How technology is changing society: Man of the future to have bigger brain

If you had to guess what human beings will be like 1,000 years from now, what would you say?

It has been a long favoured sub-genre of science fiction where entertainers imagine what our future will look like.

We have seen everything from flying human beings to indestructible human-machine cyborgs.

In a few decades, will we really be having more sex with robots than with fellow human beings, and ultimately, will we turn into robots ourselves? Man’s fascination with the future is well documented and is tied to our fascination with mortality, and there is no shortage of theory to feed into this frenzy.

Every few years, scientists give us their predictions about the future of man, based on their studies and research.

In the most recent of these, scientists said we will get taller yet more heavy around the middle, brains and eyes will be bigger, skin colour will be uniformly the colour of very milky coffee (black people will get lighter as white people get darker) and penises will get smaller.

EVOLVING

According to Ms Michelle Angwenyi, an MPhil student in Zoology at Cambridge University and who has worked in evolutionary and developmental biology, human beings are evolving, but not in the dramatic way that movies have led us to believe.

The changes are small and subtle, and difficult to decisively predict, as they happen over long periods of time and hinge on many ever-changing factors.

“There are many small changes that occur, and these changes can accumulate over long periods of time to bring about the drastic species changes we are familiar with and things are constantly changing, even as they accumulate. Because we live in different environments, and face different conditions, it is tricky to determine any one common, and obvious, phenotype that is being selected for, so this is evident especially in certain populations of people who are subject to the same conditions,” she told the Nation.

She added that recent evidence of evolution (away from the widely known illustration of man transitioning from a crouching Ramapithecus to an upright Homo Sapiens) includes tolerance for lactose in adulthood, which occurred as human beings started to rely on milk for nutrition, and the mutation of the red blood cell that confers a level of resistance to malaria-causing plasmodium in equatorial/tropical African regions.

MANY UNCERTAINTIES

When pressed about what the future of man is likely to be, many scientists, Angwenyi included, have shied from giving a definitive answer — there are just too many uncertainties.

But some answers are emerging. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scientists set out to prove that women were changing, and these changes were pegged on the importance of reproduction for the survival of the human race.

“The descendants of these women are predicted to be on average slightly shorter and stouter, to have lower total cholesterol levels and systolic blood pressure, to have their first child earlier, and to reach menopause later than they would in the absence of evolution. Selection is tending to lengthen the reproductive period at both ends,” the scientists wrote.

They explained as social contact between human beings lessened, as has happened in countries like Japan, where demographic studies have shown that people are having less and less sex, nature will prolong child bearing years in women to ensure the propagation of the species.

A direct consequence of this is that people will become more selective about whom they mate with, leading to the prioritising of characteristics such as intelligence.

SEXUAL SELECTION

“You still have powerful mate choice shaping mental traits particularly… traits that are needed to succeed economically and in raising kids,” Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist said in an interview published in the National Geographic, said.

“We’re also going to get stronger sexual selection, because the more advanced the technology gets, the greater an effect general intelligence will have on each individual’s economic and social success, because as technology gets more complex, you need more intelligence to master it,” he added. “That intelligence results in higher earnings, social status, and sexual attractiveness.”

Some scientists have said this will result in the emergence of two sub-species; one more intelligent, hence, more superior than the other one.

Oliver Curry, an evolution theorist at the London School of Economics in 2007 predicted human beings would split into an upper and under class, determined by physique and intelligence. The upper class would be tall, intelligent, healthy and attractive while the underclass would be shorter and squatter, and of low intelligence, creating a grotesque caste system that would change and exaggerate rather than eliminate the current dynamics of oppression and inequality. Curry said the changes would come about due to high selectivity on sexual partners, where tall smart people will prefer to procreate with their tall smart counterparts.

TECHNOLOGY

But man’s dalliance with technology and advances in medical research have meant that evolution as we understand it has changed — natural selection is no longer the dominant method through which it occurs, as populations that would have previously gone extinct are able to live and propagate due to technological interventions. More importantly, genetic engineering now gives human beings the capacity to edit genes; changing, removing or adding things to them, which dictates the direction evolution might go in the future, and what this might mean for society.

One of my favourite movies explores how a “normal” man, born without any genetic engineering advantages, navigates a world in which privilege is bestowed based not on skin colour, sex or class as is the case today, but on how well one has been modified to fit into the realities of a world where technology is king.

The plot revolves around how the protagonist, who has no genetic modification, survives and beats the odds to rise to the highest ranks of a society despite being genetically “inferior” to everyone else. 

That movie, Gattaca, came out in 1997, way before science introduced the world to CRSPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), the gene editing tool that has brought the reality of “designer babies” that much closer home. CRSPR, which has been heralded for its ability to edit out certain diseases from the human genome, has also raised ethical questions regarding how far humans should go in their quest for genetic perfection.

MOLECULAR PATHWAYS

“The ethical debate over CRSPR has gotten more heated due to the wide range of functions this particular technology can perform with remarkable precision, “designer babies” being one of the functions in question. First, there is the question of incredibly complicated molecular pathways that are still under study that influence many of these “desirable” traits, but even if they are to be elucidated, and before such technology is allowed for widespread use, certain agreements have to be reached about how best to use them, and these often put the science of these matters on hold, for years and years at a time,” said Angwenyi.

This means the technology is far from becoming mainstream because scientists are still working out the kinks.

There are however those that claim man has reached perfection, and that we are unlikely to evolve beyond this point without the help of artificial technology. In an interview with The National Geographic, anthropologist Ian Tattersall of New York’s American Museum of Natural History explained man is unlikely to evolve any more; human beings have become less isolated, therefore less likely to differentiate themselves from the general population.

MODERN MEDICINE

“Since the advent of settled life, human populations have expanded enormously. Homo sapiens is densely packed across the Earth, and individuals are unprecedentedly mobile. In this situation, the fixation of any meaningful evolutionary novelties in the human population is highly improbable.” Tattersall said. “Human beings are just going to have to learn to live with themselves as they are.”

His claims are supported by those who posit that natural selection, as understood from the Darwin Theory of Evolution, is no longer an effective agent of change because modern medicine keeps alive “weaker populations” who would have died off had nature been allowed to take its course.

But Angwenyi disagrees, stating that technology has in no way replaced natural selection as an agent of evolution.