Tomorrowland (8 page)

These notions are not entirely new. Economists have known for almost a hundred years of a correlation between height, income, and longevity. What had not been properly explained was mechanism, or how this process worked. The idea that humans can take control of evolution’s trajectory has been around since the 1970s, when polio vaccine discoverer Jonas Salk argued that humanity had entered a new era, which he dubbed “meta-biological evolution,” where we have the potential to control and direct evolution (our own and that of other species). Moreover, the now well-established field of epigenetics has shown us that a myriad of factors beyond alterations in DNA can produce heritable change in an organism.

Fogel, though, goes farther by going faster. “It’s a ‘whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts’ argument,” he explains. “We’re talking about an incredible synergy between technology and biology, about very simple improvements — pasteurization, a general reduction of pollutants, cleaning up our water supply — producing heritable effects across populations faster than ever before. Think about this: humans are a 200,000-year-old species. When we first emerged, our life span was twenty years. By the turn of the twentieth century, it had become forty-four years. We advanced by twenty-four years over the course of 200,000 years. But today, it’s eighty years. These simple improvements doubled our longevity in a century.”

University of Munich economist John Komlos explains further: “Evolution designed us to be quite plastic: Our size expands in good times and contracts in bad. As opposed to being hardwired and unable to adapt to environmental conditions, this [flexibility] provided an evolutionary advantage. The gain in
body mass that Fogel observed began in the 1920s — when people started working more sedentary jobs, driving automobiles, and listening to the radio — then started skyrocketing in the 1950s — with the introduction of television and fast food — and today has become an obesity epidemic. All in eighty years. We didn’t know this much change was possible this quickly; we didn’t know that extrinsic factors could make this kind of difference. Techno-physio evolution shows that economics has an impact at the cellular level — that it goes bone deep.”

4.

Since Fogel first began this work, his ideas haven’t stayed balkanized in economics. Everyone from cultural anthropologists to population geneticists have begun investigating the phenomenon. In a summary article published in February of 2010 in
Nature Review Genetics
, an international team of biologists argue that the interplay between genes and culture (with culture including things like economics and technology) has profoundly shaped evolution, especially when it comes to the speed of the process. “Gene-culture dynamics are typically faster, stronger, and operate over a broader range of conditions than conventional evolutionary dynamics,” writes lead author Kevin Leland, a biologist from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, “leading some practitioners to argue that gene-culture co-evolution [sometimes called dual inheritance theory] could be the dominant mode of human evolution.”

In a very real sense, the process Leland calls gene-culture evolution and Fogel dubbed techno-physio evolution are just examples of punctuated equilibrium by a different name, with culture rather than catastrophe providing the new niches. The main difference is in frequency. Naturally occurring geologic events are historically rare occurrences. Technological progress, meanwhile, is ever-accelerating.

This is no small detail. In recent years, researchers have found that the same exponential growth rates underpinning computing (Moore’s Law, for example) show up in all information-based technologies. Thus fields with a huge potential to drive techno-physio evolution — artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biology, robotics, networks, sensors, etc. — are now advancing along exponential growth curves. Consider genomic sequencing, long touted as the “essential tool” needed to move medicine from standardized and reactive to personalized and preventative. In 1990, when the Human Genome Project was first announced, the cost of this tool was budgeted at $3 billion — about as far from personalized medicine as one can get. But by 2001, costs were down to $300 million. By 2010, they were below $5,000. In 2012, the $1,000 barrier had fallen. Within ten years, at the current rate of decline, a fully sequenced human genome will price out at less than $10. If standardized and reactive medicine managed to double human life span in a century, just imagine how far personalized and preventative medicine might extend that total.

Fogel’s work documents how an increase in control over our external environment impacts our biology. But the fields that are now growing exponentially are cutting out the middleman, allowing us to take direct control over our internal environment. “Exponentially growing technology changes the evolutionary discussion,” says molecular geneticist and Autodesk distinguished researcher Andrew Hessel, “because, if you follow those patterns out, you very quickly see that this is the century we take control over our genome. Just look at the technologies surrounding reproduction: fetal testing, genetic screening, pregnancy monitoring, genetic counseling. When I was a child, Down syndrome was a real problem. Today, roughly 90 percent of all fetuses with Down syndrome are aborted. Play these patterns forward and we aren’t long from the day when we’re engineering our children: choosing skin color, eye color, personality traits. How long after that until parents are saying: ‘I bought you the best brain money can buy — now why don’t you use it?’ ”

5.

Of course, this massive acceleration of natural selection raises additional questions — like how much does it take to create an entirely new species? Dartmouth neuroscientist Richard Granger, who works on brain evolution, doesn’t think it will take much.

“Think about dogs,” he says. “Used to be they all looked like wolves. Now they don’t. In just a few thousand years of messing around with their genes, humans have created canine breeds that are completely physically incompatible — a Great Dane and a Chihuahua could not produce offspring without help. How much longer until they’re genomically incompatible? There’s nothing surprising here. When you start messing around with genes you get radiation [rapid, radical change]: It’s true in dogs, and it’s true in humans.”

Think of it like this: When a subset of a population is isolated from their ancestry, as this subset rushes to fill new — competitor-free — niches, the result is rapid evolutionary change, or allopatric speciation. But the exponential changes occurring today are examples of what could be called
technopatric
speciation, a process that occurs when a species is technologically isolated from their ancestry. Either way, the results are the same: rapid radiation.

Right now, humans are the only hominid species on earth, but this wasn’t always the case and, as these techno-physio trends continue to unfold, it seems unlikely to remain the case. Juan Enríquez, founding director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School, believes we’ve already fractured our species. “We’re now no more than a generation or two away from the emergence of an entirely new kind of hominid,” he says. “
Homo evolutus:
a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over their own evolution and the evolution of other species.”

