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,
- we can control our evolution through our descendants and
- 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
- a new species is 10^6 years;
- a new genus is 10^7 years;
- a new class is 10^8 years;
- a phylum is 10^9 years and
- it took less than 10^10 years to evolve from the primeval
slime to Homo Sapiens.
"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)