Biological Eschatology Now and Forever

"...the perfectibility of man is unlimited, even though, up to now, we have only supposed him endowed with the same natural faculties and organization. What then would be the certainty and extent of our hopes if we could believe that these natural faculties themselves and this organization are also susceptible of improvement?"
(Condorcet: Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, 1795)

"It is impossible to calculate in detail the long-range future of the universe without including the effects of life and intelligence."
(Freeman Dyson: Time Without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe, 1979)


The aim of the biological eschatology is to describe the possible futures of life in a long lasting Universe. It focuses on the effects which appear only on a very large time scale, and it is about only the description of a phase space of possibilities, but not a real future.This concept was introduced by Milan Cirkovic in 2002.

Birth of an Idea

The theory of evolution led logically to the idea of eugenics which was created by Darwin's cousin named Francis Galton in 1883. Eugenics' "first object is to check the birth-rate of the Unfit" he wrote in his Memories of My Life (1908), "instead of allowing them to come into being, though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely. The second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the Fit by early marriages and healthful rearing of their children. Natural Selection rests upon excessive production and wholesale destruction; Eugenics on bringing no more individuals into the world than can be properly cared for, and those only of the best stock."
According to him, "what Nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly" (Essays in Eugenics 1909).
In other words,
  1. we can control our evolution through our descendants and
  2. our descendants can became different from us (in this case "different" means "highly developed")
In tune with the Darwinian theory about the rise of the man it is a logical step to suppose that our human race will be different from us in the distant future, either (following the Galtonian doctrine) we will manipulate our inheritance or we won't. Although homo sapiens as a taxonomic category seems to be static to us, if we change the time scale, it will be changed, as well. Our ancestors weren't humans a million year ago, and within a million year our descendants won't be similar to us. On the other hand, the history of our race was the history of the development of intelligence from the beginnings, but while eugenics promised a continuous advance, it is at least possible that the results of natural evolution of our race won't result a higher intelligence in the future.

Martians and Super Minds

Herbert George Wells
(1866-1946) described a World of 802,701 A.D. in his book entitled The Time Machine (1895) where two different Human species existed, and where the secure environment without any danger or challenge led to the mental and physical degeneration of the upper-class. Simultaneously, the worker class became a new carnivorous race, and they began to hunt the other Humans.
This is the first appearance of the idea of the biological eschatology (BE) (eschato means last, and it was used in a theological context originally). This science focuses on the biological future of Human beings, or on the future of the intelligence in the Universe in general.
Wells also presented the second example for biological eschatology, as well, citing an imagined article of Pall Mall Budget in his book entitled War of the Worlds (1898) which was said to point out, "that the perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs; the perfection of chemical devices, digestion; that such organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer essential parts of the human being", and so we have to regard only our brain and hands as an indispensable organ.
Wells in his another book entitled Biology of the Human Race (1937) described another scenario of the evolution of the future, where the "synthesis" played a key role. Both he and his co-author, biologist Julian Huxley believed that the history of the living world was the history of the synthesis form the single cell to the multicellular organism, and they stated that our "mental modification is steadily in the direction of the subordination of egoism and the suppression of extremes of uncorrelated individual activity". Extending this train of thought we can suppose that sooner or later a synthetic super mind will appear, "into which individual consciousnesses tend to merge themselves. These super-individual organizations have taken form from the creeds, communities, cultures, churches, states, classes, and suchlike accumulations of mentality. They have grown and interacted in the history of the species very like the complexes of an individual human mind... They seem to be heading towards an ultimate unification into a collective human organism, whose knowledge and memory will be all science and all history, which will synthesize the pervading will to live and reproduce into a collective purpose of continuation and growth", although it is only an opportunity and it is possible that we won"t be able to take the advantage of it.

In the Name of a Visionary Science

The co-founder of population genetics, J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964) mentioned in his book Daedalus or Science and the Future (1923) that mankind will be free from biological pressures after separating the reproduction from sexuality, and within a three hundred years (supposing the survival of this political method) we would see such slogans on the election placards, such as "Vote for Smith and more musicians", "Vote for O'Leary and more girls", and "Vote for Macpherson and a prehensile tail for your great-grandchildren".
A famous crystallographer and Marxist, John Desmond Bernal (1901-1971) answered to Haldane in The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929) that besides modifying the germ plasm (which was Haldane's favorite idea) we will be able modify our body using the latest results of surgery and psychological chemistry in the future, as well. "Sooner or later the useless parts of the body must be given more modern functions or dispensed with altogether, and in their place we must incorporate in the effective body the mechanisms of the new functions", he wrote.

