What if you could pick one thing and start over from scratch? What would you change? Would you choose another career, a different home, a new spouse? Or would you choose to remake the world around you? Why not fix America’s prison system, make schools more efficient, or make your political leaders more intelligent?
The editors asked me to contribute to their special report, speculating on how we would “reinvent things without regard for cost, politics or practicality”. I thought a little bigger than a new spouse or career, though, and instead tossed in few peculiar ideas about reinventing humanity itself.
What would I redo?
two words:
barnacle penis
And PZ, I’m surprised at you. No mention of tentacles?
Fair enough, but rather than an extra pair of arms, how about some all-purpose tentacles? Maybe in tasteful colors? Or the ability to stay underwater longer?
You didn’t give humanity any tentacles? Or was the bit about the prehensile tail just a way to sneak a tentacular appendage past the editors of Forbes?
Oooh! I want a pony-tail instead. You should have put this picture to accompany the article.
OK, disclaimer: I did not see the previous two posts before submitting mine. Three of your faithful readers felt the same lack, independently. Sez sumthin’, don’t it?
I was so tempted, but it would have been against my principles: I didn’t want to impose teleology on the process, driving evolution towards a particular especially attractive end result. I just tried to come up with a few things where the early decision was relatively trivial, and flipping it one way vs. how it turned out could have led to some major differences much further down the road.
I’m surprised you didn’t want to change the brain itself. We could be sooooo much smarter. Adding two legs pales in comparison to what we could do with a bigger brain. Actually, I’d say the bigger brain is the only change necessary (besides a widened birth canal, I suppose). People would be so smart they’d be able to genetically engineer whatever other features they desired. Maybe you want two extra legs and a tail, but not everyone does .. why not give them the choice?
I would like to see what would happen if animals had chloroplasts (and could undergo photosynthesis). Nocturnal animals would have a very differant trade-off! Imagine how long an insect could remain dormant. It is possible intellegence would never have evolved … .
Think I might start a JREF thread about this. “Pimp my HOX Genes!” or something like that.
…Since I’m a layman, HOX genes have something to do with the basic “template” all us vertibrates have, right?
I know if this is left to a woman, a man’s penis would be on his nose…………
Actually, what I was imagining was that if we rerouted the reproductive tract orally, the tongue would make an excellent intromittent organ.
I took the poll (voted for the last choice, ‘Don’t want to be human at all’ — I figured I could sort out which qualitites I’d want at my leisure.
But I notice a suspicious number of respondents want ‘better protection for genitals’ and ‘a pouch’.
well, speaking of reinventing things, from engineering point of view, brain in the chest + precision vision don’t pair up together.
More precise vision means more information needs to be sent to the brain, and so it’s better to have it as close to eyes as possible. I’d rather leave the main brain in the skull, and compensate its vulnerability with capability to fully regenerate after injury, and by storing backup memories in aditional ‘brain’ deep in the body.
.
Oh, and we also shouldn’t forget to fix its major bugs : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
My JREF thread, for those of you interested in other people’s contributions, should it not die like many of my other threads on there.
I’ve heard that argument about proximity a lot, and it doesn’t ring true. Output from the eyes first has to jump a synaptic gap at the lateral geniculate, and then projects all the way to the back of the brain. I’d argue that distance is much less important than you think.
It’s also the case that a lot of processing power is packed into the eyes already.
I don’t think the eye and brain are at the same end of the body for any functional reasons, but for developmental ones.
A tail! The return of the tail. It could be a great thing for posture and balance. It’s really silly, us wandering around all bipedular and having no tail.
I’d argue that distance is much less important than you think.
sure, distance is not very important… till someone attempts quadruple it, together with doubling the data throughput ;-)
PZ opines,
You realize, of course, how close you are getting to an octopoid form…
You realize, of course, how close you are getting to an octopoid form…
Taken out of context, those could be considered fightin’ words. But given who they’re addressed to, they’d likely be taken as compliments, in any context.
I’d go back and build the first nervous system very differently.
Inside each cell is a pretty powerful computer capable of a lot of switching—via genetic regulatory networks.
Instead of using a cell (neuron) as a fairly dumb switch, use it as a fairly smart computer—with most of the memory and computation going on inside cells.
And find a faster interconnect technology than 200 mph ion reversals down an axon—say, actual electrical signals that travel orders and orders of magnitude faster.
Now evolution can gang together these tiny computers to make a very small, very powerful, and very fast brain compared to what we’ve got with neurons and axons.
