A Passing Phase

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?

Two Immortalities

Be careful what you wish for. Even if immortality involves living forever in a physically healthy body much as it would be in the prime of life, it would take a miracle to make it bearable in the long run. Boredom can constitute an extreme form of suffering extended over millennia, and this time it would never end. This, to me, has long been the problem with the idea of eternal life in the Christian sense. I chose to resolve this by thinking of the human mind as a closed system within which entropy tends towards a maximum, in this case a form of insanity perhaps, and the options are therefore eternity without God with one’s mind filling up with emotional purulence and stagnating, or eternity with God which links one to the infinite, and therefore an open system, which by some miracle makes it bearable. Just a thought experiment. Olaf Stapledon seemed to have something like this in mind in the “cult of evanescence” – the idea that there is beauty in mortality, though this was in beings with a life expectancy of fifty thousand years.

Even so, people do generally not want to die and when they do it’s often because they find their current life unbearable for all sorts of reasons. Consequently, as a species we like to pursue things which might extend our lives. And there are a few animals who are kind of immortal. There’s a species of starfish, if I remember correctly, who starts off as a swimming form containing a tiny body of the future adult, who is then deposited somewhere and the rest of the larva swims off and doesn’t die. I’m not sure how this works because it makes it sound like eventually all the biomasse of the planet would turn into starfish vehicles, but so I’m told. There’s also a jellyfish who responds to injury and disease by ageing backwards and then growing back towards adulthood, and planaria, flatworms I used to keep as pets along with leeches as a child, way before I went vegan of course, do the same kind of thing. They respond to starvation by shrinking from twenty millimetres long to about three, after which they’re rejuvenated, and since they often reproduce by pulling themselves in half, the planaria living today are in a sense the same individuals as their distant ancestors who knows how many thousands or millions of years ago. Finally, there’s a bird called Leach’s storm petrel who doesn’t age in the usual way for vertebrates. Chromosomes have long bits on their ends called telomeres which prevent fraying damaging actual genes. Every time cells undergo mitosis in a living animal’s body, these shorten slightly until this damage starts to occur. In Leach’s petrel, and probably other related birds, telomeres lengthen with age. Procellariformes, the order including storm petrels, tend to live surprisingly long for animals of their size. A starling has a life expectancy of fifteen years, and is about the same size as one of these birds, but a Leach’s storm petrel can live to about thirty, and is likely to die of a non-age related cause such as infection, accidental death or being eaten.

Ageing could be seen as amounting to accidents which befall the inside of the body, sometimes to do with outside factors. As such, it may not be entirely realistic to think of a human being as simply getting older, and circumstances where humans were impervious to such diseases as cancer, heart disease, infections and diabetes would not also be circumstances where we were immortal because we could step off the kerb and be knocked down by the proverbial ‘bus at any point. It isn’t even clear whether a real distinction can be made between stuff going on outside the body and stuff going on inside it, so a simplistic assessment of how frayed your chromosomes are may not be terribly informative. In fact chromosomes that don’t fray may be problematic, a point to which I shall return.

We are of course chordates. I keep saying this but haven’t explained what it means. In case you don’t know, a chordate is an animal who at some stage in her life cycle has gill clefts, a stiffening back rod and muscle blocks. They often have a post-anal tail, i.e. the end of the digestive system and the genitalia are not always the end of the body. Humans usually but not always lack external tails but of course we do have them and they’re not even vestigial, as anyone who has fractured or bruised theirs will testify – it makes it painful and difficult to do number twos, for instance. We also have gill clefts as embryos and in fact our ears and jaws have evolved from them. If our notochords don’t regress, which normally happens by the age of four, they can eventually cause problems rather like benign tumours although they are usually asymptomatic.

