Thumbs, Toes, and Tears

by Chip Walter

  What next? Speech, writing, and art enabled us to share inner feelings in new and powerful ways. But it takes months or years to learn a new language or how to play the piano or master the art of engineering bridges and buildings. Will new technologies that accelerate communication (virtual reality, telepresence, digital implants, nanotechnology) create new ways to communicate that can bypass speech? Will we someday communicate by a kind of digital telepathy, downloading information, experiences, skills, even emotions the way we download a file from the Internet to our laptop? Will we become machines, or will machines become more powerful versions of us? And if any of this comes to pass, what ethical issues do we face? At what point to do we stop being human?

  Lynn Margulis, arguably the world’s leading microbiologist, has argued that this blurring of technology and biology isn’t really new at all. She has observed that the shells of clams and snails are a kind of technology dressed in biological clothing.j Is there really that much difference between the vast skyscrapers we build or the malls in which we shop, even the cars we drive around, and the hull of a seed? Seeds and clamshells, which are not alive, hold in them a little bit of water and carbon and DNA, ready to replicate when the time is right, yet we don’t distinguish them from the life they hold. Why should it be any different with office buildings, hospitals, and space shuttles?

  Put another way, we may make a distinction between living things and the tools those things happen to create, but nature does not. The processes of evolution simply witness new adaptations and preserve those that perform better than others. That would make Homo habilis’s first flint knife a form of biology as sure as a clamshell, one that set our ancestors on a fresh evolutionary path, just as if their DNA had been tweaked to create a new, physical mutation—say, an opposable thumb or a big toe.

  Even if these technological adaptations were outside what we might consider normal biological bounds, the effect was just as profound and far more rapid. In an evolutionary snap, that first flint knife changed what we ate and how we interacted with the world and one another. It enhanced our chances of survival. It accelerated our brain growth, which in turn allowed us to create still more tools, which led to yet bigger brains. And on we went, continually and with increasing speed and sophistication, fashioning progressively more complex technologies right up to the genetic techniques that enable us to fiddle with the selfsame ribbons of our chromosomes that made the brains that conceived tools in the first place. If this is true, then all of our technologies are an extension of us, and each human invention is really another expression of biological evolution.

  Moravec and Margulis aren’t alone in asking questions that force us to bend our traditional thinking about evolution. Scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil has, like Moravec, pointed out that the rate of technological change is increasing at an exponential rate. Also like Moravec, he foresees machines as intelligent as we are evolving by midcentury. Unlike Moravec, he doesn’t necessarily believe they will arrive in the form of robots.

  Initially Kurzweil sees us reengineering ourselves genetically so that we will live longer and healthier lives than the DNA we were born with might normally allow. We will first rejigger genes to reduce disease, grow replacement organs, and generally postpone many of the ravages of old age. This, he says, will get us to a time late in the 2020s when we can create molecule-sized nanomachines that we will program to tackle jobs our DNA never evolved naturally to undertake.

  Once these advances are in place we will not simply slow aging, but reverse it, cleaning up and rebuilding our bodies molecule by molecule. We will also use them to amplify our intelligence, nestling them among the billions of neurons that already exist inside our brains. Our memories will improve; we will create entirely new, virtual experiences on command, and take human imagination to levels our currently unenhanced brains can’t begin to conceive. In time (but pretty quickly), we will develop into a completely digital species that has reverse-engineered the human brain into a vastly more powerful, digital version.

  This view of the future isn’t fundamentally different from Moravec’s brain-to-robot download, except it is more gradual. Either way we will have melded with our technology if, in fact, those barriers ever really existed in the first place, and in the end, erase the lines between bits, bytes, neurons, and atoms.

  Or looked at another way, we will have evolved into another species. We will no longer be Homo sapiens, but Cyber sapiens—a creature part digital and part biological that will have placed more distance between its DNA and its destiny than any other creature. And we will have become a creature capable of steering its own evolution (“cyber” derives from the Greek word for a ship’s steersman or navigator—kybernetes), an entirely new state of affairs in the natural world.

  Why would we allow ourselves to be displaced? Because in the end, we won’t really have a choice. Our own inventiveness has already unhinged our environment so thoroughly that we are struggling to keep up. In a supreme irony we have created a world fundamentally different from the one into which we originally emerged. A planet with six and a half billion creatures on it, traveling in flying machines every day by the millions, their minds roped together by satellites and fiber-optic cable, rearranging molecules on the one hand and leveling continents of rain forest on the other, growing food and shipping it overnight by the trillions of tons—all of this is a far cry from the hunter-gatherer, nomadic life for which evolution had fashioned us two hundred thousand years ago.

  So it seems the long habit of our inventiveness has placed us in a pickle. In the one-upsmanship of evolution, our tools have rendered the world more complex, and that complexity requires the invention of still more complex tools to help us keep it all under control. Our new tools enable us to adapt more rapidly, but one advance begs the creation of another, and each increasingly powerful suite of inventions shifts the world around us so powerfully that still more adaptation is required.