Then we can dwarf the species to, say, 16″ tall, because we don’t need big bodies to support big brains; we can move into opulent, spacious dollhouses and still reduce our environmental impact by an order of magnitude or so.
I just think it would be really sad. If we developed with tails, but our ‘nads in our mouths, the phrase “chasing tail” would still fall short of accuracy in the literal sense.
{sigh} Always there be trade-offs in biology, eh…
Nice article, though PZ.
Yeah, but think of the mosquitoes.
There’s another inconsistency that I noticed: why have both four legs and a fully prehensile tail? I would think that each one obviates the other, developmentally speaking, and I can’t think of an environment in which a single organism would need to have both features.
Actually, think of the heat dissipation. Using electrons isn’t obviously more energy efficient than using ions — they’re less massive, but moving much faster.
And cell switching networks are relatively slow. For all we know we do use them in long term memory, but integrating them with neural speeds, let alone electronic ones… well, I don’t see it.
I had a very attractive older cousin who went off to college not knowing how reproduction worked. Somewhere, she had picked up the idea that one got pregnant from kissing too long. Her mother eventually found this out and, luckily, set her straight in time. For years after hearing this story, though, I would think of my cousin in a make-out session:
COUISIN: We have to stop.
CAD: Why?
COUSIN: I don’t want to get pregnant.
CAD: Huh?
COUSIN: You know, from kissing too long. We’ve been at it quite a while now and I’m getting worried.
CAD: Oh….You’re right, of course, how foolish and selfish of me. I got carried away. We wouldn’t want you to get pregnant, would we?
COUSIN: No. I’m glad you’re so understanding.
CAD: I try. So we’ll stop kissing. I have something else you might like to try, though…..
Your suggestion about oral reproductive organs reminded me of this, which I hadn’t thought about in years. Made my day to bring it back.
Hey, any chance you could get Olduvai George to illustrate this?
C.J.Colucci: that’s a funny, yet sad, illustration of why sex ed is so important!
I would redesign human sexuality. It seems as though it gets in the way of a lot of things. For example, if we went into estrous once every few years and did not reproduce or wish to reproduce in the meantime, that would be convenient.
Paul W, I don’t quite see how your suggestions are an improvement, unless you’re being ironic and I’m too slow to catch on.
The neuron isn’t a dumb switch. There is a lot of processing going on inside it.
Depending on gene regulatory networks for the processing would require a bigger brain for equivalent function. It’s making the cell nucleus the locus of processing power. Right now, it’s at the synapse…and we’ve got a thousand times as many synapses as we do nuclei.
There’s also this thing called saltatory conduction that improves signal conduction by orders of magnitude.
As a 60’s guy (in two senses), I’d put in a vote for a bit more redundancy in the circulatory system. I’ve become very aware of this big thumping single-point-of-failure in my chest. A little failure analysis by the Flying Spaghetti Monster wouldn’t have been remiss during his design phase. One liver? One spinal cord? It’s my understanding that the brain has a fair amount of redundancy, both at a low level and in having two separate halves, but what was the point of putting both of them in the same case with the same power supply and cooling system?
And what’s the story with toenails? Or toes, for that matter. To me the sticking point of Intelligent Design is that the design isn’t especially well done.
Bird Lungs! I want glorious flow through non compressing bird lungs.
And bird mitochondria! Way better at avoiding the bad effects of that dangerous poison, oxygen.
What the heck, let’s try out uric acid instead of urea. Maybe helpful in your plumbing rework.
Oh, and I want my vitamin C pathway back. And my sense of smell (most of our odorant receptors are inactivated). And at least a worms worth of extra cytochrome P450 enzymes (it’s tough living in dirt without limbs, they’ve got the Swiss Army Knife of toxin metabolizing ‘zymes).
No, I was being stupid and running together performance issues of different kinds of “molecular” computation.
In particular, I was confusing performance properties of molecular mechanical switches with genetic regulatory networks. I seem to recall reading about ideas for small, fast, energy-efficient molecular switches that essentially work by switching from one shape to another, and mechanically bonking other switches.
Actual genetic regulation is probably much less efficient and a whole lot slower—you have to produce a bunch of product molecules that diffuse around until they happen to latch onto the right binding site, such that the gene it controls turns on or off and either does or doesn’t produce a bunch of molecules…
(Which brings up a question: how slow is genetic switching? If a gene produces a product that switches another gene on, how long does it take for the other gene to turn on? I guess it has to be on a while, and produce a population of molecules, not just one, so that the concentration of the product goes over the critical level.)
