This is the fifth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode extends the point from Episode 3 that we owe almost everything to life that came before us. All our senses and capabilities are inherited. We would be nothing without our older brothers and sisters on this planet.
As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.
Introduction
This is the usual short naming of the series, of myself, and the topic of this episode (our biological inheritance) as part of the process for putting modernity into context.
Masters of Innovation
I admit it. Humans have invented a lot of very nifty and clever technologies—as I have done in my own small way. The story we tell ourselves about ourselves is that we are masters of innovation, identifying our powerful brains as what sets us apart from all other living things. Indeed, we are exceptional among life forms in our ability to new-fangle our way into unprecedented technological territory.
But I want to compare our “artificial” technologies to the innovations expressed by life itself. The following set of questions involve an assessment of our high-tech inventions on the robust—fragile axis, compared to the inventions of life.
Our Fragile Inventions
The following five questions/categories help illuminate ways in which technology does not hold a candle to life.
Durability
How long do our technologies last? How long until our devices end up in the junk pile or forgotten? Some examples that we would hesitate to call “modern” like ancient tools (stone arrowheads), techniques (fire-starting), and artifacts (pyramids and earth-works) might last thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of years. But even that is short on evolutionary and ecological timescales. For modern technology, corrosion, deterioration, and damage generally preclude long lives. Years or decades are not uncommon measures.
Self-Repair
Can our inventions repair themselves, the way a gash on our arm heals, a disease is defeated, or a tail or limb grows back (for some animals)? Plants are absolute masters at self-repair, constantly recovering from being munched. Nothing we build is capable of doing anything like biological repair, as our inventions are simplistic, artificial assemblies lacking ecological context.
Self-Replication and Upgrades
Do our inventions self-replicate? I remember hubbub around 3-D printers printing new 3-D printers, but it’s total fantasy without substantial human intervention (e.g., assembling, wiring, etc.). Not only do microbes, plants, and animals self-replicate, most throw in random variations via sexual reproduction. On top of this, environmental factors (background radiation) can produce mutations, thus accidentally trying new arrangements that sometimes lead to impressive upgrades through the relentless and patient process of favoring organisms that work well (but not overly well) in their ecological contexts. Our inventions do nothing of the sort.
Perfect Recycling
Can our inventions achieve 100.00% recycling efficiency? Not even close. Our technologies require mining materials that are not otherwise in circulation in the community of life. Meanwhile, life has figured out how to persist essentially indefinitely on a small handful of elements in broad circulation on the surface of our planet (see post on inexhaustible flows). Evolution is a demanding task-master. Only those organisms participating in this 100% recycling program persist.
Ecological Context
Can our inventions tuck into an ecological context, “accepted” as members in a set of reciprocal relationships among the community of life. Huh? Most people likely don’t even know what this gibberish means, which is a huge part of our problem: we’ve become ecologically ignorant. So, of course our technology does not integrate in a co-evolved role within the full ecological context. It does rather the opposite, shredding longstanding relationships while being oblivious to the damage. One of the aims of this series is to promote greater ecological awareness.
Humans Solved Almost Nothing
As stressed in Episode 3, humans are hugely reliant on solutions to the very toughest problems of life solved by microbes over billions of years. Basic jobs like replication via DNA and RNA, metabolism, protein synthesis and catalysis, cell membranes, waste processing, etc. were worked out and refined by single-cell organisms and passed along to us. Of our 20,000 genes, we share a third of an amoeba’s 13,000 genes to carry out these basic requirements every second of every day.
After single-cell organisms laid the foundation, more complex animals invented bones, muscles, tendons, skin, gills, lungs, circulatory systems, neurons, nervous systems, immune systems, and on and on. Is any anatomical invention unique to humans? We entirely benefit from an enormous legacy of experimentation and success.
Senses
Humans are familiar with sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. None of these five were invented by humans, of course. And while humans have pretty impressive performance across the board—especially in sight—we are not the best in any category.
Other senses are alien to us, like echolocation (sonar), infrared vision (snakes), magnetic sense (navigation), electrical sensing (many aquatic beings), and polarization sensitivity, for instance. What alien sensations do plants sense? The view out our window is not as expansive or complete as we naturally imagine—as our imaginations are confined to the window that our physiology allows us to comprehend. It’s hard to know what you don’t know, or experience what you simply can’t.
Capabilities
Other capabilities like running, flying, swimming, or dexterity were pioneered by other species, some of which were passed on to us. How about photosynthesis? Pretty amazing to be able to eat sunlight! We can’t do anything nearly as cool as that!
Anthropocentrism Aside
In my search for an image to use for the example of running, what I had in mind was a lizard running up on its hind legs (perhaps across water, as some can do). But more generally, I did a search for “evolution running animal” trying to learn when running emerged among animals. What I got instead was an outpouring of results pertaining to human running performance. Try it yourself!
In a similar vein, I wanted to find examples of senses that humans do not possess. Again, it was a challenge to produce search results that dared peer beyond human sensory experience.
Geniuses!
As has been stressed before, early microbes did the heavy lifting for us. The plants and animals that followed continued to build up solutions. I like to view them as real geniuses.
