Trigger warning: cancer, infertility.
We humans have long tended to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of creation or evolution. Aristotle, though a better biologist than he was a physicist, organised everything into a “great chain of being”, starting at the bottom with materia prima, unformed matter, and progressing upward through minerals, plants, invertebrates, vertebrates of various kinds and reaching its peak in “man”, and yes I do mean man as he was supposed to be better than woman. Although there were ideas of evolution around at the time, with natural historians wondering if humans had emerged from the water, this wasn’t supposed to be something up which beings ascended. They were just set statically in their positions. Christians later added God to this scale, above humans, although it’s possible Aristotle had already done that. I don’t remember it that clearly.
Thousands of years later, along came Linnaeus, actually Carl von Linné, a botanist who invented Latin binomials aiming to describe all life in neat categories called genera and species in a work entitled Systema natura. Homo sapiens is a good example, another one, probably not invented by Linnaeus himself, being Boa constrictor. There’s a sense of security in his system, which has been much modified since he invented it although the principles remain the same. I don’t know if he had the idea of hierarchy in his system in general but he certainly courted controversy by including humans in the system. Later still, Wallace and Erasmus and Charles Darwin, along with Lamarck, came up with the theory of evolution, leading to a strange set of misconceptions summed up by the question “if we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”. There are a couple of things wrong with this question as well as the idea that things are moving upwards when they evolve, which are worth mentioning now. One is that the more recent invention of cladism attempts to group related organisms as everything more closely related to a particular species than another, meaning that there’s a clade called simians including New and Old World monkeys and also apes, including humans, but there isn’t really a clade for monkeys, and also nothing ever evolves out of its clade, so insofar as there are monkeys we are still monkeys and nothing ever stops being one, and also the idea that evolution is advance and everything moves “up”. Just looking at the great apes, there is one species which has evolved less than the others, the orangutan, but because they’ve changed less than the others they retain features in common with them, but more significantly, human hands are more primitive, in the sense of having changed less, than those of chimps or gorillas whose hands have evolved for knuckle-walking as well as handling things, and the famous “march of progress” graphic is completely spurious and also dodgy in various ways, because we didn’t evolve from chimp-like ancestors except insofar as we are chimp-like ourselves, and it’s as true to say that the other apes are descended from us as we are from them. I think I’ve already talked about orangutan on here though.
In other words, in a sense there is no progress. That said, things do get more efficient sometimes. Modern predatory carnivores can run faster than their ancestors and replaced another group of predatory mammals who couldn’t capture prey with their paws but had to use their jaws to do so, for example. But even as far as intelligence is concerned, because humans can use language our short-term memories are much worse than those of chimps and our common ancestors. This is particularly interesting because the recent concern about social media and the internet more generally reducing attention span and concentration is actually only the latest phase in a process which began with the appearance of language, continued with the invention of writing and the growth of literacy and reached a more advanced stage with our current “goldfish” brains (actually goldfish have good memories of course).
Intelligence of the kind we have has been thrown up as something which appears to be useful to us and our ancestors in recent geological times, but to refer to the title of this blog, could be a passing phase. There are problems with being able to learn a lot which animals who don’t need to do this don’t have. Firstly, humans have to learn to do many things which other species can do instinctively, such as walk. Quite often, animals have a simple “party trick” such as spinning an orb web in the case of some spiders, which is not reflected in the rest of their accomplishments, but of course a human could learn to weave a net for a similar purpose. Termites can build arches, but humans can invent arches and learn how to make them from others, by word of mouth, observation, study or muscle memory.
All this comes at a cost. We have a long childhood and in order to reproduce physically (we’re social and cultural beings who also reproduce in the noösphere), ideally we need to get through puberty. We then need to find a partner and wait for pregnancy to produce one or occasionally two or more offspring at a time, who then take up much of our time and most of our energy. I’ve made this a heteronormative account for the sake of simplicity, and there are other possible narratives regarding lifetimes, but whatever they are, we are cultural, we depend on each other and what we do takes a long time, so the same principles still stand.
