• Sanitation, including pure water and efficient garbage disposal
• Safer food such as the requirement that milk be pasteurized
• The introduction of vaccination against contagious diseases beginning with smallpox and moving on to diphtheria (1906), tetanus (1914), influenza (1938), polio (1955), measles (1963), and meningitis (1970s)
• The expanding use of antibiotics in the late 1930s and early 1940s
• Increasingly accurate diagnoses and treatment of birth defects such as prenatal ultrasounds (1956), prenatal intra-uterine surgery,(1980s), and the use of folic acid supplements for pregnant women, the last a simple move that reduced by half the incidence of neural tube defects such as spina bifida
• Improved neonatal care and the continuing expansion of access to medical care through programs such as Medicaid
As a result, Americans experienced a dramatic reduction in infant mortality, which declined overall from 300 per thousand live births in 1900 to 6.14 in 2010.14, 15 And the healthier infants did indeed grow up to live a longer life. In 1900, the average life span for an American was slightly more than 47 years. By 2014, it had nearly doubled to an average 78.8 years. Neither was due to evolution. It was simply medical science and public health at work.
INFANT MORTALITY IN THE UNITED STATES, 2010
Race of mother # Live births Mortality rate/1,000 live births
Total 3,999,386 6.14
Non-Hispanic white 2,162,406 5.18
Non-Hispanic black 589,808 11.46
American Indian or Alaska Native 46,760 8.28
Asian or Pacific Islander 246,886 4.27
Hispanic 945,180 5.25
Mexican 598,317 5.12
Puerto Rican 66,368 7.10
Cuban 16,882 3.79
Central and South American 142,692 4.43
LIFE EXPECTANCY AT BIRTH IN THE UNITED STATES, 1900–201016
(All races, based on death certificates)
Having predicted that we will have stronger immune systems to fight off newer bad bugs, New Mexico psychologist Geoffrey Miller also thinks that advances in genetic technology will offer up better choices not only in our sexual partners but, more to the point, in the children we make. “‘Parents could basically choose which sperm and egg get to meet up to produce a baby based on genetic information about which genes contribute to which physical and mental traits,” he says. “If the rich and powerful keep the artificial-selection technology to themselves, then you could get that kind of split between a kind of upper-class, dominant population and a lower-class, genetically oppressed population, [b]ut I think it’s very likely the new genetic technologies will be widespread in their use, simply because that’s more profitable. So I think there will actually be a leveling effect, where both the poor and the rich are going to be able to have the best kids they can genetically [and] a rise in average physical attractiveness and health.”17
FICTIONAL FUTURES
Future fiction has a long and honorable history. Early on, there were Jules Verne’s adventurous space travelers in De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865). Then Edward Bellamy predicted the creation of utterly mundane debit cards in Looking Backward (1887). H.G. Wells described a terrifying atomic bomb in The World Set Free (1914). Ambrose Bierce had a villainous chess-playing robot who murders its creator in his short story “Moxon’s Master” (1899). And who can forget the early 20th century’s iconic space hero, Buck Rogers, the commander created by Philip Francis Nowlan in the novella Armageddon 2419 A.D. (1928) and subsequently a star in comics, radio, television, and the movies?
As we become pleasantly bionic, improving our bodies with all manner of devices ranging from pacemakers to regulate our heartbeat, implants instead of teeth, and hair plugs instead of natural hair patterns, it’s interesting to note that most future-predictive fictions, including those in the previous paragraph, focus on changes in our devices and manners and mores rather than our bodies. Fantasy has served up plenty of BEMs (bug-eyed monsters) such as the enormous spiders in the 1997 film Starship Troopers and the shape shifters in Ray Bradbury’s extraordinary The Martian Chronicles (1946), but humans are virtually always still human. Perhaps the best-known exceptions are the two humanoid species in Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). Here, the Time Traveller’s [sic] journey takes him to AD 802,701, where he meets the ineffectual former elite who have morphed into Eloi, smaller than we with big eyes, small ears, small mouths, pointed E.T. chins, and subhuman intelligence, and the formerly downtrodden working classes have become the hairy ape-like Morlocks, who live underground, fear the light, and hunt and eat the Eloi. Hardly a happy evolution.
Our major future films have pretty much stuck to the humans-as-humans script pioneered by novels and stories. Yes, the Planet of the Apes movies have their highly evolved simians, but the men and women are still fighting, scrambling, loving, and behaving pretty much like us. Many of the dystopian films—A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, Brazil, Divergent, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, The Island—are set in an often unspecified future when government is the enemy, and the recognizably human hero is either forced into compliance or attempts, usually unsuccessfully, to escape an oppressive system. Logan’s Run offers an idyllic life in a domed city with only one problem: every person under the dome must end his or her life in a sort of religious ceremony called Carousel, which naturally leads to the hero’s taking off with a pretty girl along for the ride. Blade Runner expands the theme to androids that must also run for their lives. In Divergent, everyone must fit into a “faction” based on personality, and outliers are excluded from society. Some films, such as Gattica, do propose genetic manipulation. The Island relies on clones. In the three versions of Brave New World (1980, 1998, 2011), as in the 1932 classic Aldous Huxley novel on which they are based, babies are produced in “hatcheries” and raised in “conditioning centers,” each of which is programmed to accept and follow the rules governing his or her predetermined place in society. When the protohero, a man born of a human mother, attempts to break the pattern, he is driven by his failure to suicide.
