Should we be talking about an upgrade to Human 2.0?

Are humans up to the task? I've argued in past blogs that it doesn't appear so. If my suppositions prove correct, then what? When your computer can no longer keep up with the work load, what do you do? Is it possible that Homo sapiens needs an upgrade? Of course evolution has been 'upgrading' the genus for hundreds of thousands of years, so to speak. In fact there is reason to believe that that process has continued to the current day. Maybe we're at Human Release 1.85 (think of australopithecenes as prototypes to the sapient release!). But the workload has suddenly gotten huge. And our ability to process information and make good decisions looks to be falling behind. How might we get the next big release out the door?

In an era of genetic engineering there is an increasing amount of talk about designer babies. There is serious discussion about choosing traits for kids yet to be conceived. I have no doubt that there will be a move to at least eliminate genetic defects. We already have seen couples choosing abortion after finding out through amniocentesis that their fetus had some abnormality. The next step is filtering eggs and sperm (for in vitro fertilization) based on marker genes that correlate with inherited diseases. As progress is made in genetic therapies we may yet see the active insertion of genes that impact physical and mental traits as parents seek advantages for their offspring.

Make no mistake. This is as evolutionarily sound as it gets. The fact that humans have consciously entered into the process of pre-selecting advantageous traits doesn't make it less a natural evolutionary process. Of course, this isn't the same as saying that it will be successful either.

Parents may get the option to design the intelligence of their offspring. But I suspect this form of pre-selection (or anticipatory selection) will not work all that well. The reason is that parents are not prescient. They may be responding to the current cultural belief that intelligence is the most important mental trait a kid can have. But the culture might be wrong.

Evolution works in stages. First there needs to be a mechanism for generating variation in one or more traits. There are many mechanisms by which this happens. The most widely known is random mutation in genes. However in recent years we have found many other mechanisms, including mechanisms for increasing or decreasing mutation rates in response to external factors. Genes, we now know, are not the only segments of DNA subject to variation. The vast regions of what was once thought to be accumulated junk DNA contains segments that don't code for protein synthesis, but do code for short snippets of RNA that turns out to be active in controlling the transcription of protein-coding DNA! The genome is far more complex and intricate than understood as little as a decade ago. Nevertheless, variation in the genetic material is at the root of evolutionary process.

The variation produces (if it isn't fatal to the embryo) variation in phenotype — in the physical structures of the body and brain. The latter can give rise to altered behavior or mental competencies. And it is this phenotypic variation that must be put to the test in the extant environment. Shapes or behaviors that confer a selective advantage on the individual are realized in increased procreative success. The frequency of the variant in the gene pool rises over generations and little by little the new variant can come to dominate the pool. In the case where this variant helps to create a situation in which carriers are more likely to mate with other carriers (e.g. through linkage with a sexually selected trait) a sympatric speciation may occur right within the population. But this is getting ahead of the theme.

Pre-selection must assume one knows what the extant environment for the offspring will be and that the trait chosen for enhancement will, perforce, guarantee success, which translates to reproductive advantage. Obviously there are two things wrong with this picture. First, how could the parents know with certainty that the trait will confer added fitness? What happens if the environment changes in such a way that the trait will end up in exactly the opposite situation? Second, reproductive success has to translate into leaving far more offspring than any competing variant in that trait. Humans who end up 'smarter' are not guaranteed to reproduce more. In fact there is some reason to believe they will do so less! Perhaps athletic prowess would confer a male with additional opportunities to mate (well maybe females too) but with widespread use of contraceptives there would be no major gain in reproductive success.

So is anticipatory selection a blind alley? Possibly not. The hitch here is that all of the traits we readily imagine enhancing may not actually work out as anticipated. Increasing intelligence or physical stature are sort of the obvious traits to work on. But are they the right ones?

In fact there is another trait I would choose to provide my children or grandchildren if the opportunity presented itself. That is sapience.

Sapience is the brain basis for wisdom. It is part of the executive functions mediated by the prefrontal cortex and, if my suspicions are correct, can be largely attributed to the expansion of the polar patch identified as Brodmann Area 10 (BA10). That is the patch immediately behind your forehead. There are several distinct patches of cortex in this region that work together to produce overall planning and forethought. But BA10 has some special aspects that make it a prime suspect for sapience. It is the 'newest' and fairly recently enlarged patch of cortex in evolutionary terms. My speculation is that this patch is one of the key players in what makes us human in the first place.