We have, as I mentioned yesterday, evolved from fish-like invertebrate chordates, but the story doesn’t begin there. Early chordates were like sea squirts, and this time I’ll seek out a picture of an individual sea squirt rather than the admittedly pretty Haeckel-stle illustration I used previously:

Komodo National Park sea squirt (Polycarpa aurata)
Date
10 October 2006
Source
Own work
Author
Nhobgood Nick Hobgood

Sea squirts are I think completely brainless filter feeders as adults. The two siphons whose openings you can see suck water in and blow it out, trapping plankton in a mucous “net” which is then eaten. They have hearts which pump their blood sporadically in either direction arbitrarily and swap over sporadically. Their blood is also unique for being high in vanadium, possibly to make them poisonous to potential predators. This is an adult sea squirt, who lives facing head down, attached to the sea bed. Sea squirts are probably the ancestors of all vertebrates, but looking at one like that, and there are considerably stranger ones out there, it might be hard to guess. That’s because it’s an adult.

Sea squirts start off as tadpoles. Here’s a comparison of an ascidian (as they’re known) and a frog tadpole side by side:

The resemblance is remarkable and is a clue to how fish, our ancestors, came to be: a process called neoteny, which occurs a lot in evolution. Neoteny is when the younger form of an organism becomes its life-long form. It happened in humans when we evolved from other apes – we are more like baby apes of other species than their adults. Sea squirts start their lives as tadpoles, with vision and brains guiding their activity, seek out a suitable site to attach to, then do so head down, lose their eyes and brains and develop into their adult stage. There’s another group of invertebrate chordates called the larvaceans, so called because they stay in their larval form but are otherwise like juvenile sea squirts. This is one called Oikopleura:

Photo of eYFP expressing Oikopleura dioica taken by Dr. Thomas Clarke.

It’s thought that fish evolved from these via lancelet-like forms, and therefore in a sense all vertebrates are larval. Now I don’t know if there is anything left of the genes or mechanisms which would allow a vertebrate to change from her larval to an adult form, but considering that humans spend all their lives, up to ten dozen years, in their larval form I sometimes wonder if we could do a little tweak and make ourselves metamorphose into our adult form as giant marine blind and brainless sea squirts. The adults live up to thirty years, and the tadpoles take only a day and a half to settle and start to change, so proportionately, assuming three score years and ten to be our life expectancy, we could live up to half a million years. But would it be worth it? Intuitively, a post-human sea squirt doesn’t seem to be much more than a sarcophagus or memorial, although knowing that the oceans are where all our family members end up living might change our attitudes towards their stewardship.

That scenario is of course quite fanciful and is almost certainly impossible, not to mention pointless, but it would effectively be immortality of a kind. There is another kind which is much more feasible and closer to home, which also involves the sea. I’ll start with dogs.

There is a tumour affecting dogs, wolves and coyotes referred to as Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumour. Thousands of years ago, a dog developed a tumour in his genitalia which could be passed on through coitus. That dog’s genome survived to some extent to the present day because he is now effectively that tumour. It contains his genome to some extent. It can also be passed on by other social contact such as licking and can also infect the nose. I found out recently that this tumour is one of the few survivors of the dogs who used to cohabit with Native Americans, incidentally. It can cause urinary obstruction and can recur after surgery. So there’s that.

Then there’s the famous Henrietta Lacks:

Please pay attention to this caption!
This is a photograph of Henrietta Lacks, legally speaking ALONE property of the University of Harvard, taken in the late 1940s. It will be removed solely on request of a member of her family or a legal representative of her family. It will absolutely not be removed on request of the University of Harvard.

I suppose it’s possible that you don’t know who Henrietta Lacks is. I’m not going over that again. Look her up if not.

Ms Lacks’s cervical cancer is good evidence that a transmissible tumour could occur in human bodies, even a transmissible venereal tumour. So far as anyone knows, it hasn’t happened yet. However, since the human population of this planet is increasing, the probability of the requisite mutations occurring is also increasing. This is how someone can, in a sense, achieve immortality.

HeLa cells are able to survive in vitro, which happens sometimes with certain cell lines but is fairly unusual. This is interesting because clearly lab conditions are very different from inside the body. It’s this ability to survive in a different environment which persuades some to regard them as a different species. The karyotype (chromosomal number) is also unique and not like that of most human somatic cells. HeLa cells are at least triploid for every chromosome if not more. Most animal cells are diploid, including a pair of each chromosome. HeLa have up to five copies of some, and there are also some mixed chromosomes and they can vary in chromosome number, which is not surprising since they’re cancer cells.