FUTURE FILMS
Title Release date Setting
Metropolis 1927 2026
1984 1956 1984
Fahrenheit 451 1966 ?
2001: A Space Odyssey 1968 2001
Barbarella 1968 4000
Planet of the Apes 1968 1972–3978
A Clockwork Orange 1971 ?
Soylent Green 1973 2022
Rollerball 1975 2018
Logan’s Run 1976 2274
Alien 1979 2122
1984 1980 (TV) 1984
Escape from New York 1981 1997
Blade Runner 1982 2019
Dune 1984 10,191
Brazil 1985 ?
The Running Man 1987 2017–2019
Back to the Future II 1989 2015
12 Monkeys 1995 1996–2035
Gattaca 1997 2150–2200
Starship Troopers 1997 ?
1984 1998 1984
Lost in Space 1998 2058
The Matrix 1999 2199
The Island 2005 2019
1984 2011 1984
The Hunger Games 2012 2280
Divergent 2014 ?
This pretty much echoes our human experience over the millennia: Society changes, but our bodies stay more or less the same. To date, our most important evolutionary advances have been our stance and our brain. What makes us different from virtually all other animals is that unlike them, we are bipeds. We naturally and consistently stand and move on two feet rather than four or eight or any other multiple of two. The only other bipeds are the macropods (“big-footed” kangaroos and wallabies) and the very small-footed kangaroo mice, jumping rodents native to the southwestern United States. Birds are also bipeds, but as avian anatomists know, birds hop on what looks like two feet but is actually comparable to our toes: the “heel” of a bird’s foot is part of a toe, and the thin piece just above that corresponds to the sole of the human foot. Theoretically
, all of us can walk, run, jump, and jog, although the last, a compromise between walking and running, is pretty much the province of humans.
So we still stand upright just as we did millennia ago, but our brain has slowly become larger and more complex.
In the beginning, we were all lizards, or at least our brains were. The brain stem, cerebellum, and basal ganglia (neurons that govern involuntary movement) govern our most basic, involuntary functions such as breathing and heartbeat. Together, these tissues and organs are still colloquially known as “the lizard brain.” The difference between us and the lizards, who inherited their own basic brain from fish, is intellect, emotion, and judgment. These qualities are embedded in our cortex, the “gray matter” surface of the cerebrum, the two hemispheres at the front of the brain that control our complex sensory and neural functions and enable our voluntary activity.
Along with other primates, we can do things that lizards can’t. All mammals from mice to moose recognize emotions such as fear and anger, but we humans are especially acute in our reactions to social reactions such as shame or guilt and pride. These require us to recognize what others are thinking, a specialty of that cortex-covered cerebrum. The “lizard brain” keeps the body working, but the cortex makes us human, giving us language, memory, and reasoning.18
To accomplish this, the brain grew larger as we evolved from early primates whose brain capacity measured about 20 ounces (600 cubic centimeters) to 53 ounces (1,600 cubic centimeters) in Neanderthals. Interestingly enough, the brain seems to have been shrinking slightly ever since. Today, the average modern man has an average brain capacity of about 48 ounces (1,440 cubic centimeters) and the modern woman slightly about 41 ounces (1,240 cubic centimeters).19 But if the human brain is slightly smaller now, we have certainly learned to do more with what we have. Our brain function has steadily improved along with our understanding of how the brain works. In the summer of 2016, researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine published a new map of the human showing nearly 100 regions no one had previously identified. And neuroscientist Matthew F. Glasser, the lead author on the study, wants everyone to know that this is far from the last word, or last map, we will see. Think of it, he says, as version 1.0. “There may be a version 2.0 as the data get better and more eyes look at the data. We hope the map can evolve as the science progresses.”20
Nonetheless, many futurists persist in predicting a larger head to hold a larger brain as we evolve to whatever. In November 1893, two years before The Time Machine, Wells published an essay titled “Man of the Year Million” in which he wrote that “The descendants of man will nourish themselves by immersion in nutritive fluid. They will have enormous brains, liquid, soulful eyes, and large hands, on which they will hop. No craggy nose will they have, no vestigial ears; their mouths will be a small, perfectly round aperture, unanimal, like the evening star. Their whole muscular system will be shriveled to nothing, a dangling pendant to their minds.”21
Some have followed his predictive image of the large head, large eyes, small body, perhaps most perfectly in the character of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), who, of course, was not human. A more recent example of the picture in human terms is the work of Nickolay Lamm. Lamm is the Russian-born Pittsburgh graphic artist who designed “Lammily,” a.k.a. “normal Barbie,” a re-creation of the famous doll with the body shape of a normal 19-year-old girl rather than a wasp-waisted big-breasted, impossibly long-legged toy.22 His second most famous work is his thoroughly terrifying portfolio of drawings of future man and woman 10,000, 60,000, and 100,000 years from now, an evolved human face with really big eyes in a really big head holding a really big brain.23
