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An Alternate Human
B0b Barker writes "What has six limbs, a prehensile tail, its brain in its chest, and reproductive organs in its mouth? The alternate human designed by biologist PZ Myers in Remaking Humanity, a story in Forbes.com's package on Reinvention. It may sound fantastic, but researchers are already working to re-build DNA, proteins and cells in a new field called synthetic biology, and we may have to meet these bug-eyed freaks sometime in our lifetime."
Many anthropologists, socioligist, and biologists agree that humans have essentially stopped their own evolution, or at least slowed it to a crawl. Evolution is the long-term response of continuously having to adapt to your environment. However, because of civilization, the large majority of humanity simply adapts its environment around them instead.
That being said, wouldn't it make more sense to look at our evolutionary development and compare it with the rest of the animal kingdom. In this way, scientists might identify actual possible improvements which would simply be considered the evolution of homo sapiens (I shudder to think what would happen if I include the word homo in a sentence on Slashdot). For instance, if our legs bent inwards (backwards) at the knee, like say a stork's legs, we could run faster, jump higher, and sit down more easily.
The meddling in this article, and that is all it is, would in the end create not an alternate human but an altogether different and completely unrelated species.
In addition to this, add that it puts the high-bandwidth inputs -- audio, and particularly vision -- on dedicated "buses" rather than trying to run them through the same system bus (spinal cord) that handles the low-bandwidth signals for muscles. And allows direct connection to the higher brain structures, rather than routing through all that antique brain-stem nonsense.
I think I can cope with the extra limbs and pre-hensile tail. While certain evolutionary changes did reduce us to four-limbed tail-less creatures, I suppose there could be certain circumstances where at the least we could've kept the tail. The notions about reproduction and the brain are a bit odd.
As others have pointed out, the human brain would make most logical sense in the head. Being near the sensory organs is rather important to ensure fast response to external stimuli. Also, the chest cavity makes for a lousy place for brain storage. I guess the ribs and like could've evolved differently, but it just doesn't seem like an effective barrier. It is also mid-mass so your brain would get bounced around with just normal moving and sleeping. Not really a great idea. At least in the head it is fairly protected from that sort of stress.
The reproductive organs...well I just would not want to think about the trouble this would cause. Our mouths already have a confusing time with the eating and breathing. There are problems with this system mind you. Our bodies don't seem to like the idea of eating and breathing much at the same time. Also, I think I would rather have my less pleasant bodily functions sharing space with my reproductive organs than with place where I eat, drink and breath. Also, reproductive organs would have bad protection in your mouth. Besides the dangers of self mutilation (I mean imagine if this thing bit its own balls), the area is grossly exposed. The mouth is technically an external area that receives a great deal more bacteria then your lower regions.
For any major change to have occured in the evolutionary path, something major would have to happen to the environment. Environment played a huge roll in our evolutionary path, and I would like to think that genetics, natural selection and all that fun stuff worked together to produce the best form possible.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Speaking of neural wiring. One very important nerve, the vagus nerve, is very likely the most important nerve in the body. It runs to the heart, larynx, lungs, and internal organs yet doesn't go via the spinal cord, it runs directly from the brainstem down the neck. This means that no matter how much damage your spine suffers your automatic functions will still work (explaining why people can be total paraplegics but stay alive). This may be an evolutionary advantage but I find it hard to believe that anything that survived a severed spinal cord would live long enough to reproduce.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
It does. In fact, unusually tall people often have trouble with their feet. They can't feel infections and things very well.
What has six limbs, a prehensile tail, its brain in its chest, and reproductive organs in its mouth? The alternate human designed by biologist PZ Myers
This goes to show the problem of trying to use any design on such complicated systems as biological organisms. Reproductive organs are relatively external in the male because their requirements are very different from the other organs like the heart and kidneys. In they female they also require unique capabilities. The jaw cannot be as functionally flexible as the pelvis and cervix is. What woman would want to deliver through her mouth? A brain in the chest might have some serious overheating problems on top of the wiring issues mentioned elsewhere. Etc...
