the not-too-distant future, there are going to be consumer devices available — brain stimulatorsor immersive virtual reality googles or some combination of the two — that can provide us with direct access to the preternatural. So forget about the need to join a monastery or volunteer for a science experiment or, for that matter, go skydiving. Soon the experience of the numinous will be available via video game.
Amen.
Evolution’s Next Stage
THE FUTURE OF EVOLUTION
There’s a pretty good chance you know something about evolution. More importantly, there’s a pretty good chance that the thing you know is how slowly it proceeds. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the “gradualism” of Charles Darwin or the “punctuated equilibrium” of Stephen Jay Gould (more on this in a moment), the point is the same: Evolution takes eons.
But not anymore. The changes we’re talking about in this story aren’t unfolding in millions of years; they’re unfolding in a handful of decades. Moreover, these changes are far more radical than anything that came before. And none of these trends appear to be slowing down. In fact, just the opposite. Which means, as many are starting to suspect, the era of
Homo sapiens
is coming to a close. We have massively accelerated evolution and the results are soon to fracture our species. In short, we are no longer human beings, we are now human becomings — and that, my friends, is a whole new kettle of fish.
1.
In 1958, Harvard economists Alfred Conrad and John Meyer published a book about the financial profitability of slavery — which was too much for a University of Chicago economist named Robert Fogel to abide. While Fogel was white, his wife was African American. Very African American. “When I was teaching at Harvard,” recounts Fogel, “she hung a sign outside the door to our house. It read: ‘Don’t be upset because you’re not black like me — we’re not all born lucky.’ ”
Not surprisingly, Fogel decided to prove Conrad and Meyer wrong.
He spent almost a decade on the problem. In his earlier work, Fogel had helped pioneer the field of cliometrics, sometimes called economic history, which is the application of rigorous statistical analysis to the study of history (this development earned him a Nobel Prize in 1993). Next, working alongside University of Rochester economist Stanley Engerman, Fogel began applying these methods to the study of slavery. As this enterprise required an understanding of caloric input and energy output, questions like
How much food did the average person consume in the Nineteenth century? How much work could be produced from that food?
and
How long did that person live?
became critically important. These questions led him deeper into the relationship between economics, physiology, and longevity, which is when the theory of evolution came into the picture.
To examine these relationships, Fogel needed data and metrics. For data, he used an NIH-maintained database of American Civil War veteran records, a physiological treasure trove containing things like height and weight at time of conscription, dailyroll calls of the sick and injured, periodic postwar checkups, census data, and, often, death certificates. For metrics, he chose height and body mass, because of a steadily growing consensus among scientists that these factors were phenomenal predictors of mortality and morbidity. “Height,” says UCLA economist Dora Costa, who cowrote papers on these ideas with Fogel, “turns out to be a fantastic health indicator. It’s net for nutrition, infectious disease, sanitation, and demands placed on the body.” (As a result, the United Nations now uses height as a way to monitor nutrition in developing countries.)
What all this information provided was a population-eye view of life in the nineteenth century, which is what Fogel needed to understand broad trends and reach startling conclusions. The first of those conclusions, which he and
Amen.
Evolution’s Next Stage
THE FUTURE OF EVOLUTION
There’s a pretty good chance you know something about evolution. More importantly, there’s a pretty good chance that the thing you know is how slowly it proceeds. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the “gradualism” of Charles Darwin or the “punctuated equilibrium” of Stephen Jay Gould (more on this in a moment), the point is the same: Evolution takes eons.
But not anymore. The changes we’re talking about in this story aren’t unfolding in millions of years; they’re unfolding in a handful of decades. Moreover, these changes are far more radical than anything that came before. And none of these trends appear to be slowing down. In fact, just the opposite. Which means, as many are starting to suspect, the era of
Homo sapiens
is coming to a close. We have massively accelerated evolution and the results are soon to fracture our species. In short, we are no longer human beings, we are now human becomings — and that, my friends, is a whole new kettle of fish.
1.
In 1958, Harvard economists Alfred Conrad and John Meyer published a book about the financial profitability of slavery — which was too much for a University of Chicago economist named Robert Fogel to abide. While Fogel was white, his wife was African American. Very African American. “When I was teaching at Harvard,” recounts Fogel, “she hung a sign outside the door to our house. It read: ‘Don’t be upset because you’re not black like me — we’re not all born lucky.’ ”
Not surprisingly, Fogel decided to prove Conrad and Meyer wrong.
He spent almost a decade on the problem. In his earlier work, Fogel had helped pioneer the field of cliometrics, sometimes called economic history, which is the application of rigorous statistical analysis to the study of history (this development earned him a Nobel Prize in 1993). Next, working alongside University of Rochester economist Stanley Engerman, Fogel began applying these methods to the study of slavery. As this enterprise required an understanding of caloric input and energy output, questions like
How much food did the average person consume in the Nineteenth century? How much work could be produced from that food?
and
How long did that person live?
became critically important. These questions led him deeper into the relationship between economics, physiology, and longevity, which is when the theory of evolution came into the picture.
To examine these relationships, Fogel needed data and metrics. For data, he used an NIH-maintained database of American Civil War veteran records, a physiological treasure trove containing things like height and weight at time of conscription, dailyroll calls of the sick and injured, periodic postwar checkups, census data, and, often, death certificates. For metrics, he chose height and body mass, because of a steadily growing consensus among scientists that these factors were phenomenal predictors of mortality and morbidity. “Height,” says UCLA economist Dora Costa, who cowrote papers on these ideas with Fogel, “turns out to be a fantastic health indicator. It’s net for nutrition, infectious disease, sanitation, and demands placed on the body.” (As a result, the United Nations now uses height as a way to monitor nutrition in developing countries.)
What all this information provided was a population-eye view of life in the nineteenth century, which is what Fogel needed to understand broad trends and reach startling conclusions. The first of those conclusions, which he and
Similar Books
