The future of mankind’s genes is mostly a mystery. But there are some changes we can speculate on based what I’ve been talking about in the previous chapters of this book.
As I declared above, mankind’s gene pool is about to be edited.
How much difference will genetic editing make to the Living Library of Life?
To get a feel for the kinds of changes it will bring to mankind, let’s consider a previous human dream that has been realized: Flying. The humans who did the most to turn that dream into reality were inspired by watching seagulls soar.
But do airplanes look or perform like seagulls? Not much! They are different in size, airframe construction, power source, and performance.
We can expect the same kind of relation—or near lack of it—between the changes that human gene editing produces and those that evolution produces. Human-produced changes to DNA will be wildly different in goals, techniques, and results, so different that the current ethics questions concerning genetic engineering are essentially nonsense. Nevertheless, those questions are very important because how we answer them will strongly affect genetic engineering progress.
Let’s consider another technology that was long the subject of science fiction and popular speculation: robot technology. What people have long expected robot technology to produce was a robot butler—something like Isaac Asimov’s humanoid positronic-brained I, Robot robots.
The robot butler has never appeared and is increasingly unlikely to do so. In real life, the typical moving robot is a sophisticated painting machine used on automobile assembly lines that doesn’t speak. The typical speaking robot is accessed through “Press 1 for English” telephone menus and doesn’t move. Butlering, now called being a personal assistant, is still a very human activity.
In the same way, the changes that gene editing will bring to human civilization will be very important, but will have little to do with the creating of clones, the concept that so engages contemporary science fiction readers and writers.
The questions people ask about genetic engineering ethics are very important because mankind can walk away from a technology and choose not to use it. Advances in technology and civilization are not inevitable. The choice of embracing agriculture was not quick or inevitable; mankind could have remained a successful hunter-gatherer for many more generations than most of us did. In many places, such as remote New Guinea valleys, we still do.
My favorite example of a contemporary failed technology is nuclear power. As I have detailed above, the Curse of Being Important stunted that technology with the added expense and idea-squelching caused by the massive reporting and safeguarding that worrywarts require, so that only big, simple projects that could survive despite lots of paperwork were considered feasible. That’s why its full potential to change our lives for the better has never been realized.
And as also noted above, the fantastic flowering of integrated circuits and the personal computer industry was a result of the Curse of Being Important being temporarily evaded. As a result of the early PCs being considered toys by industry veterans and on-lookers, developers in the late seventies and early eighties could design very simple systems and worry little about safeguards, producing a huge flowering of applications: Word processors, spreadsheets, and dozens of styles of computer games, to name just a few. But as personal computers became networked and business-oriented, they fell under the Curse and that golden era was drowned by security and complexity issues.
Genetic engineering suffers from the terrible Curse. Many smaller projects that could produce very interesting results are going to wither and not even be considered because of paperwork and safeguarding expenses. But despite the Curse, things will come of genetic engineering that will be full of surprises and bear as much relation to evolution’s fruits as a seagull does to an airplane.
So instead of expecting an X-Man to come from genetic engineering, we should expect a new plastic.
Human civilization is pushing the human gene pool harder than ever, and evolution will continue to work on certain problems. Some things are being weeded out, and some things are being added.
First, some examples of the weeding out process, which is easier to see and understand.
Perhaps the strongest push on the gene pool is that on thinking. Almost all parents want their children to be successful—in our society, the stereotype is to marry a doctor or be one. Such desires will continue to push the gene pool towards smarter, more imaginative humans, who are therefore more successful in the environment civilized by our boom species.
People have always cared a lot about how other people look. But when killers such as disease, domestic violence and war are common, how people look doesn’t matter as much as surviving disease, poverty and war. As those survival problems become a smaller part of daily life, appearance can matter more and more. As mankind becomes prosperous and civilized, appearance matters more in selection, so bad appearance is being selected out.
What is being strengthened in the gene pool is not as obvious as what is being weeded out. Additions are always surprising. That said, here are some things I see being added.
No other species, not even pre-20th century humans, has experienced nearly every child born becoming an adult with a good expectation of living to ripe old age. And we’re continually reducing the exceptions, partly by aborting many of the predestined failures, but largely by smoothing the path for the potential successes.
How well this works out remains to be seen, but it’s a good example of humans being aware of their environment and taking control of it.
What is lost by this is experimentation—Mother Nature is used to a few successes mixed in with a whole lot of failures. Can the human species continue to progress with this no-failures policy in place?
It’s new, it’s unique, only time will tell.
One of the consistent changes in the human environment as mankind has civilized is finding new ways to cooperate. The development from barter, to money, to banks, to ATMs, to PayPal is just one of thousands of threads of human activity displaying more and more cooperation over time. We’ve come a long way from “trust your family, don’t trust strangers”, and there’s no reason to think such progress will stop soon.
These environmental changes are pushing the gene pool toward new ways of thinking about cooperation.
What are some of the surprises of our 21st century civilized environment? What are changes in our lifestyle that have been hard to predict?
Here are a few that I see.
Throughout most of human existence, Speed, Size, and Strength have been important in human relations. Because these three S’s have been valuable to important daily living activities, they have been admired. Because on the average men have more of those three S’s than women, historically high-profile human societies have seen themselves as appropriately patriarchal. (This does not necessarily reflect another S-virtue, Smarts.)
The Industrial Age took a lot of edge off that as machines developed the three S-virtues beyond human capabilities.
Starting roughly with the middle of the Industrial Revolution, aided a lot by proliferation of labor-saving home appliances in post-World War II America, and influenced enormously by the proliferation of ways to cooperate, the relations of power and responsibility between men and women have been changing. Now in the first part of the 21st century, we are deeply in the throes of working out what new relations are going to work best.