Judgment is a somewhat nebulous concept because it is hard to fix any particular processing functions to what it does. Intelligence can at least be parsed in terms of functions like memory capacity, rate of learning, recall, and decision typing (multiple intelligences). Someone can make a decision purely using intelligence provided the choices are clearly identified. Intelligence can be thought of as the rational processing machinery needed to make a decision. Judgment, on the other hand, is brought to bear just to determine what background knowledge should be applicable and depends on tacit knowledge that is hard to circumscribe functionally. Increasing intelligence might make it possible to make more decisions per unit time, but it does not mean they will be good decisions in the long run. Think of business executives focusing on short-term profits while that focus makes them blind to long-term, on-going profitability. It is easy to show that a short-term focus can lead to short-term profit maximization and long-term loss! A smarter manager could make more decisions involving more complex choices, but that wouldn't mean s/he was making wise choices for the long-run. In computer algorithms this is known as the Greedy Method. And there are a restricted set of optimization problems for which it actually works. But for most optimization problems it can easily be proved to fail. Humans are prone to the greedy approach. Humans write computer programs and frequently are seduced into using some form of the greedy method to solve computational problems if they haven't been listening in their CS courses. Think of it as a cautionary tale.

So more intelligence isn't necessarily the route to improving humanity. It might not hurt. It might even be necessary in order to improve some aspects of sapience, so it could be a necessary but not sufficient condition for improving human decision making. The same argument goes for creativity. Creativity can be thought of as the brain's capacity to set up novel connections between concepts when playing 'What-if' — imagining. A good bit of creativity can help get out of local minima where intelligence might get stuck in a relational valley while attempting to make a decision. You know the case, when you just can't seem to decide because at first glance it looks like you are faced with an impossible set of choices. Then later, like in a dream, you suddenly see a new way and voilà, you can make a decision.

More creativity might be good to a point, but it should be easy to see that too much creativity is more likely to get one in trouble than not. Highly creative people (artists, writers, etc.) very often suffer internal demons of various kinds. And there is some evidence that too much creativity in one domain causes deficits in other areas. Creativity is one trait I would be very cautious about improving.

But wisdom, who wouldn't want more wisdom? Why would anybody not want their children to possess more sapience? Wouldn't we all be better off if we had better judgment? It would seem to me to be a no-brainer (pun intended). Human 2.0 — not necessarily a lot smarter, but a lot more likely to make good decisions! I'd buy it.

So what if neuroscientists, evo-devo scientists, etc. were to delve into the genes and control switches in the genome that affect the development of BA10 (and associated patches) and discovered an allele that caused the patch to develop larger and perhaps thicker? What if psychologists studying wisdom were to identify tests for sapience that could be correlated with fMRI (or other imaging) activity in BA10? Don't you think that fiddling around with the brain-development genome to enlarge BA10 and (hopefully) improve human judgment might be a good idea?

Somebody (wise, I think) once said that humanity is evolution discovering itself. We've already mucked around with the forces of variation and selection in breeding plants, animals, and even ourselves (blood lines). Is it really implausible that we might learn enough about evolution and our own genetics/mentality that we could consciously create the first incipient species of Homo since sapiens walked out of Africa? Yes, I know, some of you (maybe most) will immediately think of Frankenstein or recoil at the thought of playing god. Some will immediately conjure up images of Mengele and Hitler and start uncontrollably yelling something about eugenics. If you do I would simply reply it's time to grow up now. It's time to face the world as it really is. It's time to rise above the past and look at such questions with dispassion and objectivity. It is time to mature and be as wise as is humanly possible (once again pun intended).

If we get stuck in the past, and our imagined horrors, there is some likelihood that our genus won't actually participate in future evolution at all.

Comments

[Brent Scheneman]

Take heart if you feel like your keen insight is a just a single cry in the wilderness.

There are at least two of you addressing this subject now.

Please check out my colleague's essay, "Human Nature 2.0 - A Simple Idea for a Troubled World." You can Google the title to find it.