Anyway, I should probably have proposed a molecular switching gate array, constructed by the genes inside each neuron, but not itself a genetic network. Just two kinds of bistable molecules could act as mechanical flip-flops and NAND gates, (which is sufficient to build a universal computer) and each neuron could have many thousands of them.
I realize that if that runs really fast, it’s going to cause heat problems. My impression—and I could be wrong about that too—is that it could still compute much faster and more efficiently than our neurons do.
I realize it’s not really, really dumb like a two-input AND gate or a flip-flop—it’s more complicated than that.
But it’s still pretty simple, at least in its fast short-term computing. It sends the same low-bandwidth axonal signal out to all of its many dendrites, and it more or less just sums the positives and negatives from the input synapses to compute a new low-bandwidth output. (Actually, I realize there’s some controversy about the details, but I don’t think anybody thinks it’s a lot faster than that, computationally. The sophistication is in the relatively slow changes of synapse strength and maybe some relatively slow internal changes to the neuron that affect its function, but the total amount of computation per unit time per neuron still isn’t much. The fastest parts are dumb and slow, and the smarter parts are even slower.)
That’s fine kind of switch for implementing certain kinds of algorithms, which operate on massive arrays of data and do very regular things to them, like extracting correlations and using them for classification, but there are lots of algorithms it’s not well suited for.
A big slow parallel switch like that can’t do a lot of non-parallelizable computations in a hurry—it can’t execute a serial algorithm at thousands of instructions
per second, or even hundreds. (In contrast, a fast serial processor can efficiently simulate a slow parallel one.)
This imposes some truly horrible constraints on computational architectures, meaning that neurons often can’t be used efficiently; you are restricted to algorithms (and even problems) for which they’re appropriate.
I agree; I was wrong.
Still, if we had as many molecular flip-flops logic gates in a neuron as we do synapses, a neuron could do a whole lot more computation than if each synapse merely relays the same axonal signal.
Does that improve transmission speeds a lot, or just reduce signal degradation over distance? I thought the fastest spikes only went about 300 mph, but I’d be happy to be wrong about that.
PZ, what’s wrong? Are you ill? And what’s wrong about y’all?
Dozens of comments, and not one mentioning the retina? The one that could so obviously be blindspot-less?
I feel sooo let down.
About the tail, ok, but only if we completely forsake bipedism : sitting on one’s tail all day long doesn’t sound fun.
I have to admit I’m quite sceptical about this noodly appendage in stead of a head…
let’s count : reproductive tracts, oesophagus, trachea (yeah, snorkel!), optical olfactive and taste nerves… It would be a *very* bad idea to get it accidentally severed.
Oh, and let’s not forget the substance of this comment : thanks for the laugh.
PS : I might translate it to French for blogging purpose, if I have the time, courage, whim, and informal authorisation from you. Please?
As well as Nymphalidae’s idea of redesigning sexuality to make it less of a daily distraction, having a marsupial pouch for those offspring expelled from our orally adjacent uterus would be handy, as otherwise if our mouths are still on our heads near our eyes then those heads are still gonna have to be huge.
In answer to your question, “Why not have a six-limbed organism, the two forelimbs used for manipulating objects with an assist from a prehensile tail, with a small head used for feeding, reproduction, and sensing the world around it with a pair of highly sensitive eyes, and a large brain safely ensconced in the chest?”
Because, the image that this calls to mind is not the image of God! Might as well have humans look like the FSM.
It might be hard to get to the superbrain by non-teleological evolution. Plus, I’m not sure how damn smart we’d have to be to actually redesign our current bodies. Redesigning our kids is the only thing accessible for a long time. And what if you decide on the asexual brainy space-man type of body, but the kid would much rather have been a octopus-centaur hybrid with a prehensile tail like his friends?
And those extra limbs would really have been most “handy” in all those millennia before genetic engineering. Although we wouldn’t know to appreciate a different body if we had it…
I’ve wondered if having six-limbed vertebrates would mean more chances for intelligent life, and other cool adaptations, since one pair of limbs could then more easily be exapted to new tasks. Then history might not have had to wait for an ape to start going about on two legs to get a social species which uses tools on a regular basis.
