Cyberfetus Rising

Forget Darwinian Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design. Biological life on earth is only a larval form of a much greater organism. Or so says the Heresiarch who over the past few years has evolved the Star Larvae Hypothesis.

The Hypothesis:

1. Stars constitute a genus of organism.
2. The stellar life cycle includes a larval phase.
3. Biological life constitutes the larval phase of the stellar life cycle.

Elaboration:
The hypothesis proposes a teleological model of nature, in which ...

* Stellar nebulae manufacture viruses and bacteria in their interiors while they cool to form solar systems.
* Biological life evolves according to a plan, which in its entirety, on- and off-planet, constitutes a generational life cycle of the stellar organism.
* Technology plays a necessary role in evolution. It enables biological life to emigrate from incubator planets to weightless space.
* Postplanetary life, symbiotic with technology, manufactures the protons needed for, then metamorphoses into, new stars.
* A prescient complex of religious motifs, including ascendance, illumination, and transcendence, expresses humankind’s stellar calling and longing—its imago.
* Nature is a metabolism that encompasses the organic and the inorganic in a continuum of matter and energy exchanges.

To me, the most fascinating portion of the Heresiarch's rather long exposition of the Star Larvae Hypothesis is an Addenudum entitled, Cyberfetus Rising.

Humankind's extraterrestrial descendants, if they abandon artificial gravity and adapt to weightlessness, will grow remote from their terrestrial counterparts not only geographically, but also biologically and psychologically. One biological change they will undergo is an enrichment, or juvenilization, of brain tissue. Psychological changes could only follow. Another change is a dwindling of bone and muscle mass. This effect of weightlessness plagues astronauts and is sure to be more pronounced in native extraterrestrials, descendants of humankind who spend their entire lives weightless. An organism with an enriched brain—many neurons and many connections among the neurons—and underdeveloped bones and muscles will resemble a human infant more than it will a human adult. The effects of weightlessness on our extraterrestrial descendants, therefore, will constitute a neotenous adaptation to the environment of outer space.

Folklore and fable seem to have seen it coming. Juvenile skywalkers are familiar characters in popular storytelling. The stereotypical UFO pilot, for example, with his fetal allometry (big head, small limbs); the eternally youthful high-flyer Peter Pan; the cosmic fetus who wraps up 2001, A Space Odyssey, and other mystical and sci-fi icons suggest that living in the sky preserves youth. But the most familiar and explicit renderings of extraterrestrial tots must be the cherubim, the flying babies of Baroque and Victorian art. These infantile cloud dwellers are curious representatives of advanced spirituality.

Among the holy flying babies, the St. Valentine's Day Cupid in particular seems eager to homestead the evolutionary frontier. The infant cupid combines neoteny—retarded development—and sexuality in a context of weightlessness, a sure-fire recipe for speciation. Neoteny has a well-established propensity to spawn species in remote populations. As Ecologist Ramon Margalef notes in his "Perspectives in Ecological Theory" (University of Chicago Press, 1968), "The opening of new spaces to colonization creates new opportunities for the development of new species; such evolution does not take a slow and regular path but proceeds through neoteny or other nonhabitual or poorly understood evolutionary paths."

What space is more likely to trigger nonhabitual modes of speciation than outer space?

The proposal that neoteny—retarded development—will set the direction for evolution in space is consistent with current theories of human descent. Human evolution generally has been neotenous—meaning that human beings are the juvenilized descendants of their more apish ancestors—according to paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and other evolutionary theorists. The neotenous trend, having picked up steam under the influence of industrialization, is set to become even more pronounced under the influence of weightlessness. Humankind's extraterrestrial descendants eventually might not develop beyond the form of the fetus, the embryo, or even the zygote—the newly fertilized egg. This conjecture springs from the pattern of development that characterizes all complex organisms.

Every complex organism begins life as a zygote that inititally divides into an undifferentiated clump of cells. As the organism continues to develop—as its ontogeny unfolds—it acquires more of the characteristic anatomy and morphology of its species. The tails, fangs, and wings that sprout during ontogeny constellate into a distinctive bodily form, culminating in the adult form of the species. Pig, duck, dolphin, and human embryos share a common form, initially, then differentiate into their specific adult forms.

(This developmental trend, from a general and undifferentiated form into a differentiated and specialized one, was recognized as the basic pattern of organic development by nineteenth-century German naturalist, Karl Ernst von Baer. Among biologists, Von Baer's observation has replaced the so-called biogenetic law of Ernst Haekel as the orthodox view. Haekel's law, which asserts that during development organisms pass through the adult stages of their ancestors, in sequence, is summarized by the well known formula, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." This formula persists in the popular mind, but scientists today dismiss it as discredited in the light of recent findings. In 1988 the president of the National Academy of Sciences concluded, "The biogenetic law is as dead as a doornail" ["Ontogeny and Phylogeny Recapitulated," American Scientist, May-June 1988]. According to von Baer's law of progressive differentiation, neotenous descendants resemble the juvenile form of their ancestors—in contrast to Haekel's law, which predicts that neotenous descendants will resemble ancestral adults.)