Evolution has proven superbly effective at creating workable systems because any component which is serious suboptimal causes the extinction of the entire line that contains it. Nature is extremely wasteful in the trial and error process which is natural selection, but nature is also extremely prolific so those creatures that survive can thrive on the failure of others. No designed organism can compete with an organism that evolved, even if that evolved organism has some defects like vestigial organs or an enhanced tendancy towards cancer in the post reproductive years.
I find this one of the biggest defects in the whole (un)intelligent design argument, what I call (u)ID. Design is not a desirable process, it is actually undesirable. A designed creature is not at all to be considered better or more noble than one that wasn't designed. Quite the opposite, as the preposterous article shows. Designs are oversimplistic, inflexible, assume fixed conditions in the environment, and cannot function beyond their designed requirements specifications. For things as trivially simplistic as watches or cars or air traffic control systems, the process of designing the product may be profitable (though even there it can be difficult or impossible to achieve all goals), but not for something as complex as a living organism.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
Oh there's a latency, and you probably have experienced it, too. Think on the last time you stubbed your toe. You know that "oh shit" moment, the moment between when you know you've stubbed your toe, and the moment when the blinding pain makes you start hopping about and swearing? That moment begins when your sense of balance and motion tells you that your foot has stopped moving and ends when the nerve impulses from your toe reach your brain and are processed. It's not long, but it's plenty long enough to perceive conciously.
Now if the brain were in the chest cavity and the eyes were in the head, there would be a delay, and probably a lot more blind or one-eyed individuals. Ever see something like a tree branch or a rock speeding toward your eye, and blinked or ducked to save your vision? The increased delay would make that sort of reaction time impossible, and *pow* you just put your eye out!
I've always wondered if Niven's Puppeteers had this problem, and perhaps that's why they started to hide all the time.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
We haven't stopped it, we've only altered the rules. Finding food and escaping predators is no longer much of an evolutionary influence. There are quite a few new things which can cause us to fail to reproduce. Humans will likely evolve in time to become less susceptible to cancer and asthma caused by air pollution, more likely to survive car crash trauma, be more tolerant of lead and mercury, and less likely to suffer negative effects such as heart disease from overconsumption of food. Women whose genetics prevent birth control from working well are currently far more likely to reproduce than others, so we will likely see some tolerance in the general population (although the medications will likely change at a much faster rate than we can evolve around). This is all just speculation though, I'm not a biologist.
I seem to remember John Smart talking about "developmental optimum" that evolution settles into. The eye most people get, having one doesn't give stereo vision, and three is redudant so the extra requirements of having a third eye get pared out over time. There are also some reasons having five fingers having to do with gripping a rock so it could be thrown accurately at ninety miles an hour. Get a pack of hairy men all throwing at a single predator/prey and they've got a serious problem. Our thowing abilities aren't too important today, granted, but consider how much engineering and design work would need to be completely redone to accomadate a couple extra digits. Sad to see this sensational article completely ignore the body of reasearch in this area.
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When we are a million species spreading through the galaxy, the questions 'Can man play God and still stay sane?' will lose of of its terrors. We shall be playing God, but only as local dieties and not as lords of the universe. There is safety in numbers. Some of us will become insane , and rule over empires as crazy as Doctor Moreau's island. Some of use will shit on the morning star. There will be conflicts and tragedies. But in the long run, the sane will adapt and survive better than the insane. Nature's pruning of the unfit will limit the spread of insanity among the species in the galaxy, as it does among individuals on earth.
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The expansion of life over the universe is a beginning, not an end. At the same time as life is extending its habitat quantitatively, it will also be changing and evolving qualitatively into dimensions of mind and spirit that we cannot imagine. The acquisition of new territory is important, not as an end in itself, but as a means to enable life to experiment with intelligence in a million different forms."
-- "The Greening of the Galaxy," Freeman Dyson, 1979
I have a few of my own ideas, as well as comments on his article.
First, while people are arguing about brain in chest vs head due to nerve length, nobody is mentioning one of the other impracticalities of his suggestions. Namely, the brain in the chest would require a larger chest cavity, thus a larger torso, and more weight. As well, the extra pair of arms would add to this. The heart would likely need to be larger to support the extra mass. Also, I think the brain would not be as free to grow/evolve to larger sizes when surrounded by all this ribcage, heart, lungs.