  The only way to survive is to move faster, get smarter, change with the changes; and the best way to do that is to amplify ourselves eventually right out of our own DNA so we can survive the new environments—physical, emotional, and mental—that we keep creating.

  Is all of this too implausible to consider? Will Homo sapiens really give way to Cyber sapiens who seamlessly integrate the molecular and digital worlds just as our ancestors merged the technological and biological worlds two million years ago? Evolution has presided over stranger things. It took billions of years before the switching and swapping of genes brought us into existence. Our particular brain then took two hundred thousand years to get us from running around in skins with stone weapons to the world we live in today. Evolution is all about the implausible. And the drive to survive is a relentless shaper of the seemingly impossible. We ourselves are the best proof.

  If all of this should happen; if DNA itself goes the way of the dinosaur, what sort of creature will Cyber sapiens be? In some ways we can’t know the answer any more than Homo erectus could imagine how his successors would someday create movies, invent computers, and write symphonies. Our progeny will certainly be more intelligent, with brains that are both massively parallel, like the current version we have, and unimaginably fast. But what of those primal drives that we carry inside our skulls, and those nonverbal, unconscious ways of communicating? What of laughter and crying and kissing? Will Cyber sapiens know a good joke when he hears one, or smile appreciatively at a fine line of poetry? Will he tousle the machine-made hair of his offspring, hold the hand of the one he loves, kiss soulfully, wantonly, and uncontrollably? Will there be a difference between the “brains” and behaviors of he and she? Will there even be a he and a she? And what of pheromones and body language and nervous giggles? Maybe they will have served their purpose and gone away. Will Cyber sapiens sleep, and if they do, will they dream? Will they connive and gossip, grow mad with jealousy, plot and murder? Will they carry with them a deep, if machine-made, unconscious that is the dark matter of the human mind, or
will all of those primeval secrets be revealed in the bright light cast by their newly minted minds?

  We may face these questions sooner than we imagine. The future gathers speed every day.

  I’d like to think the evolutionary innovations and legacies that have combined to make us so remarkable, and so human, won’t be left entirely behind as we march ahead. Perhaps they can’t be. After all, evolution does have a way of working with what is already there, and even after six million years of wrenching change, we still carry with us the echoes of our animal ancestors. Maybe the best of those echoes will remain. After all, as heavy as some baggage can be, preserving a few select pieces might be a good thing, even if we are freaks of nature.

  Acknowledgments

  As solitary an exercise as writing appears to be, it is never really done alone. The making of books requires a kind of community effort, and this one was no exception. So my sincere thanks go out to those who helped make possible the pages that you have read. The scientists, for example, who did so much of the heavy intellectual lifting in so many fields, from the fascinating work of Terrence Deacon, Michael Arbib, and Giacomo Rizzolatto on the evolution of language to the startling insights into human consciousness that Michael Gazzinga, Oliver Sacks, and Gerald Edelman have developed. There is the work of Donald Johanson, Ian Tattersal, the Leakey family, and the battalions of anthropologists who have sifted through the dust of Asia, Africa, and Europe to uncover clues about our past that help explain how our species managed to make its way into the present. I am grateful for the research into social behavior, laughter, crying, and brain development by Robin Dunbar, Jane Goodall, Randolph Cornelius, Patricia Greenfield, Robert Provine, Henry Plotkin, Dean Falk, and others that helped flesh out areas of our evolution and behavior that a couple of decades ago were hardly understood at all. And generally I am grateful for the work of Steven Pinker, Lynn Margulis, Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Lewis Thomas, and Richard Dawkins, who have a habit of seeing nearly everything in fresh and inspiring ways. These are only a few of the hundreds of scientists whose work shed light on how we became the creatures we are.

  I am also thankful to my agent Peter Sawyer for introducing me to one of the finest people I have ever met, Walker and Company’s publisher, George Gibson. The support that both of them have offered on this project has been unwavering and positive. Jacqueline Johnson took on the task of editing my writing. Her endless patience and gentility made that job a pleasure rather than drudgery, and her skill took jumbled passages more than once and made them smooth and coherent.

  Several close friends showed just how close they were by reading through the manuscript in its various phases to provide me feedback. I am especially grateful to Richard Tobin, Cyndy Mosites, my father and mother, Bill and Rosemary Walter, Robin Wertheimer, Mary Murrin, Jerry Farber, and Tara McLamey.

  Above all I am grateful to my two extraordinary daughters, Molly and Hannah, who so often put up with a father who attended softball games, crew races, and theatrical performances with his mind sometimes still in ancient Africa or mulling over brain anatomy. But they were always patient with me, kept their sense of humor (and mine) tuned up, and were constant reminders of how lucky we all are to be the only creatures that can laugh, kiss, and cry with the ones we love.