Life, Universe, and Every- or Nothing

Freeman Dyson published his paper on Physics and Biology in an Open Universe to bring into life a new science named physical eschatology (PE) in 1979. One of his central thesis was that intelligent races would exist in an open Universe forever. In an open world cosmology, using only as much energy as our central star can radiate within eight ours, a society is able to survive with the complexity of our one if they hibernate themselves for longer and longer periods and use slower and slower "biological clocks". So the human (or any intelligent) species can exist in an open universe forever (although it is only a possibility, but not a necessity). This open "universe growing without limit in richness and complexity, a universe of life surviving forever and making itself known to its neighbors across unimaginable gulfs of space and time."
A closed universe is an other story. According to Dyson, "If it turns out that the universe is closed, we shall still have about 10^10 years to explore the possibility of a technological fix that would burst it open" and it is possible that intelligent beings would be able to change the geometry of the Universe by "converting matter into radiation", for example.
Opposite to Dyson's optimism, twenty years later the physicist Lawrence M. Krauss and Glenn D. Starkman (Life, The Universe, and Nothing: Life and Death in an Ever-Expanding Universe, 1999) pointed out that there is no opportunity for a civilization to exist forever in an ever-expanding and cosmological-constant dominated universe, as there is a minimum temperature, and below of it we should use energy-consuming refrigerators to  survive (although we have only a limited amount of energy). "In any cosmology, the need to dissipate excess heat may fix a minimum temperature at which a biological system can operate continuously", and since every alarm clock operates in thermal background, so they have minimum power consumption requirements, as well. So we have two options: "live for the moment in high powered luxury, or progressively reduce the information theoretic complexity of life until it loses consciousness forever."
What is more, although it is possible to make infinite number of computations using a finite amount of energy, having a finite amount of information, only a finite number of the computations will be distinct. That is to say, "only a finite (if still huge) stream of consciousness is available to any civilization."
A possible life time of a civilization is extremely long, but either a 10^50 year or a 10^100 year is very far from Dyson's eternity.

Evolutionary Spaces

According to Dyson, the needed time to evolve
"What changes could occur in the next 10^10 years to rival the changes of the past?" he asks and we can imagine that the rise of new species or - horribile dictu - phylum will be faster in the future. He envisions a turbulent future in his book entitled Imagined Worlds (1998), believing that the next thousand years will be determined by "biological battles" and different conceptions of the human race will fight against the others. Wellsian collective brains will fight against the civilization of traditional individuals and artificial intelligence against natural minds, for example. But before the beginning of the next millennium, our race will colonize the Solar System, and those genetic diversities which were non tolerable on Earth, will be tolerable when humans with different genetic programs will live on distant asteroids.
The process of diversification will cause speciation, and the result of it will cause further diversification. "Our one species will become many" Dyson argues.
Evolutionary biologist James W. Valentine notes that the result of the colonization of our Solar System will similar to the radiation of life of early Cambrian era when life occupied new and empty niches and there was a very rapid development of phyla. Spreading into space, we will occupy empty evolutionary niches, as well, but space communities will be able to significantly influence both our environments and our genomes, and we will be able either to choose or to refuse different evolutionary solutions. It seems to be possible that new species will appear on a thousand-year time scale and new phyla will rise within only two million years.

Some links:

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1923)
Daedalus or Science and the Future

John Desmond Bernal (1929)
The World, the Flesh and the Devil

Freeman Dyson (1979)
Physics and Biology in an Open Universe

Dean Falk: History of Brain Evolution and
Michael A. Hofman: Limits to Human Brain Evolution
Concepts and Hypothesis

Lawrence M. Krauss and Glenn D. Starkman (1999)
 Life, The Universe, and Nothing: Life and Death in an Ever-Expanding Universe

National Academy of Sciences (2001)
Colloquium on The Future of Evolution

George F. R. Ellis (editor. Templeton Foundation Press, 2002)
The Far-Future Universe. Eschatology from a Cosmic Perspective

Zoltán Galántai PhD (2005)