Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived (30 page)

The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past, fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep
.

—Loren Eiseley,
The Immense Journey

In the Bay of Naples, not far from the shadow of Vesuvius, swim two seemingly unremarkable creatures, a common sea slug, and a jellyfish, called a medusa. The jellyfish, researchers know, carelessly bob through the upper waters of the bay and after birth quickly mature into full–grown, elegant adults. The sea slug’s larvae also contentedly ride the water’s currents, apparently happy to live the lives that such snails generally do. You wouldn’t think that these creatures could possibly have anything to do with one another, but it turns out they are intimately and strangely connected.

Marine biologists first saw this connection when they noticed that full–grown versions of the snails had a small, vestigial parasite attached near their mouth. Nothing you would immediately notice. But when they did notice it and looked further into the whole affair, they made their remarkable discovery. It seems that as the slug larvae bob through the bay, they often become entangled in the tentacles of the medusa and are then swallowed up into its umbrella–shaped body. At this point you would assume that the larvae would soon be done in as nice morsels by the predator jellyfish, but, that is not how it goes. Instead, and astonishingly, it is the snails that begin to dine,
voraciously—first on the radial canals of the jellyfish, then on the borders of the rim, and finally on the tentacles themselves, until the medusa disappears altogether and is replaced by rather a large slug, with the small bud of a parasite attached to its skin right near its mouth.

Lewis Thomas, the fine physician, researcher, and essayist, told this story in his wonderful 1970s book
The Medusa and the Snail
to illustrate how peculiar and connected life on earth is. It certainly does that, but I’m recounting it here because in the eccentric relationship of these two creatures lies the echo of what the future holds in store for the human race.

Usually at this point in a book like this, the inevitable—and heavily loaded—question arises, what next? Where will human evolution take us now after our long and astonishing adventures? Are we still evolving? And if we are, what will the next act look like? Can we expect ever–enlarging brains to cram themselves behind alienlike foreheads? Or will our noggins contract to the size of a walnut, shrunk down by media overload and pharmaceuticals (the dimensions of the human brain have diminished 10 percent over the past thirty thousand years)? Or perhaps we will grow weak, fat, and small of limb, vaguely resembling Jabba the Hutt, while simultaneously sprouting an extra digit or two to better handle all of the texting we do? It might even be possible, as one scientist has speculated, that we will diverge into two subspecies, one fit and beautiful and the other overweight and slovenly, a kind of real–world version of the Eloi and Morlocks in H. G. Wells’s
Time Machine
, except without the cannibalism and enslavement, we hope.
ⁱ

Evolution, as the past four billion years have repeatedly illustrated, holds an endless supply of tricks up its long and ancient sleeve. Anything is possible, given enough millennia. Inevitably the forces of natural selection will require us to branch out into differentiated versions of our current selves, like so many Galápagos finches … assuming, that is, that we have enough time to leave our evolution to our genes. We won’t, though, and none of these scenarios will come to pass. Instead, we will come to an end, and rather soon. We may be the last apes standing, but we won’t be standing for long.

A startling thought, this, but all of the gears and levers of evolution indicate that when we became the symbolic creature, an animal capable of ardently transforming fired synapses into decisions, choices, art, and invention, we simultaneously caught ourselves in our own cross–hairs. Because with these deft and purposeful powers, we also devised a new kind of evolution, the cultural variety, driven by creativity and invention. So began a long string of social, cultural, and technological leaps unencumbered by old biological apparatuses such as proteins and molecules.

At first glance you might think that this would be a boon to our kind. How better to better our lot than with fire and wheels, steam engines, automobiles, fast food, satellites, computers, cell phones, and robots, not to mention mathematics, money, art, and literature, each conspicuously designed to reduce work and improve the quality of our lives. But it turns out not to be that simple. Improvements sometimes have unintended consequences. With the execution of every bright new idea it seems we find ourselves instantly in need of still newer solutions that only seem to make the world more kerfuffled. We are ginning up so much change, fashioning thingamabobs, weaponry, pollutants, and complexity in general, so swiftly, that as creatures genetically bred to a planet quite recently bereft of technical and cultural convolutions, we are having an exceedingly difficult time keeping up, even though we are the agents of the very change that is throttling us. The consequence of our incessant innovating is that it has led us inevitably, paradoxically, irrevocably, to invent a world for which we are altogether ill fit. We have become medusae to our own snails, devouring ourselves nearly out of existence. The irony of this is Shakespearean in its depth and breadth. In ourselves we may finally have met our match: an evolutionary force to which even we cannot adapt.

We are undoing ourselves because the old baggage of our evolution impels us to. We already know that every animal wants power over its environment and does its level best to gain it. Our DNA demands survival. It is just that the neoteny that has made us the Swiss Army knife of creatures, and the last ape standing has only amplified, not replaced, the primal drives of the animals we once were. Fear, rage, and appetites that cry for instant gratification are still very much with us. That combination of our powers of invention and our ancient needs will, I suspect, soon carry us off from the grand emporium of living things.

The best evidence that we are growing ragged at the hands of the Brave New World we have busily been rolling off the assembly line is the growing numbers of us who freely admit to being thoroughly stressed. A recent study reported that the United States is “a nation at a critical crossroads when it comes to stress and health.”
^j
Americans are caught in a vicious cycle: managing stress in unhealthy ways while assembling insurmountable barriers that prevent them from revising their behavior to undo the damage they are inflecting on themselves. As a result, 68 percent of the population is overweight. Almost 34 percent are obese. (This is rarely a problem in hunter–gatherer cultures.) Three in ten Americans say they are depressed, with depression most prevalent between the ages of forty–five and sixty–five. Forty–two percent report being irritable or angry, and 39 percent nervous or anxious. Gen Xers and so–called Millenniums admit to being more stressed about personal relationships than even their baby–boomer parents. It’s so bad that the results of our anxieties have found their way into dental offices, where dentists now spend far more of their time treating patients for jaw pain, receding gums, and worn teeth than they did thirty years ago. Why? Because we are tense and anxious, grinding our teeth down to nubs as we sleep.

