Read Online Tomorrowland by Steven Kotler - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Steven Kotler
Ads: Link
stretches of time are required for it to spread across an entire population. Those are the rules — or, at least until Robert Fogel came along — those were supposed to be the rules.
3.
Fogel spent the next two decades trying to figure out why humans were suddenly breaking those rules. He came to believe a steady stream of technological improvement — advances in food production, distribution, sanitation, public health, and medicine — facilitated our rapidly advancing evolutionary processes. “In the past hundred years,” says Fogel, “humans have gained an unprecedented degree of control over their environment, a degree of control so great that it sets them apart not only from all other species, but from all previous generations of
Homo sapiens
.”
Fogel’s core idea, which he calls
techno-physio evolution
and explained most fully in his 2011 book
The Changing Body
(cowritten with Roderick Floud, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong), is fairly straightforward: “The health and nutrition of one generation contributes, through mothers and through infant and childhoodexperience, to the strength, health, and longevity of the next generation; at the same time, increased health and longevity enable the members of that next generation to work harder and longer and to create resources which can then, in their turn, be used to assist the next, and succeeding, generations to prosper.”
These notions are not entirely new. Economists have known for almost a hundred years of a correlation between height, income, and longevity. What had not been properly explained was mechanism, or how this process worked. The idea that humans can take control of evolution’s trajectory has been around since the 1970s, when polio vaccine discoverer Jonas Salk argued that humanity had entered a new era, which he dubbed “meta-biological evolution,” where we have the potential to control and direct evolution (our own and that of other species). Moreover, the now well-established field of epigenetics has shown us that a myriad of factors beyond alterations in DNA can produce heritable change in an organism.
Fogel, though, goes farther by going faster. “It’s a ‘whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts’ argument,” he explains. “We’re talking about an incredible synergy between technology and biology, about very simple improvements — pasteurization, a general reduction of pollutants, cleaning up our water supply — producing heritable effects across populations faster than ever before. Think about this: humans are a 200,000-year-old species. When we first emerged, our life span was twenty years. By the turn of the twentieth century, it had become forty-four years. We advanced by twenty-four years over the course of 200,000 years. But today, it’s eighty years. These simple improvements doubled our longevity in a century.”
University of Munich economist John Komlos explains further: “Evolution designed us to be quite plastic: Our size expands in good times and contracts in bad. As opposed to being hardwired and unable to adapt to environmental conditions, this [flexibility] provided an evolutionary advantage. The gain inbody mass that Fogel observed began in the 1920s — when people started working more sedentary jobs, driving automobiles, and listening to the radio — then started skyrocketing in the 1950s — with the introduction of television and fast food — and today has become an obesity epidemic. All in eighty years. We didn’t know this much change was possible this quickly; we didn’t know that extrinsic factors could make this kind of difference. Techno-physio evolution shows that economics has an impact at the cellular level — that it goes bone deep.”
4.
Since Fogel first began this work, his ideas haven’t stayed balkanized in economics. Everyone from cultural anthropologists to population geneticists have begun investigating the phenomenon. In a summary article published in February
3.
Fogel spent the next two decades trying to figure out why humans were suddenly breaking those rules. He came to believe a steady stream of technological improvement — advances in food production, distribution, sanitation, public health, and medicine — facilitated our rapidly advancing evolutionary processes. “In the past hundred years,” says Fogel, “humans have gained an unprecedented degree of control over their environment, a degree of control so great that it sets them apart not only from all other species, but from all previous generations of
Homo sapiens
.”
Fogel’s core idea, which he calls
techno-physio evolution
and explained most fully in his 2011 book
The Changing Body
(cowritten with Roderick Floud, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong), is fairly straightforward: “The health and nutrition of one generation contributes, through mothers and through infant and childhoodexperience, to the strength, health, and longevity of the next generation; at the same time, increased health and longevity enable the members of that next generation to work harder and longer and to create resources which can then, in their turn, be used to assist the next, and succeeding, generations to prosper.”
These notions are not entirely new. Economists have known for almost a hundred years of a correlation between height, income, and longevity. What had not been properly explained was mechanism, or how this process worked. The idea that humans can take control of evolution’s trajectory has been around since the 1970s, when polio vaccine discoverer Jonas Salk argued that humanity had entered a new era, which he dubbed “meta-biological evolution,” where we have the potential to control and direct evolution (our own and that of other species). Moreover, the now well-established field of epigenetics has shown us that a myriad of factors beyond alterations in DNA can produce heritable change in an organism.
Fogel, though, goes farther by going faster. “It’s a ‘whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts’ argument,” he explains. “We’re talking about an incredible synergy between technology and biology, about very simple improvements — pasteurization, a general reduction of pollutants, cleaning up our water supply — producing heritable effects across populations faster than ever before. Think about this: humans are a 200,000-year-old species. When we first emerged, our life span was twenty years. By the turn of the twentieth century, it had become forty-four years. We advanced by twenty-four years over the course of 200,000 years. But today, it’s eighty years. These simple improvements doubled our longevity in a century.”
University of Munich economist John Komlos explains further: “Evolution designed us to be quite plastic: Our size expands in good times and contracts in bad. As opposed to being hardwired and unable to adapt to environmental conditions, this [flexibility] provided an evolutionary advantage. The gain inbody mass that Fogel observed began in the 1920s — when people started working more sedentary jobs, driving automobiles, and listening to the radio — then started skyrocketing in the 1950s — with the introduction of television and fast food — and today has become an obesity epidemic. All in eighty years. We didn’t know this much change was possible this quickly; we didn’t know that extrinsic factors could make this kind of difference. Techno-physio evolution shows that economics has an impact at the cellular level — that it goes bone deep.”
4.
Since Fogel first began this work, his ideas haven’t stayed balkanized in economics. Everyone from cultural anthropologists to population geneticists have begun investigating the phenomenon. In a summary article published in February
Similar Books