In environments undergoing rapid change, neoteny enables organisms to adapt to the unstable conditions. It enables organisms to jettison adaptations that have outlasted their usefulness. As for the environmental changes that promote human neoteny, technology seems to play a major role, as evidenced by anthropological digs where ancient skeletal remains are peculiarly retarded—they're toothless. Anthropologist C. Loring Brace explains the connection: "Human skeletal collections from the Neolithic and subsequent periods contain the remains of individuals who had survived for years in a completely edentulous [toothless] state. No such evidence is available for any human population that did not use pottery. Pounding, grinding, and milling tools also become common late in the Pleistocene . . . and it seems likely that this may also have contributed to the relaxation of Pleistocene levels of selection, which had maintained large amounts of tooth substance." (Brace, C. Loring, Karen R. Rosenberg, and Kevin D. Hunt, "Gradual Change in Human Tooth Size in the Late Pleistocene and Post-Pleistocene," Evolution, 41(4), 1987, pp. 705-720. See also, "Human Teeth, Small Already, Continue to Shrink," The New York Times, August 30, 1988.) Food processing technologies reduce the need for large teeth, the grinding and milling tools native to heads. The biological tools become superfluous and unable to return the metabolic investments that they require, once automation technologies, such as pounding, grinding, and milling tools, become available.

"The first tools were probably conceived initially as simple extensions of the human body," surmises David Barash in "The Hare and the Tortoise" (Penguin Books, 1986), "the club a stylized and more powerful hand and fist, the bowl and pouch more efficient cupped hands, the flint scraper a heavy-duty fingernail. . . ." Marshall McLuhan made the same observation. His opus, "Understanding Media," he subtitled "The extensions of man." Philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard defines the same relationship in "The Postmodern Condition" (University of Minnesota, 1984): "Technical devices originated as prosthetic aids for the human organs or as physiological systems whose function it is to receive data or condition the context."

The technological environment appears to be a milieu of gadgets whirring and chugging in space and time in lieu of human labor. Freud, for one, welcomed this prosthetic effect. In "Civilization and its Discontents," he pronounces, "With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent."

Evolutionary pressures for metabolic economy apparently allow tools to supplant the specialized—adult—body parts that they simulate and outperform. By extending the specialized functions of the body, technology relaxes selection pressures for the body parts that perform those functions. Hence, technology and neoteny proceed hand in hand.

This ability of tools to shape the species finds a more formal theoretical foundation in the gene-culture coevolution hypothesis of sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson. Humankind was synthesized by "a sustained autocatalytic reaction in which genetic and cultural evolution drove each other forward," Wilson and colleague Charles Lumsden propose in "Promethean Fire" (1983, Harvard University Press). "This largely unknown evolutionary process we have called gene-culture coevolution: it is a complicated, fascinating interaction in which culture is generated and shaped by biological imperatives while biological traits are simultaneously altered by genetic evolution in response to cultural innovation."

Although Wilson and Lumsden tend to restrict their use of "culture" to mean social behavior, clearly the concept must include artifacts, implements, devices—technology. The notion of "epigenetic rules" that they use to link genes and social behaviors in a feedback relationship should apply as readily to genes and human technical proficiencies—the crafting and use of tools. In this view, a species that modifies its environment technologically becomes locked into an evolutionary feedback circuit in which it and its technologies mutually shape one another.

Neoteny and technology feeding off each other—techneoteny—is the primary mode of gene-culture coevolution among human beings. What was true of neolithic cookery should apply to subsequent generations of technologies: they each should contribute to the autocatalytic cycle of neotenous gene-culture coevolution. If we fast forward from the Pleistocene to the present, we see the techneotenous gyre tightening and taking a particular toll on the male of the species, more highly differentiated gender.

Technology tends to be associated with the prerogatives of men; ironically, it has produced an environment increasingly suited to feminine, and by extension juvenile, aptitudes and sensibilities. Havelock Ellis noticed the connection already at the end of the nineteenth century. In his "Man and Woman," he observes, "Savagery and barbarism have more usually than not been predominantly militant, that is to say masculine, in character, while modern civilization is becoming industrial, that is to say feminine, in character, for the industries belonged primitively to women, and they tend to make men like women." This feminization is neotenous, Ellis contends, citing what he calls the "infantile diathesis" of women: "When women differ from men, it is the latter who have diverged, leaving women nearer to the child-type. Women are nearer to children than are men [and] the child represents a higher degree of evolution than the adult."

