The Meaning of Human Existence (5 page)

5

The All-Importance of the Humanities

Y
ou might think this odd coming from a data-driven biologist, but I believe that the extraterrestrials created by the confabulations of science fiction serve us in an important way: they improve reflection on our own condition. When made as fully plausible as science allows, they help us to predict the future. Real aliens would tell us, I believe, that our species possesses one vital possession worthy of their attention. It is not our science and technology, as you might think. It is the humanities.

These imagined yet plausible aliens have no desire to please or elevate our species. Their relation to us is benevolent, the same as our own toward wildlife grazing and stalking in the Serengeti. Their mission is to learn all they can from the singular species that achieved civilization on this planet. Wouldn’t that have to be the secrets of our science? No, not at all. We have nothing to teach them. Keep in mind that nearly everything
that can be called science is less than five centuries old. Because scientific knowledge has been more or less doubling according to discipline (such as physical chemistry and cell biology) every one or two decades for the past two centuries, it follows that what we know is by geological standards brand-new. Technological applications are also in an early stage of evolution. Humanity entered our present global, hyperconnected technoscientific era only two decades ago—less than an eyeblink in the starry message of the cosmos. By chance alone, and given the multibillion-year age of the galaxy, the aliens reached our present-day, still-infantile level millions of years ago. It could have been as much as a hundred million years ago. What then can we teach our extraterrestrial visitors? Put another way, what could Einstein as a toddler have taught a professor of physics? Nothing at all. For the same reason our technology would be vastly inferior. If that were not so, we would be the extraterrestrial visitors and they the planetary aboriginals.

So what could the hypothetical aliens learn from us that has any value to them? The correct answer is the humanities. As Murray Gell-Mann once remarked of the field he has pioneered, theoretical physics consists of a small number of laws and a great many accidents. The same is true, a fortiori, of all the sciences. The origin
of life occurred over three and a half billion years ago. The subsequent diversification of the primordial organisms into species of microbes, fungi, plants, and animals is only one history that could have occurred out of a near-infinitude of histories. The extraterrestrial visitors would know this, from robot probes and the principles of evolutionary biology. They could not immediately fathom Earth’s full history of organic evolution, with its extinctions, replacements, and dynastic rise and fall of major groups—cycads, ammonoids, dinosaurs. But with their super-efficient fieldwork and DNA-sequencing and proteonomic technology, they would quickly learn Earth’s fauna and flora at the present moment, and the nature and ages of the forerunners, and calculate patterns in space and time of life’s evolutionary history. It’s all a matter of science. The aliens would soon know all that we know called science, and much more, as though we had never existed.

In a closely parallel manner during the human history of the past hundred thousand years or so, a small number of human Ur-cultures arose, then gave birth to the thousands of daughter cultures. Many of these persist today, each with its one language or dialect, religious beliefs, and social and economic practices. Like species of plants and animals splintering across the geological ages, they have continued to evolve, alone, or divided
into two more cultures, perhaps fused in part, and some have just disappeared. Of the nearly seven thousand languages currently spoken worldwide, 28 percent are used by fewer than a thousand people, and 473 are on the edge of extinction, spoken only by a handful of elderly people. Measured this way, recorded history and prehistory before it present a kaleidoscopic pattern similar to that of species formation during organic evolution—yet different in major ways from it.

Cultural evolution is different because it is entirely a product of the human brain, an organ that evolved during prehuman and Paleolithic times through a very special form of natural selection called gene-culture coevolution (where genetic evolution and cultural evolution each affect the trajectory of the other). The brain’s unique capability, lodged primarily in the memory banks of the frontal cortex, arose from the tenure of
Homo habilis
two million to three million years ago until the global spread of its descendant
Homo sapiens
sixty thousand years ago. To understand cultural evolution from the outside looking in, as opposed to the inside looking out, the way we do it, requires interpreting all of the intricate feelings and constructions of the human mind. It requires intimate contact with people and knowledge of countless personal histories. It describes the way a thought is translated into a symbol
or artifact. All this the humanities do. They are the natural history of culture, and our most private and precious heritage.

There is another cardinal reason for treasuring the humanities. Scientific discovery and technological advance have a life cycle. In time, after reaching an immense size and unimaginable complexity, they will certainly slow and stabilize at a much lower level of growth. Within the span of my own career as a published scientist across half a century, the number of discoveries per researcher per year has declined dramatically. Teams have grown larger, with ten or more coauthors on technical papers now a commonplace. The technology required to make a scientific discovery in most disciplines has become much more complex and expensive, and the new technology and statistical analysis required for scientific research more advanced.

Not to worry. By the time the process has set in, likely in this century, the role of science and high technology will, as expected, be beneficent and far more pervasive than now. But—and this is the most important part—science and technology will also be the same everywhere, for every civilized culture, subculture, and person. Sweden, the United States, Bhutan, and Zimbabwe will share the same information. What will continue to evolve and diversify almost infinitely are the humanities.

For the next few decades, most major technological advances are likely to occur in what is often denoted BNR: biotechnology, nanotechnology, and robotics. In pure science the secular grails now sought along the broad frontier include the deduction of how life originated on Earth, along with the creation of artificial organisms, gene substitution and surgically precise modification of the genome, discovery of the physical nature of consciousness, and, not least, the construction of robots that can think faster and work more efficiently than humans in most blue-collar and white-collar labor. At the present time these envisioned advances are the stuff of science fiction. But not for long. Within a few decades they will be reality.