Cancer cells are in a sense a triumph of evolution. They mutate in order to avoid the “kill signal” sent to cells which have gone awry, they can survive while circulating in the blood out of contact with their usual environment and they are, ironically, much better at handling anærobic respiration. The reason this is ironic is that there’s a fake cancer treatment called lætrile which is based on the hypothesis that theyŕe worse at it, which as well as being dangerous even in a healthy person would quite possibly encourage the growth and spread of tumours. Cancer cells are also immortal, at least up until the point where they kill the host, and as CTVT, HeLa cells, a sarcoma found in hamsters and devil facial tumour which affects Tasmanian devils demonstrate, even beyond that point.

Trichoplax adherens. Eitel M, Osigus H-J, DeSalle R, Schierwater B (2013) Global Diversity of the Placozoa. PLoS ONE 8(4): e57131. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0057131
Author
Bernd Schierwater

Placozoa are a phylum of very simple multicellular animals consisting of a flat mat of cells which absorbs organic débris from the surface they’re living on and reproducing by shedding clumps of cells. They may also produce eggs. They are the simplest animals of all, and looked at another way they’re basically free-living tumours. HeLa cells can survive outside the body. I’ve also mentioned organoids before. These are the result of cells shed from the human digestive tract into sewers which multiply and form tiny organised bits of organs in sewage works. These too are human cells which can survive outside the body. They’re also nightmare fuel of course.

Putting all of those things together, a couple of possible scenarios arise. One is that there could be a human tumour transmissible through sexual contact, and it’s possible also that this could cause sterility. If that spread sufficiently and early enough in fertile life, it would probably reduce the population considerably and perhaps completely. That seems unlikely, however. I can easily see that there could be a tumour transmissible between humans in this way but it would eventually come to light, at least by the time it had reached parts of the planet which have medical facilities. However, the human species seems bent on its own destruction thanks to global capitalism. It’s hard to imagine what will happen once we’re gone, except that there may be a lot of nuclear power station meltdowns and poisoned areas around them, which however might stimulate evolution just as they did at Chernobyl with the mould which uses ionising radiation as a source of energy. I think it’s feasible, given the state of the planet right now, that it will bounce back after a period of chaos and instability. In order for that not to happen, it would mean that even microörganisms living in deep sea thermal vents would have to be wiped out. It could even be that evolution will be stimulated, as it often seems to be, by mass extinctions, and that there will be greater biodiversity in a few million years’ time than there was before the onset of the recent ice ages. Mammalian diversity, for example, has been in decline for millions of years even without the influence of human activity.

The Doomsday Argument, which I’ve mentioned from time to time in this blog, is a probability-based argument that the human species will soon become extinct. It emphatically does not depend on any specific apocalyptic process, which is important to note because it seems at first to suggest that our extinction will be caused by overpopulation. Rather, it works as follows, and I’m going to use out of date statistics and trends here to argue for it just to illustrate the principle. First of all, for the purposes of this argument to count as human it has to be possible that the individual concerned can have the thought that humans will cease to exist physically. It was estimated several decades ago, when the population was at around 4 000 million, that there had been 75 000 million humans from 200 000 years ago to the day the estimate was made, and at the time population doubled about every thirty years. The thought of human extinction has occurred in all sorts of situations throughout history, for instance in connection with Christian eschatology, and it’s easy to imagine a small tribe of people unaware of anyone else fearing for their survival back in Palaeolithic times. The probability that one is living at the end of human history increases as population increases, and given those figures, which are not now as accurate as they were because population growth is slowing, the final human birth is due to occur in about 2130 relative to my own birth in 1967. Of course this argument has many flaws. However, it requires human sentience.

Imagine this then. Humans as we know them die out. In the meantime, cell lines from a transmissible venereal tumour have come to thrive in sewage and nearby warm seas, perhaps parasitic on other animals. Humans will therefore survive and be immortal, just not in a state which can contemplate its own demise, but more like tumours living off other vertebrates living in the Caribbean or somewhere similar.

Immortality!