One: No. That’s the so-called technological singularity. It’ll be your second singularity, if you survive long enough to experience it. Your first singularity was biologic.

  Jace: Then what is a singularity?

  Found One: In essence, a phase change. It’s a demarcation so fundamental and so profound that members on one side are barely recognizable to those on the other. Your first singularity changed you from beasts to humans and required hundreds of thousands of years to achieve. (Unlike your second one which will have taken less than two centuries.)

  Jace: I always heard that tool use was what set us apart and made us human.

  Found One: Tool use certainly factors into it, but tools brought their own problems, as you shall see. In addition, tool use started your love affair with machines, which will certainly play a role in your next singularity.

  During your first singularity, your brain tripled in size, mostly in the front part, the prefrontal cortex. Your brain also changed its architecture, with improved wiring between the various parts. Consequently, the knowledge that was preloaded in a baby’s brain began to include a winning hand of cognitive tools. Instead of merely reacting to situations in purely reflexive fashion, you learned to consciously anticipate outcomes, good or bad, and to prepare for contingencies. In other words, you invented the concept of the future, with which you could plan for success while at the same time make provisions for possible failure. You invented agriculture, for instance, based on the expectation that planting seeds today would lead to harvesting fruit in the future.

  You invented imagination — the ability to model reality inside your head. You began to look at parts and see the whole or look at the whole and see its parts. To make guesses and assumptions. To count units
and make estimations. To mark time and distances, order objects and events by various systems. To add and subtract and to prioritize actions. You invented language and the ability to communicate knowledge and feelings with symbolic systems. You figured out how to cook food. You became self-aware and learned to laugh at yourself. And in order to take advantage of all this, you increased the density of mirror neurons that primed you for learning to a degree beyond all other animals. Your new brain trumped the old ones every time, and you became the top predator on Earth.

  But while discovering the brave new world of knowledge, you hominins were still saddled with a legacy body. The simian body isn’t bad as bodies go. Your time in the trees has bequeathed you fully articulating shoulders, agile fingers, and the astonishingly useful opposable thumb, as well as color, stereoscopic vision. You learned to walk on two limbs, freeing your clever hands for new duties. You were happy omnivores capable of finding nourishment in any habitat. Your body size and bulk became optimized for the environments you settled in.

  However, you still possessed bony skulls and birth canals and were subject to the size limit of the pelvic bottleneck. The struggle between the value of knowledge and its cost only escalated. So unrelenting was the evolutionary pressure for bigger and faster brains that natural selection tried every trick in its repertoire for maximizing the size and quality of the payload it was able to pass out of the womb, even if doing so jeopardized the lives of individual mothers and babies. (To this day human childbirth remains a tortuous and dangerous affair.)

  The human female evolved broader hips than the male to increase the diameter of her pelvic outlet. But broad hips eventually bumped up against the demands of your famous tool use. Apes knuckle-walked; not so good for wielding a spear or weaving baskets. Tools required freed hands, and hands required an upright stature and bipedal gait. And a bipedal gait required slimmer hips. So during your adoption of tool use, the birth canal actually narrowed in size.

  The human female also evolved hormones during pregnancy that softened the ligaments that held her pelvic bones together to allow a little give during childbirth, adding a few millimeters to the size of her boneheaded offspring.

  Nature further acted on the bonehead itself, making a newborn’s skull soft, flexible, and incomplete for easier passage through the birth canal.

  At the same time, natural selection was taking an altogether different approach by extending the human’s ability to grow and develop its brain after birth — by a great deal. The human brain triples in size outside the mother’s body, and it isn’t fully organized until early adulthood. Your closest primate cousin, the chimpanzee, has a comparable term of pregnancy (eight to nine months), but her baby’s brain is finished growing and organizing itself within a year of birth.

  As a result of these and other evolutionary cheats, the human brain is five times larger than the average brain of mammals of the same body size, and it is considerably more complex. You are so far ahead of the curve in terms of intelligence there is no competition. Congratulations, you won the planet.

  Jace: This is all fascinating stuff, but I’m still waiting to hear what any of it has to do with God.

  Found One: Patience, dear C student. Enlightenment lurks right around the corner.

  As this one has already pointed out, there is a steep price to pay for all of this mental firepower — longterm dependency. Caring for dependent offspring is costly and dangerous for mother and child and, therefore, should last only as long as absolutely necessary. As a consequence of the extraordinary emphasis placed on the brain, the human baby is the most embryonic mammal at birth in the animal kingdom and the one with the longest period of dependency. You might say that every human baby is a preemie. The maturation of its lungs, digestive system, immune system, temperature control system, skeleton and muscles, sensory systems, and so forth has been held back in favor of brain size. In effect, the human baby is still gestating outside its mother’s body.