  —C. W.

  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  2006

  Footnotes

  a Chimps and gorillas sometimes use grass and sticks and rocks as tools, but they do not create tools from scratch.

  b If you doubt the importance of the hallux magnus, try walking with it raised off the ground. Ifother toes are injured, we can get by, but robbed of our big toe, we not only have severe problems walking properly, but, as any NFL running back suffering from “turf toe” can tell you, it becomes impossible to run or jump or cut rapidly and gracefully in one direction or the other.

  c We have twenty-eight bones in each foot if you count the sesamoid bones at the base of the big toe.

  d The same forces may have been behind the development of the full, red lips we humans have, which may recall female genital labia. Some scientists theorize that beards on men mark a recapitulation of their genital area as well.

  e For example, as chimpanzees form in the womb, their big toe is initially straight, not unlike the one at the end of your foot. Later it curves so it can better handle tree climbing. But as our ancestors began to move into the savanna, any newborns that accidentally came into the world with the birth defect of straight big toes would have actually enjoyed an evolutionary advantage, and that advantage might have been passed along.

  f At about nine months a baby’s throat elongates enough that her larynx drops sufficiently to begin to tackle speech. Several months later the cerebral wiring for transmitting the signals required to make words falls into place.

  g The original meaning of the English word “chat” comes from the chattering sound made when monkeys (and later humans) disposed of parasites with their teeth as they groomed others. John Skoyles and Dorion Sagan, Up from Dragons (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), p. 83.

  h The prefrontal cortex is part of the neocortex but is not the same as the neocortex. While current theory holds that much of the human neocortex evolved over the past one million years, scientists believe the prefrontal cortex emerged in just the past four hundred thousand, or less.

  i Another interesting finding by the scientists in Osaka was that the intensity and loudness of the laughter didn’t affect the increase in NK cell activity. The better indicator was how good the subjects said they felt afterward. It was their positive mental amd emotional state of mind that correlated to the increase in killer cell patrolling. In other words, you couldn’t tickle someone into good health. It was the positive feelings the laughter represented that did the job, not just the laugh itself.

  j This was during a conversation with Professor Margulis at her home in western Massachusetts.

  Notes

  Prologue

  1. This is an estimate from Microcosmos, a book written by science journalist Dorion Sagan and his mother, microbiologist Lynn Margulis, and published in 1986.

  2. Scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil has pointed out that as complicated as the human genome is, it contains relatively little information: about three billion rungs or six billion bits or roughly eight hundred millions bytes (with many redundancies). In his book The Singularity Is Near he argues that the genome can be compressed to close to thirty million bytes—less than a Microsoft Word program. On the other hand, this fairly simple “program” sets in motion processes that create the human brain, which is a billion times more complex than the genome itself. One example is the human cerebellum, which contains nearly half of the brain’s neurons, yet only a handful of genes—a few tens of thousands of bytes of information—express the wiring instructions for that part of the brain. Of course, it is the flexibility of this brain and its ability to cull, store, manipulate, and create new information that makes it so remarkable, and made figuring out how to map of the genome was possible in the first place.

  3. Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977), p. 42.

  Chapter 1: The Curious Tale of Hallux Magnus

  1. Paleoanthropology is not an exact science, and scientists still hotly debate when precisely the single line of apes that we, chimps, and gorillas share actually split into separate evolutionary lines. Most agree that it happened five million to six million years ago, at the close of the Miocene epoch.

  2. James D. Wright, “Climate Change: The Indonesian Valve,” Nature 411 (2001): 142–43.

  3. Two recent finds have fueled the debate about the precise timeline and origins of our direct ancestors. One, a skull found in July of 2001 in Chad, fifteen hundred miles west of the Rift Valley, is thought to be close to six million years old. Some say that this fossil, dubbed Sahelanthropus tchadensis, is a hominid, the nonape line of creatures from which we evolved. Others say it may be the last common link between chimpanzees and
us. It is difficult to resolve. Only skull fragments were found, which means we have no way of knowing whether the creature walked upright or on all fours. Another creature, Orrorin tugenensis, was found in Kenya’s Tugen Hills, also in 2001. Its discoverers maintain that tugenensis is a hominid. Like Sahelanthropus tchadensis, Orrorin has features that are both simian and hominidlike. Based on the information at hand, it’s too difficult to say whether they are our direct ancestors. Rick Potts, director of the human origins program at the Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., might have summed up the situation best: “A couple of years ago, quite a number of us were simply waiting for Ardipithicus ramidus (the oldest undisputed hominid fossil) to tell us what it was all about. We thought that it would be the most primitive hominid. All of this mixing and matching [of traits] suggests a lot of population isolation, independent evolution, and coalescence of populations again. It’s going to be really difficult to figure all of this out.”