Stress, as the experience of lab rats everywhere has repeatedly testified, is a sign that a living thing is growing increasingly unfit for the world in which it lives, and as Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace astutely observed more than 150 years ago, when a living thing and its environment are no longer a good match, something has to give, and it is
always
the living thing.

How are we handling our stress? Not too well. Rather than relaxing or getting more exercise when pressures mount, studies show that we instead skip meals, spend more time online or in front of the TV, then overeat and lie awake at night perfectly prepared to enter the next day bleary–eyed, short–tempered, and exhausted. What triggers this behavior? Those old primal drives and appetites we struggle so mightily to ignore.

Which returns us to the question, what next?

Our demise doesn’t have to be a Terminator–style annihilation that leaves the world emptied of all humans, postapocalyptic cities stark and decaying with the smashed remains of our cultural accomplishments. It
may be more of a butterfly–like metamorphosis, a transformation in which we step over the Rubicon of our old selves and emerge as a new creature built on our own backs without ever realizing, at least early on, that we are no longer the species we thought we were. Did the first Neanderthal know that he, or she, was no longer
Homo heidelbergensis?
Those passages are made gradually.

Perhaps we will simply morph into
Cyber sapiens
,
^k
a new human, infinitely more intelligent than you or I are, perhaps more socially adept, or at least able to juggle large tribes of friends, acquaintances, and business associates with the skill of a circus performer. A creature more capable of keeping up with the change it generates. To handle the challenges of time shortages and long distances,
Cyber sapiens
may even be able to bilocate or split off multiple, digital versions of themselves, each of whom can blithely live separate lives and then periodically rejoin their various digital selves so that they become a supersize version of a single person. Imagine being able, unlike Robert Frost’s traveler in his poem “The Road Not Taken,” to choose both paths, each with a separate version of yourself. It makes you wonder if something essential in us might disappear should such possibilities come to pass. But then, perhaps, that is what will make the new species new.

A whole group of
Homo sapiens
are already contemplating what the next version of us might be like. They call themselves transhumanists, anticipating a time when future anthropologists will have looked back on us as a species that had a nice run, but didn’t make it all the way to the future present. Transhumanists foresee a time when beings will emerge who will literally be part biology and part machine. In this I suspect they are right, the logical next step in a long trend. We are already part and parcel of our technologies after all. When was the last time you checked your cell phone or simply walked to work, hunter–gatherer style? We have long been coevolving with our tools. It’s just that now the lines between humans and machines, reality and virtuality, biology and technology, seem to have become especially blurry and will soon twitch and blink away completely.

Transhumanists predict that by melding molecule–size nanomachines with old–fashioned, carbon–made DNA the next humans might not only speed up their minds and multiply their “selves,” but boost
their speed, strength, and creativity, conceiving and inventing hyper–intelligently while they range the world, the solar system, and, in time, the galaxy. In the not–distant future we may trade in the blood that biological evolution has so cunningly crafted over hundreds of millions of years for artificial hemoglobin. We may exchange our current brand of neurons for nanomanufactured digital varieties, find ways to remake our bodies so that we are forever fresh and beautiful, and do away with disease so that death itself finally takes a holiday. The terms
male
and
female
may even become passé. To put it simply, a lack of biological constraint may become
the
defining trait of the next human.

There could be a downside to these sorts of alterations, I suppose, should we find ourselves with what amounts to superhuman powers, but still burdened by our primal luggage. Our newfound capabilities might become more than we can handle. Will we evolve into some version of comic–book heroes and villains, clashing mythically and with terrible consequences? Powers like these give the term
cutting edge
a new and lethal meaning. And what of those who don’t have access to all of the fresh, amplifying technologies? Should we guard against a world of super–haves and super–have–nots? It is these sides of the equation I wonder about most.

Given evolution’s trajectory, short of another asteroid collision or global cataclysm, we will almost certainly become augmented versions of our current models. That has been the trend for seven million years. Apes increasingly endowed with more intelligence, and more tools, becoming simultaneously wiser and more lethal. The question now is, can we survive ourselves? Can we even manage to become the next human? It’s a close question.

I’m counting on the child in us to bail us out, the part that loves to meander and play, go down blind alleys, fancy the impossible, and wonder why. It is the impractical, flexible part we can’t afford to lose in the transition because it makes us free in ways that no other animal can be—fallible and supple and inventive. It’s the part that has gotten us this far. Maybe it will work for the next human, too.

Sitting here at my desk on a warm morning in 2012, it’s easy to think of book writing as an entirely private undertaking. Lots of time spent tapping away all by yourself, wrestling with sentences that refuse to make sense, wrangling obstinate phrases; lots of reading, library excursions, and Web–crawling, too, for obscure facts; and a fair amount of frantic note–jotting punctuated with mindless gazings out the window. Occasionally some solitary head–banging was known to go on.

But mostly the sequestered nature of writing is an illusion. A book like
Last Ape Standing
could never find its way into the world without the help and support of battalions of people. For starters, I’ve been privileged over the years to sit in long conversations with scores of scientists and some of the finest minds I’ve ever come across—Michael Gazzaniga, Gerald Edelman, Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, Michael McElroy, and the late and remarkable Lynn Margulis, to name a handful. Those conversations provided me with perspectives for this book that I would never have developed without the benefit of their hospitality, capacious intellects, and experience. “But look at it this way …” is a phrase I heard often from all of them as they gently helped me out of the small seat of my limited perspective.