The symbol of this experimentation with new man-woman relations is the rise of feminism; women are gaining more equal access to decision-making on important things. (Significantly, “important things” have never been well defined in the history of male-female divisions of decision making.) On the whole, this is good because it brings social relations in line with the lifestyle possibilities that today’s technology can offer.
Feminism has been wittily defined as “the radical notion that women are human”, but there are those who seem to hold the pernicious notion that only women are human, so that men and boys must become indistinguishable from women and girls. To go overboard, replacing a patriarchal society with a matriarchal one, would be foolish.
I repeat the caution I offered above: Disenfranchising males risks losing the Sacred Masculine, bringing the generic male mammal style of thinking to the surface, making dominance-disputing and “lone wolf” behavior relevant. That won’t be good for the community.
If you don’t think there’s any relevance to the proverb that “Behind every great man there’s a good woman”, consider what happens if you pull the woman out of the situation. What will the man become instead of great? I think the cheesier martial arts action movies display the answer.
Another possibility is that as computer power and understanding of humans grows, some kind of simulator or avatar could take over the role of “significant other” for much of humanity and do it faster, better, and cheaper. (In my Technofiction books I call this kind of creation Taj Mahal Girls because they inspire their men to accomplish great things, just as Mughal emperor Shah Jahan was inspired by Mumtaz Mahal, his dead wife.)
Most organisms spend most of their time enduring through the bad times, in an environment that is too hot, too cold, too crowded, with too little food, and so on. When a short-lived good time comes around, the organism must grow and thrive as fast as it can.
Different sets of genes are relevant and active for the good times than for surviving the bad times. But because good times never last, being soon replaced by some version of bad times again, no organism’s good-time genes have to worry about what happens if they stay turned on for a really long time.
No organism’s until modern man, that is.
Through Neolithic Village, Agriculture Age, and early Industrial Age times, the environment that mankind lived in was uncertain. It could be too hot one day, too cold the next. There could be lots of food one day and none the next. Just as for other organisms, human good times didn’t last.
But ever since mankind developed strong language skill and started to cooperate, we have worked steadily to make our communities’ good times last longer. Agriculture was one major step in this effort. Another is reflected in Genesis. In response to the Egyptian Pharaoh’s dream of seven lean cows devouring seven fat ones, Joseph recommends setting up a system of granaries.
Fire, from open flames through forced-air furnaces, has solved the too-cold problem. And during the 20th century refrigeration systems became economical and widespread so that in developed nations we are never too hot. Improved agriculture and transportation, including refrigerated vehicles, mean that we can eat strawberries all year round.
But effectively continuous good times are not normal for life on Earth, and the surprise result of human good-time genes being turned on all the time is that modern humans suffer from several disorders.
For example, human genes predispose us to store fat during the good times as a reservoir against literally lean times. When those times never arrive, obesity leads to multiple health problems. So now there is a selection pressure to weed out good times genes that cause bad health if they are turned on for too long.
In an age of science, what does religion have to offer?
The answer is: Feel-good thinking. And by this I mean seriously feel-good—as in, life saving—thinking.
One of the long-standing mysteries of my life has been why formal religious belief is so pervasive among humans. My recent answer is that it wards off the bad effects of mankind’s extraordinary ability to think of himself or herself as a distinct person—the ability to be self-aware.
Let me explain.
Religion originated as a way of explaining the workings of the world around us. From the most primitive animism and shamanism to the most sophisticated forms of monotheism, pantheism, and polytheism, it still serves that function.
Now, ever since the time of the Industrial Revolution science has explained the workings of the material universe better than religion has. (Before then, science and religion were thoroughly mixed together in that task.) Yet religion has not withered away but continues to thrive. Clearly, religion is fulfilling some other need for mankind, and doing it well.
Scientists studying the thinking processes of humans and animals have concluded that humans and very few other species are self-aware—can look in a mirror and think, “That’s me!” Most other animals looking at their mirror image see another individual.
Not only can humans think, “That’s me in the mirror”, they can also think, “That’s someone else out there who doesn’t know what I know.” As I noted above, this is the foundation of teaching—passing knowledge from one individual and one generation to another.
Because we are self-aware, mankind has learned not only how to question the way the universe works but also how to alter it favorably to ourselves, more aggressively than any other organism.
But like any other powerful tool, self-awareness can hurt as well as help.
The dark side to self-awareness is the capacity for asking dangerous questions—questions whose answers don’t help mankind survive. One of the earliest of these is, “Why am I here at all?” Someone who finds the answer to be “To be happy, but I cannot be happy”, “To make myself better, but I don’t have the power”, or simply “No good reason!” becomes darkly nihilistic, seeing no meaning in life. When an individual stops trying to succeed, worse yet if they convince others to stop, it is usually not good for their community or our species.
But avoiding dangerous questions is not the best choice for mankind, either.
Religions provide a defense against nihilism by giving less dark answers to the “Why am I here?” question. Even if “to know God, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world and be happy with Him forever in the next”, “to climb to the next rung of the ladder of being in my next incarnation”, “to help God’s other children or all living beings”, and other formulations bear absolutely no relation to the reality of the world we live in, as I believe, such answers have a lot of species survival value as a cushion to the sharp-cutting that self-aware thinking can inflict upon a user. And in the natural selection game, survival matters more than truth.
My own answers, by the way, include “to build the Living Library of Life, adding human knowledge to the pre-historic DNA knowledge that Mother Nature has been developing for billions of years”, “to have a lot of fun figuring out the world, an interesting place in interesting times”, and “passing the Grandchild Test”. Not perhaps truly noble goals, but enough for me. They are based on our position as a boom species. Mankind has thrived mightily on Earth, and that brings responsibility, less of the Save-the-Whales or even Save-the-Planet type than of my Neolithic Park Save-the-Humans agenda.