At the same time, we’re developing goldfish brains in several ways, mainly in connection with digital ICT. We’re outsourcing a lot of our thought. Nowadays, people even use AI chatbots to talk to potential romantic partners. We’re – I mean, I hardly need to say this, feels like a string of platitudes – dominated by social media, fake news, fake images generated again by AI and who knows what else?
In the meantime, we interfere with the biosphere without even thinking about what we’re doing, although the fact that we think and have the kind of intelligence we have leads to the damage we do, even unwittingly. That intelligence, such as it is, is a potential liability to the planet’s life.
While all that is going on, something else carries on upon the sea bed and elsewhere. There are, to take a particular example, animals called placozoa who are simply irregular, lichen-like layers of cells clinging to rocks and consuming algae and other microörganisms in their vicinity. And then elsewhere there are certain tumours which can be passed from animal to animal. One of these is canine venereal transmissible tumour, which is a sarcoma usually transmitted by mating between canine animals in several species including dogs, wolves and coyotes and growing on the genitals. Another is Devil facial tumour, which is a similarly-spread tumour affecting the faces of Tasmanian devils and transmitted when they bite each other during fighting. These tumours and the placozoa spread without needing to find themselves mates, have practically no gestation or maturation period and they don’t need no education. There are also transmissible cancers among bivalves such as cockles and mussels. At the same time, they’re rare.
Henrietta Lacks is a well-known woman whose cervical squamous cell carcinoma is notorious for still thriving seventy-three years after her death, is effectively immortal and has replaced other carcinoma cell lines growing in labs to the extent that certain lines have been unwittingly lost by being taken over by her cancer. I have to mention too that Ms Lacks’s heirs have never seen a cent of the millions of dollars profit which have resulted from the research done on her cells and that her name was for a long time completely unknown to the general public. They’re known as HeLa cells.
I know I’ve said all this before, and I’m reiterating it because it occurs to me that this train of thought can develop in a direction I haven’t previously considered. I’m sorry about the repetition, but I have something new.
To repeat what I’ve said previously, another interesting phenomenon is that of organoids. Sometimes, the cells we shed into sewers from our bodies begin new lives briefly by starting to divide and form structures in sewage works. And of course we know that untreated sewage is often discharged into the sea.
Transmissible cancers are admittedly rare, but bear with me.
Putting these bits together, suppose HPV, which is partly responsible for HeLa cells, were to produce just the right mutation in cervical squamous cell carcinoma to make it transmissible in the same way as canine transmissible venereal tumour. This is improbable but at the same time entirely feasible. It’s a malignant cancer able to invade and destroy tissues, including those of the reproductive system, and it can cause infertility. At the same time, cells are shed into the sewers which reach the sea when discharged into it. It’s also passed on during childbirth although not usually to the genitals, and it’s terminal if not treated. This can be expected to spread somewhat like AIDS. When they reach the sea, they continue to divide and attach themselves to the bodies of marine mammals with naked skin such as whales and seals, spreading malignantly into their skin and in the case of seals and the smaller cetaceans killing them, while allowing themselves to be shed into the water where they infect other individuals. Some of them settle on the sea bed and feed on microbes, similarly to placozoa.
The second ingredient is linked to Covid but extended. One of the long-term effects of Covid on some people is cognitive impairment, reported here, although the effects are relatively mild. I’m tempted to measure it in terms of IQ but that would just give a spurious sense of precision and quantity. Covid is likely to be only an early example of many pandemics because of deforestation and climate change leading to the movement of viral vectors such as bats into new environments where they’re more likely to come into contact with people. AIDS was probably caused by this, four dozen or so years ago, more specifically by the human consumption of bushmeat. It doesn’t stretch credulity either to expect the after-effects of viral pandemics to cause a reduction in intelligence, although clearly describing it as a reduction kind of assumes some kind of scale and I’ve already said that scales are somewhat odious, not in all cases, so it gets a bit difficult to express what I mean by this. What I mean is that people will be less able to solve intellectually-demanding problems and think critically.