The ancient world similarly perceived a link between the industrial and the feminine. Early metallurgists, for example, built their lore on a mythos of gestation and incubation. "Very early on we are confronted with the notion that ores 'grow' in the belly of the Earth after the manner of embryos," comments Mircea Eliade in "The Forge and the Crucible" (Harper and Row, 1962), "Metallurgy thus takes on the character of obstetrics. Miner and metalworker intervene in the unfolding of subterranean embryology: they accelerate the rhythm of the growth of ores, they collaborate in the work of Nature and assist it to give birth more rapidly." Eliade goes on to cite the traditions of the Atonga, who "have a custom of throwing into the furnace a portion of the placenta to ensure the success of the smelting."

Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" gives a more overtly anthropomorphic form to the notion of the industrial feminine. Critics conventionally interpret the story according to its Promethean subtitle, but critic Steven Lehman interprets it as an allegory of male womb envy. He argues, "[Dr. Frankenstein's] problem—and it is the central thematic problem of the novel—is that modern science obviates the biological gender distinctions upon which our psychology and society have been built." (Lehman, Steven, "The Motherless Child in Science Fiction: Frankenstein and Moreau," Science Fiction Studies, No. 56, 1992, pp. 49-58.) Technology cures Dr. Frankenstein's womb envy by enabling him to give birth to artificial life. It allows Victor Frankenstein to mother the prototypical problem child. If inventions mimic bodies generally, then the process of invention becomes a kind of generalized birthing process.

Inspired computer programmers have adopted "artificial" or "virtual" life as a technical grail. Some programmers claim that their growing, replicating, and adapting software constitutes a new life form. Their Frankensteinian achievements, along with those of the ancient metallurgists, can be psychoanalyzed as the expression of a male desire to deliver life. But, despite any joy that they might receive from their ersatz motherhood, the men of industrial society give birth to their own undoing.

In "The Mechanical Bride" McLuhan explains the source of male vulnerability at the hands of industry: "Under complex conditions of rapid change, the family unit is subject to special strain. Men flounder in such times. The male role in society, always abstract, tenuous, and precarious compared with the biological assurance of the female, becomes obscured. Man the provider, man the codifier of laws and ritual, loses his confidence." Given the dire circumstances, a men's movement may have been inevitable. Poet Robert Bly, a movement organizer, winces at the link between industry and immaturity: "If you walk from Boston to Labrador, you’re more mature when you arrive; If you drive, you’re more infantile when you arrive. The Industrial Revolution brought central heating and the automobile. Not only does maturity fail, but a positive movement toward regression is taking place. There’s a connection between technology and infantilism. It’s sad." (Interview in EastWest, March 1986, p.72.) Despite technology’s more immediate undermining of male roles, ultimately the specialized roles of male and female alike will be compromised and both will converge on the common child type. "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and a little child shall lead them," as the prophet foresaw.

In the twenty-first century, family members gather around the electronic hearth to consume as a unit the same cultural fare, with adults now happy to watch cartoon shows and children eager to imbibe celebrity sex scandals. Psychological de-differentiation drives cultural de-differentiation. "Being There," Jerzy Kozinski's novel, captures the trend. The novel's protagonist, "Chauncey Gardiner," grows in seclusion, a television his primary companion. The tastes, concerns, and socialized personality of a normal adult never take root. Then a disoriented Gardiner is forced into the adult world, his only social skill the abililty to recite prime-time platitudes. Ironically, innocence proves disarming. Gardiner propels himself up the political ranks and lands in a position of magical influence. He assumes a political function along the lines of that later filled by Nancy Reagan's astrologer, an angelic presence.

"Being There," at least in its movie form, suggests the next stop in humankind’s evolutionary trip. Director Hal Ashby takes liberties with the novel when the infantile Chauncey Gardiner walks on water at the end of the movie. By deifying the naif, the weightless conclusion of Being There points to a way around humankind's terminal regression. Levity is nature's remedy for gravity.

The ongoing technological extension of the body would seem to resolve itself finally in an extension of the whole body. Within a comprehensive synthetic-prosthetic environment, the biological body will not need or want adaptations that were selected for it by wild, ancestral environments. Bodies will discontinue those metabolic investments that support specialized—adult—physiology, anatomy, and morphology. And that comprehensive extension of the body is the encapsulated ecosystem of the space colony. The Freudian project of human industry is construction of an immortal mother. Then biology can remain eternally embryonic. This is where the feminine energies inherent in industry come into fulfillment, as the collection of industries takes the form of a comprehensive environment—a synthetic womb. The image is complete with weightlessness providing an environment within which embryonic protoplasm can float.