Tiité endeavors to take the idea beyond awareness into the reality of a working model.

Please check it out.

You offer a lot of wisdom in this entry and throughout "Question Everything." Thank you for your contributions.

[Brent Scheneman]

Please google "2.0 - A Simple Idea for a Troubled World" instead of the longer version that I have suggested above. This will provide a link that navigates one directly to Tiité Baquero's essay of the same name on his website.

As you know this comment section disallows me the convenience of providing hot links.

[George Mobus]

Brent,

Thanks for the comment and the pointer. I will take a look for sure.

I wasn't aware you couldn't enter a URL. I will check on that.

George

[Florifulgurator]

Making better brains by genetic engineering? I don't think that could ever work.

Problem is, you would have to wait at least 20y to see if a new brain 2.x strain is an improvement or not, and that will be difficult to judge. And then there's brain plasticity: The environment (social, education,...) has quite some influence. Plus, hominids are social animals. So you need some sort of group selection/evolution to improve cooperation of diversely talented brains.

Finally, methinks evolution is now at a loss with current hominids: How could Nature or Man ever select for less GHG producing hominids? The feedback is just too slow and too subtle to exert any evolutionary pressure.

But whatabout memetic engineering? Breed not new genes but a new culture, based on current insights and necessities.

Perhaps launch some new permacultural tribe or meta-religious order. Sounds like the old Hippies' dream of dropping out - but meanwhile (c21st world food crisis) subsistence farming/gardening could be the better option for the urban poor who can't buy enough food anymore. And farming can be carbon negative. It can also be creative, fulfilling, and fun. Switch your SUV with a fine horse. Well-managed grazing can enhance the Prairie's soil carbon content, so why not go back to living in the tipi and follow the herd. This (and the joy of it) is stuff that Homo S Sapiens urgently needs to re-learn. Time is up (c21st). No time left to wait for engineered wonder brains.

The meme to select for is: Don't spoil the soil but put the carbon back...

[George Mobus]

Hi Florifulgurator (wow, what a handle!)

If you mean genetic engineering as we currently think of it wrt plant and domestic animal GE then I agree completely. You are right about having to wait to see the outcomes.

But that isn't what I have in mind. First, I suspect that the key to the evolution of the human brain, its rapid expansion, especially in the frontal lobes and prefrontal cortex, is not in the genes (the protein coding segments) but in the control network/epigenetics of the genome. That is just a starting observation.

Next we have an ability to sample the current population of Homo sapiens for competencies in judgment. Psychologists have been developing such testing for nearly a decade now, and are improving on their ability to circumscribe judgment effects over intelligence. I suspect that we are going to find a highly skewed (more Poisson-like than Gaussian) distribution but we will be able to determine the sorts of individuals in the population who have a highly developed judgment ability. I'm working on a blog post on what judgment is and how it contributes to wisdom (sapience).

Next we can sample the DNA of these people looking for variations in the network of control segments associated with brain development. We're looking, in particular for controls on the growth and development of the polar prefrontal cortical areas (e.g. Brodmann area 10). Right now I don't think anyone has a lock on where to look in the chromosomes, but I know there are people working on this.

Finally we use MRI (and other) scanning techniques to identify and correlate the brain regions activated by tests of judgment. This will help confirm that the frontal areas are instrumental in judgment competence.

All of these approaches go on in parallel (are going on as we speak). At some point I fully expect a convergence of understanding of how judgment is processed and what brain characteristics account for better judgment.

At that point I expect that several approaches can be attempted. Genetic engineering type experiments with chimpanzees might shed additional light on the role of the prefrontal cortex in making judgments. But I favor something like a voluntary breeding effort! (Please don't start screaming about eugenics!!) In this approach we set up a screening service using genetic testing for the markers discovered from the above. Provide a 'matching' service based on the genetic profile so that high judgment competency individuals can efficiently seek one another out. This would constitute an assisted but natural form of assortative mating (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assortative_mating ).

I know this sounds wild and will no doubt offend someone. But that can't be helped. As I see this, wise people would prefer to aggregate and this would make it efficient. As a consequence, such a concentrating process would address some of the other points you made about a culture.

George