And the cards are now on the table, faceup. First on the agenda is the correction of the more than a thousand genes for which rare mutant alleles have been identified as the cause of hereditary diseases. The method of choice will be gene substitution, replacing the mutant allele with a normal one. Although still in the earliest, mostly untested stage, it promises eventually to replace amniocentesis, which allows first a readout of the embryonic chromosome structure and genetic code, then therapeutic abortion to avoid disability or death. Many people object to therapeutic abortions, but I doubt that many would object to gene substitution, which can be
compared with replacement of a defective heart valve or diseased kidney.

An even more advanced form of a volitional evolution, albeit indirect in cause, is the homogenization ongoing among the world populations by increased emigration and interracial marriage. The result is a massive redistribution of
Homo sapiens
genes. Genetic variation between populations is declining, genetic variation within populations is increasing, and, as an overall result, the genetic variation of the species as a whole is also increasing—the last dramatically so. These trends create a dilemma of volitional evolution likely to catch the attention of even the most myopic political think tanks in a few decades. Do we wish to guide the evolution of diversity in order to increase the frequency of desirable traits? Or increase it still more? Or finally—this will almost certainly be the short-term decision—just leave it alone and hope for the best?

Such alternatives are not science fiction, and they are not frivolous. On the contrary, they are linked to yet another biology-based dilemma that has already entered public discussion, ranking with contraceptives in high school and evolution-free textbooks in Texas. It is this: With more and more decision making and work done by robots, what will be left for humans to do? Do we really want to compete biologically with robot technology
by using brain implants and genetically improved intelligence and social behavior? This choice would mean a sharp departure away from the human nature we have inherited, and a fundamental change in the human condition.

Now we are talking about a problem best solved within the humanities, and one more reason the humanities are all-important. While I’m at it, I hereby cast a vote for existential conservatism, the preservation of biological human nature as a sacred trust. We are doing very well in science and technology. Let’s agree to keep it up, and move both along even faster. But let’s also promote the humanities, that which makes us human, and not use science to mess around with the wellspring of this, the absolute and unique potential of the human future.

6

The Driving Force of Social Evolution

F
ew questions in biology are as important as the evolutionary origin of instinctive social behavior. To find the correct answer is to explain one of the great transitions in levels of biological organization, from the organism to the superorganism—from one ant, say, to an organized colony of ants, and from a solitary primate to an organized society of human beings.

The most complex forms of social organization are made from high levels of cooperation. They are furthered with altruistic acts performed by at least some of the colony members. The highest level of cooperation and altruism is that of eusociality, in which some colony members surrender part or all of their personal reproduction in order to increase reproduction by the “royal” caste specialized for that purpose.

As I’ve pointed out, there are two competing theories of the origin of advanced social organization.
One is the standard theory of natural selection. It has proved correct across a broad range of social and nonsocial phenomena, improving in precision since the origin of modern population genetics in the 1920s and modern synthesis of evolutionary theory in the 1930s. It is based on the principle that the unit of heredity is the gene, which typically acts as part of a network of genes, and the target of natural selection is the trait prescribed by the gene. For example, an unfavorable mutant gene in humans is that which prescribes cystic fibrosis. The gene is rare because its phenotype cystic fibrosis is selected against—it lowers longevity and reproduction. Examples of favorable mutant genes are those that prescribe adult lactose tolerance. After originating in dairying populations in Europe and Africa, the phenotype prescribed by the mutated genes made milk available as a reliable adult food, and thereby increased the comparative longevity and reproduction of the people possessing them.

A gene for a trait that affects a group member’s longevity and reproduction relative to other members in the same group is said to be subject to individual-level natural selection. A gene for a trait entailing cooperation and other forces of interaction with fellow group members may or may not be subject to individual-level selection. In either case it is also likely to affect longevity
and reproduction of the group as a whole. Because groups compete with other groups, in both conflict and their relative efficiency in resource extraction, their differing traits are subject to natural selection. In particular, the genes prescribing interactive (hence social) traits are subject to group-level selection.

Here is a simplified scenario of evolution according to the standard theory of natural selection. A successful thief furthers his own interests and those of his offspring, but his actions weaken the remainder of the group. Any genes proscribing his psychopathic behavior will increase within the group from one generation to the next—but, like a parasite causing a disease in an organism, his activity weakens the rest of the group—and eventually the thief himself. At the opposite extreme, a valiant warrior leads his group to victory, but in doing so is killed in battle, leaving few or no offspring. His genes for heroism are lost with him, but the remainder of the group, and the heroism genes they share, benefit and increase.

The two levels of natural selection, individual and group, illustrated by these extremes, are in opposition. They will in time lead to either a balance of the opposing genes or an extinction of one of the two kinds altogether. Their action is summarized in this maxim: selfish members win within groups, but groups of altruists best groups of selfish members.

The theory of inclusive fitness, in opposition to the standard theory of natural selection, and with it the established principles of population genetics, treats the individual group member, not its individual genes, as the unit of selection. Social evolution arises from the sum of all the interactions of the individual with each of the other group members in turn, multiplied by the degree of hereditary kinship between each pair. All the effects of this multiplicity of interactions on the individual, both positive and negative, make up its inclusive fitness.

Although the controversy between natural selection and inclusive fitness still flickers here and there, the assumptions of the theory of inclusive fitness have proved to be applicable only in a few extreme cases unlikely to occur on Earth or any other planet. No example of inclusive fitness has been directly measured. All that has been accomplished is an indirect analysis called the regressive method, which unfortunately has itself been mathematically invalidated. The use of the individual or group as the unit of heredity, rather than the gene, is an even more fundamental error.