  Compare your bundle of joy to the baby ringed seal in Arctic waters. The mother seal must climb out onto an ice floe in order to give birth to her young. Birthing a pup is a very precarious affair considering that the seal’s chief predator, the polar bear, can smell blood from miles away. So the less time spent on the surface of the ice the better. Fortunately, after only four days of nursing, the seal pup is already mature enough to push itself off the ice into the frigid water to follow its mother underwater to safety. Meanwhile, the human baby can’t even roll itself over for the first three or four months of life.

  Or take the baby horse that is able to walk only hours after birth, while the human baby takes a year to get the hang of it, and even then can only toddle.

  Such a long way you humans have come from the spider, fish, or turtle, who have negligible parenting skills, or even from your fellow mammals, who are finished parenting in a matter of months. By two or three years, almost all baby mammals are ready to leave their parents’ care, and just as importantly, the parents are ready to see them go. How independent is a human at two years? Four years? Eighteen years? (Twenty years? Thirty?)

  Clearly, human parents have signed on for the long haul. And while mother moose might wander harmlessly away from her grown calf after two years without giving it another thought, you humans continue to nurture junior eight or ten times longer.

  This one has spoken about learning, about how complex creatures need to supplement their preloaded knowledge by localizing the knowledge of their parents and society. Now consider this. What good is it for Nature to select for parents who are able and willing to nurture and teach their young at considerable cost to themselves if junior isn’t equally able and willing to learn from them?

  What good does it do when the polar bear is loping across the ice floes if the baby seal doesn’t know it’s got to follow mom into the water?

  The ability to learn relies on complementary instincts. Parents must feel compelled to teach their young, and their young must feel compelled to learn from their parents. Like a pair of pliers, you need both jaws for either to function. This holds true for all mammals but is especially true for humans. If human parents must endure nurturing their offspring ten times longer than other mammals, their offspring must likewise be able to pay attention to them for just as long.

  For brains that come preloaded with everything the creature needs to know, like spiders or frogs, you need no parenting after birth. But consider for a moment what it’s like to be a brand new human. For months you’ve been swimming in a warm bath of contentment. Then, abruptly, you are rudely squeezed out and forced to draw your first breath, the first act you must accomplish for yourself. The world around you is a firehose of sensory impressions, and you struggle to bear its unrelenting force: loud noises, empty belly, too much hot, too much cold, too much wet, fatigue, thirst, you name it. But you are a game little critter, and you have a built-in drive to attract to yourself the attention of a higher power. During your first months of life, your little baby brain is programmed to relentlessly scan your environment for a very distinct visual pattern, a trapezoidal shape consisting of two spots, set a certain distance apart, and a slash. That is, two eyes and a mouth in the proportions of a human face. You lock on to this target with laser intensity and coo and smile at it. You don’t know what the act of smiling is or what it is that you’re smiling at; it’s all stimulus and response at this stage. You see the trapezoid, you smile. You see it again, you coo. You shake your tiny fists and kick your tiny feet. These automatic reactions in turn stimulate the object of your smiles to pay attention to you, which triggers another round of coos and smiles on your part in a feedback loop of mutual fascination. Your chubby cheeks and adorable button nose add fuel to the fire.

  Meanwhile, your mushrooming baby brain is rewarded (spritzed with neurochemicals like dopamine and oxytocin) each time you succeed in attracting such attention, as is the brain of your admirer. A mutually rewarding bond is quickly formed. It’s all very mechanical, and it guarantees that yo
u won’t be forgotten in a shopping cart in the Walmart parking lot.

  For mother loves you totally and for all time. She is the source of all good in the world, all comfort and security, sweet lullabies, warm milk to fill your emptiness, and the sounds and scent of toasty, cozy intimacy. She is all powerful. She can lift you up — literally — to her sweet bosom. She can cast you down — literally — into darkness and despair. She is omniscient; she reads your mind and knows what you need before you do. She will move mountains for you and protect you from all harm. She is always there, you are her special creation, and your greatest torment is to be separated from her.

  If you were a ringed seal, this paradise would go on for four days, and then you’d be humping your fat little rump to the nearest hole in the ice with a polar bear on your tail.

  But you’re not a ringed seal; you’re a sweet little human, and this coddling treatment will continue for years. Naturally, you won’t consciously remember any of it later, but her power and glory are engraved on the very cells of your rapidly expanding brain. They leave an indelible impression on you, a proto-memory of a loving, personal deity.

  Alas, all good things must come to an end. When, after two years of nurturing her calf, mother moose goes her separate way, she does not pine for junior, nor he for her. Since moose are not herd animals and have no society of peers, mother and child make a clean break from each other and live solitary lives. A switch in their brains toggles from full on to full off. It’s like this for most mammals. The instincts to provide care or to receive care, like many other developmental instincts, are simply extinguished when their utility expires.

  The switchover is different for social mammals, like wolves, gorillas, and prairie dogs. The juvenile members of society still have a lot of learning to do, but they rely increasingly on their peers and society rather than their parents for instruction. In other words, parental guidance gives way to peer pressure. Remember that songbird that learns its species-specific song from an adult who is not its parent.