Lamm takes his inspiration from Alana Kwan, an expert in computational genomics, a science that analyzes our own genetic makeup to predict what we might or might not become. The Lamm drawings do not represent natural evolution; they represent the possibility that we may be increasingly able to manipulate our own biology, an entirely different subject. Besides, an increase in the head size would require a similar increase in the size of the female pelvis to permit the newly enlarged head to pass through the vaginal canal. Or, like the bulldogs whose standards, set by humans, have produced continuing inbreeding and a consequent lack of genetic diversity that gives us bulldogs with female hips so narrow and puppy heads so large that the dogs must be delivered by Caesarian section.24 Even more to the point, the size of our heads has gotten smaller, not larger, over the last thousands of years. As long ago as 1933, scientists knew that the Neanderthal skull was similar to ours or even slightly larger.25 The fact is that the most recent millennia tell a story of an expanding, ever more complex brain in a same-size or slightly smaller head.
THE RISE OF MR. ROBOT
Transhumanism is the “belief that humans should strive to transcend the physical limitations of the mind and body by technological means.”26 In evolutionary terms, it suggests that our future rests not in Darwin’s natural selection but in our own ability to recreate ourselves through unnatural means such as cloning, genetic manipulation, robotics, and artificial intelligence.
Mastering these techniques would not only make us stronger, but might even make us immortal, says Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. Bostrom raises the possibility of quasihumans who could “download themselves into robots for the occasional stroll through the real world, think faster when running on advanced operating systems, and (shades of H.G. Wells) cut their food budget down to zero. Whereas the current human generational cycle takes some twenty years, a digitalized individual could replicate [himself] in seconds or minutes.” Of course, copying yourself isn’t without complications: “Which one of them is you?” Bostrom asks. “Who owns your property? Who is married to your spouse?”27
Of course, it’s a long way from pacemakers and tooth implants to changeable bodies and the confusion that may cause. Perhaps Darwin had a better way, a view of our future, one based on mind, not body: “In the distant future,” he concluded in On the Origin of Species, “I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”28
9
Postscript
“…in science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.”
—Sir Francis Darwin, First Galton Lecture to the Eugenics Society (1914)
THE DARWIN FAMILY BUSINESS
Some families produce generations of doctors or lawyer or businessmen. The Darwins produced scientists whose fascination with the history of man did skip one generation. Charles’s father Robert, a well-respected physician, exhibited no interest in the origins of life on earth that so captivated his father, Erasmus, and then his son Charles and Charles’s sons George and, to a lesser extent, Francis.1, 2
The patriarch, Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), was a true Renaissance man, a physician, poet, philosopher, botanist, and naturalist who published one of the first organized theories of evolution, Zoonomia, or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794–1796). In it he named his First Cause, the first life, “one living filament”:
Shall we then say that the vegetable living filament was originally different from that of each tribe of animals above described? And that the productive living filament of each of those tribes was different originally from the other? Or, as the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of animals … shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filament is and has been the cause of all organic life?3, 4
Erasmus also wrote a poetic version of his theory, published after his death. It was clearly prescient and in line with the modern widely-accepted theory that life on earth began in the sea:
Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.
—Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature (1802)5
Erasmus did not discover natural selection, nor did he answer the question of how one species evolved from another, although he did consider his grandson’s later triggers, competition and sexual selection. “The final course of this contest among males,” he wrote, “seems to be, that the strongest and most active animal should propagate the species which should thus be improved.”6 But he was fascinating and original nonetheless. Outside of work, Erasmus was totally unlike his even-tempered, family-man grandson, a womanizer who embraced “free love” and attracted females left and right his whole life long. Following the death of his first wife, with whom he had five children, Erasmus took up with the children’s governess, a liaison that produced two daughters out of wedlock. Then he courted a married woman whom he himself married as soon as her husband died and with whom he had seven more children. Then he was rumored to conduct a second dalliance that was rumored to have produced yet another illegitimate child. Ever the gentleman, Erasmus supported every single one of his fifteen acknowledged and rumored children, legitimate and otherwise, and his admiration for women did not stop with his courting or marrying them. He was an early proponent of education for women equal to that offered to men, and he believed women should be educated in schools rather than in homes, where, he argued, all they would read was romantic novels.7
Spare Parts Page 16