Now imagine in this world of attritional cognitive decline caused by a series of pandemics stemming from deforestation and climate change that we continue to be confronted with various problems, another of which is antibiotic resistance, and not only lack the mental capacity to address them as a species but also have the very bodies aimed at addressing them starved of resources and the ability to operate together in a global research community as we’re currently seeing in the US. At this point it might even be necessary for AI to take over, and if it isn’t, bad decision-making could lead to that happening anyway.
This leads me to the third consideration in this mess: AI misalignment. It isn’t that AI is malevolent. The idea was once suggested that an AI might be instructed to make as many paperclips as possible and go on to convert the whole planet into paperclips, then send out space probes to turn everything else possible in the Universe into paperclips. This is a somewhat silly example, but it’s like the monkey’s paw story of wishing for various things and getting them ironically and malignly granted. Imagine therefore that in this human world of cognitive decline, AIs are instructed to “ensure biological humans survive for as long as possible”, the idea being to guard against something like mind uploading into the cloud or the manufacture of robots with human cognition and our memories copied into them. So they obey the instruction. They locate the currently rare tumours, place them in vats or perhaps coastal lagoons, guard them effectively, redirect all agricultural food supplies to them and reason that this decision encourages the mindless, unintelligent variety of human cell lines which is less harmful to the environment than human intelligence and technology. Humans as we understand them are then left sterile, dying of viral infections, less intelligent than before by gradual degrees and unable to take care of ourselves. Intelligence wanes and dies.
So that ^^^ basically.
And we’re all dead, but on the bright side there are massive vats of cancer tumours all over the world which also leak into the sea where they kill all the dolphins and seals.
Of course, this is a perfect storm of a prospect and in particular the transmissible tumour angle is quite improbable, but there is a biological argument that this world of human survival only in the form of cancer is supposed to illustrate that intelligence may be something we prize and think of as the pinnacle of some kind of progress, but actually could be a passing phase which is actually a liability to the survival of our genes and in our civilisation education and good critical thinking skills are the kind of thing which excludes the people doing it from contributing to a society dominated by people without, so whereas this passing phase of liberalism and tolerance would promote the long-term survival of the species, it can’t have a long-term influence unless people are flexible enough to move beyond scarcity-based economics. Ironically, so-called eugenics is also harmful to our long-term survival because it reduces diversity. To give a strictly physical example, a species which varies in its heat and cold tolerance, with some individuals thriving in hot weather and others in cold, would be able to survive through fluctuations in temperature over a long period. A world of blond-haired, fair-skinned and blue-eyed people is incestuous. And whereas Musk, for example, might prefer to spread prosecute’s genes preferring prosecute’s own traits, prosecute doesn’t have the broad perspective of what may be adaptive and selected for in the long run.
The short-term benefits of language and shared memory along with the capacity to act upon them become brittle not because we’re intelligent but because we’re not intelligent enough. If we were able to anticipate and work through the probable consequences of how we’ve acted in detail and be vividly aware of them, we might be more resilient in the circumstances we’ve created for ourselves. Maybe it’s the crows next time, or maybe there won’t be another turn. Earth’s story is long and indifferent, and the Medea Hypothesis captures what this might be about. This is the Gaia Hypothesis’s evil twin. According to the Medea Hypothesis, far from ushering the planet into a more habitable condition, multicellular life is self-destructive and tends to push it into a situation where only simple single-celled organisms can survive. I’m not sure this is illustrated by this specific trajectory though. It may be more that intelligence is just one of countless possible survival strategies life can manifest and simple undirected arbitrary processes just lead to us blundering into the next phase, which won’t favour intelligence at all. If this is true though, it may or may not relate to the state of the human world, or there may be an analogue to that feature. What would an intelligent society look like? Or is it intelligence or wisdom? Have we lived through the period of history where intelligence has much influence on politics or world events? If so, what does that mean for progressive and conservative views? I can’t help but be tempted by the idea that liberal democracy, good though it was, was a brief phase in a few countries which is long since gone. And my reaction to that is not to adopt conservatism as that clearly doesn’t work and is in any case morally reprehensible. So what is to be done?
A Box Of Chocolates 