PZ, In the article you mention the well known fact that testes run at lower than body temperature. This is presented, as usual, as the reason why the testes are outside the body. I have always thought the argument is inverted. Keeping the testes outside the body has disadvantages obvious to all the men in this audience. Adjusting an enzyme so it runs at a different temperature seems like the kind of thing evolution is quite good at. So then the question is why do mammals keep their testes external, forcing them to develop a low temperature enzyme?
Distance COULD matter for the eyes. I’m only an undergrad, so I could be pulling a Homer, but isn’t the eph receptor and ephrin ligand have improved accuracy over shorter distances because of a transport along the axis of ephrin issue? I had the class that talked about this two years ago, so the more I think about it, the more I’m unsure. …Thoughts?
Malcolm,
Problem, you warm the testes up sperm production drops. Warm them up to 98.6 and sperm production crashes. Most mamallian testes are simply not heat tolerant.
Glancing at the early comments about tentacles, then scrolling down to the latest comments about testicles, suddenly put me in mind of Londo Mollari in Babylon 5 and his novel method of cheating at cards. Just thought I’d share that with you all.
40 comments on this and no-one’s mentioned wings.
Of course we could think of improvements. Scientific American had an article a while back where the improvements were along the increased age track some here look at. (Doubling essential organs, inverted knee joint for less strain and longer life time.) But they also wanted to improve our spinal/back/hip construction for less problems and pains.
I don’t quite get the sexual body opening reasoning. Evolution has created several body openings, so it could have created new sexual ones and placed them conveniently and safely somewhere above the pelvic area, but that road was not taken. But this is my proposal for improvement anyway.
Similarly I think the brain could have been moved back or distributed if it was feasible. Being close to a conveniently placed cluster of major sensory organs should result in faster reaction times, which is why I think these things didn’t happen or were successful. But in us robustness against accidents may be more beneficial than actually avoiding some few of them (traffic accidents, for example), so it could be tried.
Built-in cup holders. Absolutely essential.
You’ve been watching Pimp My Bride, haven’t you?
There’s been suprisingly little discussion of such dimorphisms and secondary sex characteristics.
Ok, I’ve had this idea for awhile, and this post reminded me of it. I want to bounce it off of you PZ to see if I’m way off base.
I have heard about cows that were genetically modified to add a human gene so that organs transplanted from them to humans would be less likely to be rejected.
I have also heard that cow embryos used to be transported overseas in rabbits’ uteruses(uteri?)
And I have been told that the gestation period for cows is similar to that of humans.
So the idea occurred to me that it might be possible to take a herd of genetically modified cows and implant them with, say, 12 to 15 human(or, genetically modified organism with a largely human component) embryos. If it worked, it would be a relatively inexpensive way to produce a large number of test subjects in a short amount of time, and without the risks that would be required of human surrogate mothers.
I know there are a lot of ethical implications to this, but does it sound achievable?
What about the desires and instincts of the human brain in the new body? Among other things, wouldn’t the new human always be attracted to the old human opposite sex? I’m assuming that this basic physical attraction is hardwired somehow?
And by the way, your story has now hit slashdot…
Technically possible with a few significant potential difficulties, but sociologically impossible right now. I can’t even predict how the far Right would react to a cow carrying an implanted human fetus, but I’m sure however they did respond, it would be irrationally.
Forget “test subject” embryos, I wouldn’t mind incubating my normal baby inside a cow. A pastoral, symbiotic idyll :-)
The original work was both entertaining and educational.
As a science educator myself, I liked this combination. It would be easy to embed the facts into a simple future historical narrative. Maybe a story that follows the forms that a particular family takes over a millennia on their way to to live on planets and asteroids as bipeds, floaters, birds, ceteasionoids etc. Where do we move to when the sun goes red giant, titan? Again it maybe the 1 in a 1000 runaway bizarre fashion statements of evolution which attract a mate that are advantagous when the environment changes. This time under then willing control of a species.
I am looking forward to a whole book on the subject so I can get my science fiction and fact in one place. The future as a mirror for the past. Symmetry rocks.
Seriously, it could make for a popular text on evolutionary biology.
Beyond that, who knows? A discovery channel series, and a big budget movie: “I was a teenage centaur” year:2037, she wins the Kentucky Derby…which is now and Olympic sport. It could even be a Disney movie.
There was an old marvel comic called the “guardians of the galaxy:” where the main characters (mostly human) were genetically engineered in the year 3000 to live on various planets of the solar system: Pluto, Jupiter, etc. You would make an excellent consultant for the live action version.