The standard science fiction version of what happens after we take control of our evolution usually runs along eugenic lines — leading toward efforts to build a master race. But the situation
is nowhere near that straightforward. Seemingly unambiguous genetic goals — like trying to make people more intelligent — not only involve millions of genes, raising the specter of easy error, but might involve conditional relationships. For instance, our intelligence might be tied to memory in ways we can’t yet decode, so trying to improve one’s ability might inadvertently impede the other.

Moreover, without some form of top-down control, there’s little proof that human desires will be uniform enough to produce a master race. “Sure,” says Hessel, “we may begin optimizing ourselves and engineering our children, but it’s unlikely this will occur in a uniform way. We’re still human. So we’re going to engineer our children based on our egos, our creativity, our whims — this pretty much guarantees all sorts of wild varieties. It’s highly improbable that all of these varieties will be able to interbreed successfully, not without the use of technology. That’s when we really splinter the species; that’s why
Homo evolutus
could easily end up the parent to a Cambrian explosion of subspecies — a radical explosion of entirely new breeds of humans.”

Science is not always factually accurate, but it’s usually directionally accurate. It is the result of torturous investigation, vociferous argument, and hard-won consensus. One of the best tests of veracity is when conclusions reached in multiple fields begin to strongly overlap. And that’s exactly what’s happening here. Fogel got the process started, but today, researchers from nearly a dozen different arenas have all lit onto the same conclusions. We have stepped on the gas of natural selection, turbo-boosted evolution, and are now speeding toward the end of an era — the era of
Homo sapiens
, which is, of course, the only era we have ever known.

In short, we started out
us
, but we’re becoming
them
.

Vision Quest

THE WORLD’S FIRST ARTIFICIAL VISION IMPLANT

I spent over a year exploring the cutting edge of artificial vision research for this story. I had all my facts. I was set to start writing. Then my editor received a postcard in the mail from a mostly unknown and somewhat controversial vision researcher. Essentially, all it said was: “Hello, I’m William Dobelle, I’ve built an artificial vision brain implant. It’s about to be installed in a human being, come check it out.”

Neither of us knew what to think. Certainly, I didn’t believe such a technology was possible. After a year spent delving into the field, no one I had met along the way was even close to a workable device, forget about one that could be installed in humans. But due diligence is due diligence, so I got on a plane.

Staggering doesn’t come close to describing what I found when I landed. Day one: I met a blind man. Day three: He could see well enough to drive a car around a crowded parking lot.

According to the World Health Organization, there are 285 million visually impaired people on the planet — most of whom can be helped by this kind of innovation. But the crazier part is what comes next. Dobelle built an implant that restores normal vision, but devices capable of
augmented sight — eagle eyes or eyes that see colors outside of our visual spectrum or eyes that have microscopic abilities — are not far behind. We are arguably less than a decade away from talents lifted straight from the pages of comic books. No, staggering doesn’t even come close.

1.

I’m sitting across from a blind man — call him Patient Alpha — at a long table in a windowless conference room in New York. On one end of the table there’s an old television and a VCR. On the other end are a couple of laptops. They’re connected by wires to a pair of homemade signal processors housed in unadorned gunmetal gray boxes, each no bigger than a loaf of bread. In the corner stands a plastic ficus tree, and beyond that, against the far wall, a crowded bookshelf. Otherwise, the walls are white and bare. And when the world’s first bionic eye is turned on, this is what Patient Alpha will see.

Our guinea pig is thirty-nine, strong and tall, with an angular jaw, large ears, and a rugged face. He looks hale, hearty, and healthy — except for the wires. They run from the laptops into the signal processors, then out again and across the table and up into the air, flanking his face like curtains before disappearing into holes drilled through his skull. Since his hair is dark and the wires are black, it’s hard to see the actual points of entry. From a distance the wires look like long ponytails.

“Come on,” says William Dobelle. “Take a good look.”

From a few steps closer, I see that the wires plug into Patient Alpha’s head like a pair of headphones plug into a stereo. The actual connection is metallic and circular, like a common washer. So seamless is the integration that the skin appears to simply stop being skin and start being steel.

“It’s called a percutaneous pedestal,” Dobelle tells me.

All I can do is stare. This man has computer jacks sunk into both sides of his skull.

On the far side of the pedestal, buried beneath hair and skin, is the wetware: a pair of brain implants. Each one is the size of a fat quarter, a platinum electrode array encased in biocompatible plastic.

Dobelle has designed a three-part system: a miniature video camera, a signal processor, and the brain implants. The camera, mounted on a pair of eyeglasses, captures the scene in front of the wearer. The processor translates the image into a series of signals that the brain can understand, then sends the information to the implant. The picture is fed into the brain, and, if everything goes according to plan, the brain will “see” the image.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The camera’s not here yet. Right now the laptops are taking its place. Two computer techs are using them to calibrate the implants.

One of the techs punches a button, and a millisecond later the patient rotates his head, right to left, as if surveying a crowded room.

“What do you see?” asks Dobelle.

“A medium-size phosphene, about five inches from my face,” responds the patient.

“How about now?”

“That one’s too bright.”

“OK,” says Dobelle. “We won’t use that one again.”

This goes on all morning, and it’s nothing new. For almost fifty years, scientists have known that electrical stimulation of the visual cortex causes blind subjects to perceive small points of light known as phosphenes. The tests they’re running aim to determine the “map” of the patient’s phosphenes. When electrical current zaps into the brain, the lights don’t appear only in one spot. They are spread out across space, in what artificial vision researchers call the “starry-night effect.”