It’s pretty amazing. They’ve solved our hardest problems for how to live in a complex world. Meanwhile, we haven’t yet figured out how they did it all—if ever we even could. We’re playing catch-up to their genius, struggling even after-the-fact, supplied with working examples all around us. Ooof.
Again, we share a third of an amoeba’s genes, and appear to share 98.8% of a chimpanzee’s genes. So we’re 99% heritage, adding only a few modest alterations and nothing wholly new. Even our brains are handed to us, with a few small upgrades that turn out to be important. But the brain of any mammal will bear a striking resemblance to our own—especially as one gets to the larger and more complex mammals.
I call these microbes, plants, and animals geniuses because they have solved all these hard problems. They are also not confused about how to live in this world, which seems to be a specialty of modern humans. Artificial, arbitrary constructs with no heritage (like all the things we invent in modernity) are bound to raise endless questions about what’s right or best, since ecology and evolution have not yet had their say, and it’s all up in the air.
Bumbling Idiots?
I can anticipate the reaction of many to the affront that animals—let alone plants or microbes— might be called geniuses. The argument might go: sure, many difficult problems were addressed in the process of evolution, but not by anything we would (or should) call smart. The microbes, plants, and animals didn’t really know what they were doing: they were just bumbling along and happened to passively participate in a process that was beyond their capacity to understand or control. Rather than geniuses, they are hapless idiots that fell into these “solutions.” In other words, we can’t say they “solved” the problems if they didn’t understand what they were doing.
I get it, but isn’t this a form of self-flattery? If they don’t do it the way we would have done it—in our brains, using neurons—then it doesn’t count. It strikes me as bending the rules to favor what we consider to be “proper” problem solving techniques.
I’ll just point out that we have not demonstrated the capability of using our brains to do anything even remotely as impressive and cool as what life has done in terms of creating self-replicating, self-repairing, perfect-recycling entities that can survive for millions of years integrated into an ecological context. We have invented nothing even close to being as amazing and robust!
The other objection might involve the words “solved” or “figured out.” But just look at the results: did a working solution emerge? Was there a process at play that engaged in experimentation until the problem was figured it out? Of course there was. Just because it didn’t happen in a human-style brain doesn’t invalidate the fact that the hard problems were solved or figured out by some means that necessitated the involvement of the associated organisms.
The solutions surrounding us in nature are real, robust, elegant, and clever. They have lasted a long time.
Who cares if neurons were not the primary agents in solving these problems? Why would that be the metric of validity? The result is still really amazing, really genius, and in fact maybe even more genius for being done on a plane and in a way that we can’t even conceive, cognitively. Why let our own severe limitations define the term “genius,” when the results speak for themselves? The fact that it all works is amazing, far exceeding our own modest capabilities.
Yes, I’m saying that our self-focus and physiological limitations are getting in the way of our appreciating a broader and more impressive form of genius. Pretty annoying of us, huh?
Aside on Brains
I didn’t want to go off on a tangent in the video, and promised to say more in the companion write-up, which you have now found. We practically worship our brain power, which probably isn’t a particularly healthy habit. Let me try to help.
First, brains developed over 500 Myr ago, using neurons essentially identical to the ones we and our genetic cousins still employ today. Basic brain design is largely unchanged—just elaborated. Watching embryos develop is a great way to see the progression, starting out not too dissimilar from a worm progressing to a fish progressing to… Our brain stem—controlling basic bodily functions like breathing and heart rate—is pretty ancient. Atop this core are reptilian augmentations that influence basic survival behaviors. A mammalian limbic system adds emotions (important for social interaction), and then a neocortex provides for higher cognitive capabilities.
The main uniqueness of human brains is the size and power of the prefrontal cortex. Just as the progress of an embryo mirrors the evolutionary sequence, the prefrontal cortex is the last to fully develop, finishing in people’s late twenties. It’s not just life experience that leads to wisdom: we’re just not done cooking for a long time!
Meanwhile, evidence suggests that human brain size appears to have been larger 10,000 years ago than it is today, so that we might have lost capability compared to our prehistoric forebears. This fact is almost insulting to modern humans, thinking we’re so smart. But consider that an individual hunter-gatherer in a small group needed to comprehend far more about their world to thrive: cycles, rhythms, behaviors, patterns, associations, relationships, for instance. Modern humans have offloaded individual intellect into a rather impressive—but fragile—collective intelligence coded in temporary artificial constructs. Food comes from the grocery store, rather than from an intimate knowledge of seasons and signs.
These somewhat scattered reflections are meant to convey that our brains are not examples of transcendent hardware unlike anything that came before and deserving of worship. They are incrementally more capable than their predecessor models, which got parlayed into a temporary cultural explosion that amplifies our reach (and damage) for the time being. But if those external amplifications are not ecologically sustainable, their fragility will determine their fate. All this is to say: don’t put too much stock in human genius when:
- We’ve done nothing at all comparable to what evolution has accomplished.
- We can’t even understand the full story.
- Our “genius” is busy initiating a sixth mass extinction.
In the end, the true genius of life will persist, and we utterly rely on its doing so. The opposite reliance is very far from real.