Enclosed is my advance of $35 for your text book version of “genetic makeover”.
-mindserfer
> Somegeek :
the idea was not to design a “new” human being with bizarre properties (with big self image, reproductive and social issue for the home-made monster), but to imagine a way evolution could have taken.
Tjose many-limbed small-headed centaur humans would have been that way from the beginning, so “old human” sex aatraction issue.
On the subject of parturition, why couldn’t the reproductory organs have *2* tracts? : one thin and nimble in the head, for fecondation, and the other bigger and sturdier for the actual birth.
> Somegeek :
the idea was not to design a “new” human being with bizarre properties (with big self image, reproductive and social problems for the home-made monster), but to imagine a way evolution could have taken.
Those many-limbed small-headed centaur humans would have been that way from the beginning, so no “old human” sex-appeal issue.
On the subject of parturition, why couldn’t the reproductory organs have *2* tracts? : one thin and nimble in the head, for fecondation, and the other bigger and sturdier for the actual birth.
Am I the only Larry Niven fan to read this???
Halfway through the article I was thinking “centaur with Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent puppets on its hands,” i.e., a Pierson’s Puppeteer. Complete with the brain in the hump.
OK, so that’s not quite what you describe, but still.
And, of course, bringing back tails makes me think of H. Allen Smith.
Anyway, the alternative human is a fascinating concept, and a fun chain of thought.
Dr. Myers, surely you’re aware that G-d himself chose to put the penis/vagina in close proximity to the anus, with the obvious intent that they would be used in conjunction. The average penis is itself precisely the length from its base to the anus, which is clear evidence of design. Further, our two (and only two) arms are precisely the length of the shoulder to the genital/anal pairing, more clear evidence of design.
In my work at the Discovery Institute, we frequently apply the scientific method in our experiments to discover the exact purpose of the appendage-genital-anal nexis. Perhaps in a future post you’ll provide a forum for our scientific evidence.
Alan,
I know about the enzyme temp problem in testes. There are 2 hypothese to explain it. The accepted wisdom is that testes had to become external because of the need for the low temperature enzyme. The other hypothesis is that the enzyme works at low temp because the testes are external. I find the latter hypothesis much more compelling. One can imagine sexual selection working to externalize the testes, with parallel evolution of the low temperature enzyme. There are lots of obvious disadvantages to having external testes, so it’s a good candidate for sexual selection (like peacock tails). Evolution is good at tweaking enzymes, so their temperature range could surely keep up with the selection pressure that kept lowering testes temperature as they moved externally.
Oh look, there’s Deepak Chopra with some more crackpot misunderstandings of QM. Hell, some of his babblings are much more insane than that:
I defy anyone to find anything in QM, or any of modern physics, that states any such thing. It’s not true at any level.
Another:
Of course the reason it’s little-known is that it’s not true. Yes, the brain does vast amounts of post-processing on the data delivered by the senses (of which there are of course rather more than five): but that doesn’t mean that the senses don’t physically exist, unless Chopra knows a way to see after your eyes have been removed.
The way in which photons are converted into `visible reality’ is apparently also `totally unknown’ in the Chopraverse, something which will doubtless surprise those of us who foolishly believed that the visual cortex was the best-understood part of the brain… (or does he not believe in rhodopsin?)
There’s lots more, much worse, including invocation of ZPE (as usual falsely claimed to be a source of endless energy: oddly enough it’s also claimed to be easy to extract energy from and safe: contradictions ahoy), sense-free babblings about the `mind field’ and `merging with quantum reality’…
… still, I suppose it’s nice to know that Chopra agrees with us that he is not in fact a participant in reality.
Bah.
“Problem, you warm the testes up sperm production drops. Warm them up to 98.6 and sperm production crashes. Most mamallian testes are simply not heat tolerant.”
A couple of years ago I was stood on the staircase of our old geological department on a guided tour and Mikael Fortelius went past. A couple of minutes later he came back and pressed a reprint of one of his papers into my hand, and went on his way. When I looked at the paper, it turned out to show that elephants have a higher mutation rate in their sperm, because their balls don’t drop. The authors were then claiming (not totally seriously, I hope) that this higher mutation rate could explain why the Proboscidea were so successful and diverse.
I must try and find the reference….
Bob
Is it possible for organisms to just have lower body temperature – say, 34 instead of 37?
An original audio drama inspired by PZ Myers musing on alternative evolution is now available for free download from Darker Projects.