Instead, I think we could really benefit from the addition of one or two more hearts. Why are all our other organs redundant? (even the brain is a dual organ)
In the area of reproduction, instead of putting genitals in our mouths, take another cue from the bird world... Let's keep our reproduction like it is, but make women lay eggs. If sexual intercourse caused a woman to develop an infant-sized egg that she had to lay three days later, we would probably see a lot fewer teen pregnancies. In addition, a fetus developing in the egg would allow much more flexibility in prenatal care. It would likewise put an immediate end to the abortion issue, as the debate would no longer encompass a woman's right to do as she pleases with her body.
One of the more interesting possibilities in medicine today is that scientists may be able to reactivate the gene responsible for regeneration of organs, so you could re-grow lost kidneys, lungs, even limbs, as we can already regrow liver tissue. That's a wonderful bit of evolution that we lost, I can't possibly imagine why.
Finally, while he's taking ideas from some of the animal world, why not give our new and improved human, who I like to call Homo Novo, spinnerets so we can make our own rope, easily glue and fasten things or in a bind even make our own clothes? I admit, it would put the packing tape industry out of business, but it might afford the chance for some exciting new sports, as competitors try to tie each other up, rapell down buildings, or even the new art form of web design (oh, I guess we'd have to come up with a different name).
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
I remember reading years ago about limited experiments suggesting that people that wore special caps that circulated cool water through them performed better on intelligence tests than those that didn't. Those first tested without the cap saw their test scores improve when tested with the cap. I wonder if this was ever expanded upon; if it's true, it wouldn't be that hard to build something like that.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Don't you think it might be a little more accurate if you separated those that are killing BECAUSE of religious reasons, as opposed to those that aren't? China and the USSR were doing all their killing for governmental/control reasons, to maintain their fascist state or during a revolution. That's pretty distinct from religious types who are killing people simply for worshiping the wrong gods. It's dishonest to try to put the two groups together. What you should be comparing are religious nuts who kill for religious reasons, and atheists who specifically target believers because of their religion. And if you actually do that, I'm pretty sure the religious types will win.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
I did say unusually tall. You don't really count.
I expect if you did a properly controlled test you would find that your 7' friends have less precise and sensitive feeling in their feet than your 5'2" (and 3/4) wife. It's not that tall people can't feel their feet (sore feet from basketball isn't exactly subtle) but that they aren't as sensitive.
The world's tallest man Robert Wadlow, at 8'11" died of just such a problem. He had poor feeling in his lower extremities and died of an infection from a blister on his ankle.
No, the nerve impulses don't "get tired somewhere around the knees and give up" but there are significant signal losses through nerve conduction. The longer the nerve, the more losses, which means not only is the signal delayed but weak signals may not be detected.
People are generally short enough that it's not a big deal, although it can be, especially if a disease damages the nerves.
Ah, you pick out one person who was not simply unusual, but a medical anomoly and generalize to meet your desires. There is no evidence that Mr. Wadlows sensory issues were because he was tall. He wasn't a tall person with a normal physiology, he was tall because he had an abnormal physiology. Those other abnormalities are more likely the cause of his sensory issues than long nerve paths.
That 8'11" man probably had circulation issues as well, and that can cause problems with slow healing and lack of sensation in the lower extremities. Who knows what such a massive overdose of human growth hormone could damage the immune system as well. I wouldn't be so sure that the length of his nerves had anything to do with it.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Actually scarring is what mammals have instead of regeneration. Due to our higher energy metabolisms, we can't afford the weeks of downtime without eating to regenerate like reptiles can.
Instead, we evolved scarring, which cuts off resources to an area in the hopes that we can still feed ourselves without it. As another benefit, we close off wounds from infection faster than animals with regeneration.
Studies in mice have shown that shutting off the ability to scar leads to regeneration. The ability lies with in us, but it closed off by the benefits of scarring. Now, under modern societial pressure, we may be better off learning how to suppress scarring since it no longer means an inability to feed ourselves. Some have argued that organ regeneration will be the antibiotics of the 21st century in that it will revolutionize medicine.
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