On Earth, the transition from womb to world is traumatic for the newborn. In the exowomb of the space colony, our descendants might not notice the transition—a smooth glide from one buoyant comprehensive life-support system to another. In weightlessness the purported benefits of underwater birthing will be put to the test. The effect on future generations of the elimination of perinatal trauma is a sideline ripe for speculation.

But this much seems evident: the developmental transition from the Pleasure Principle of Freudian psychology to the Reality Principle, a transition that in the Freudian model accounts for much psychological distress and dysfunction, might not occur at all. Theoretically, a fetal mentality could remain unchallenged and unadulterated given an environment that reproduces with sufficient fidelity the life-support functions of the womb. The weightless technologically comprehensive environment of the space colony recalibrates all standards of psychological and physical development, because it promises to radically truncate both.

Once the technological project of weightless encapsulation completes itself, neotenous de-differentiation will be unchained. One extreme prospect is that of unfettered expression of oncogenes. These genes would seem to be natural vehicles for neoteny, because their job is to retard cellular differentiation. Masses of undifferentiated tissue occur twice during the lives of complex organisms: once early in embryologic development and later taking the form of the cancerous tumor. Both situations are thought to be controlled by oncogenes, or at least to involve oncogenes. In the course of embryologic development, cells differentiate into the many tissues of the adult organism. But tumors don’t differentiate. They remain undifferentiated tissue. What’s more, given a sufficiently supportive culture, these undifferentiated masses—neoplasms—behave oddly: they don't die. This peculiarity of tumors contributes to the mythical dimension of the hypothesis. It suggests the original promise of heavenly immortality.

"Prominent among the kinds of cell lineages potentially immortal in culture are cancerous ones; hence the study of such cells in culture has been vigorously pursued in recent years," writes William T. Keeton of Cornell University in the college textbook "Biological Science" (third edition, 1980, W. W. Norton and Company). "The HeLa cell line is derived from a carcinoma of the cervix of a young black woman named Henrietta Lacks, who died of her cancer in 1951. This was the first stable, vigorously growing line of cultured human cells used in cancer research. Today HeLa cells are found growing in medical and research laboratories the world over."

"Culture" denotes a manufactured environment that preserves its occupants in a state of arrested development, whether it be the urban milieus within which neotenous humans live or the petri dishes within which laboratory tumors live. Tumors in this context appear to be premature posthuman extraterrestrials, as if they were mutations waiting for appropriate environments (weightless cultures) in which to emerge as evolutionary players.

As bodies and technologies fuse, and today's virtual reality systems evolve into semisynthetic skins that mediate exchanges of molecular information between body and environment, evolution in space will erase any distinction between Gaia and Techne. Both will be subsumed into a generic, extropic stuff, an amorphous technorganism. And its genetic reach could extend beyond the human.

This related prospect includes that of a new endosymbiosis, the process by which ancient bacterial cells merged to form the first eukaryotic cells, but on a grander scale. (Eukaryotic cells are the complex cells that make up plant and animal bodies.) The juvenilizing effects of weightlessness presumably would retard all species, not just humans. Assuming that our descendants bring their pets with them into space, the several species together will revert to and converge on the common embryonic form, as they de-differentiate morphologically. And the tendency already is in place. What earlier was referred to as "techneoteny" is essentially the process of domestication, which is technology-driven juvenilization. House cats are domesticated felines, companion dogs are domesticated canines, and humankind is the domesticated primate. Each species is a potential contributor of genes to an aggregate descendant that will stand in complexity to its consituents as our cells do to the prokaryotes, or simple bacteria. The convergence of species inside a weightless solid-state environment will set the stage for an exo-Cambrian explosion of evolutionary novelty.

Already we can see that silicon will play a leading role in the transition, and, as in a variety of science-fiction story, could even replace carbon in part or in whole as the main building block of biological organisms—though at that point biology will have evolved/metamorphosed into something we probably should consider postbiology. The reappearance of silicon at the end of biology mirrors its initiating role, a parsimonious symmetry.

Ultimately, the microscopic devices known collectively as nanotechnology, acting as intracellular prostheses, could enable coils of DNA to control complex support systems remotely. Nanotechnologies, if realized as advertised, could function as prostheses for the tools of molecular genetics. They might obsolesce RNA molecules, amino acids, ribosomes, and the other machinery of protein synthesis. The overlooked dimension of nanotechnologies is their potential to translate genetic blueprints for cells, organs, and organisms directly into microprocessors, supercomputers, and space colonies—cell, organ, and organism prostheses.

Something superhuman is weaning itself of its dependence on human beings.

That thing is the local expression of the universe's ontogeny. The religious vision turns out to be perhaps merely clairvoyant, rather than transcendent—heaven and its attendants are as much a part of this universe and its history as are we and the planets and the stars.

Posted by Upwinger at January 3, 2006 06:20 PM