Home | Blog | About | Contact

The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Addendum: Cyberfetus Rising

Cyberfetus Rising

Technology decommissions the specialized adaptations of the adult body. The neoteny that results illustrates gene-culture coevolution. In space this process—techneoteny—will deliver a posthuman form anticipated by the religious figure of the cherubic angel, the celestial infant.

Once they adapt to weightlessness, humankind's extraterrestrial descendants will diverge from their kin, not only geographically, but also biologically and psychologically. The biological changes will include an enrichment, or juvenilization, of brain tissue. Psychological changes could only follow. Another effect will be an atrophying of bone and muscle tissues. This effect of weightlessness plagues astronauts and seems sure to become even more pronounced in native extraterrestrials.

An organism with an enriched brain—a superabundance of neurons and neuronal interconnections—and underdeveloped bones and muscles will resemble a human infant more than it will a human adult. That is, weightlessness will induce, elicit, or evoke a neotenous adaptation to the environment of space. Space colonists will constitute a relatively small population, geographically and reproductively isolated from terrestrial humanity. They therefore will set the stage for the evolution of post-human species.

Folklore and fable predict the outcome of space habitation. Juvenile skywalkers drift and soar through popular culture. The stereotypical UFO alien, for example, with its fetal allometry (big head, small limbs); Peter Pan, the eternally youthful high-flyer; the cosmic fetus that closes out 2001, A Space Odyssey, and other fantasy figures suggest that living in the sky retards development. But the most explicit renderings of extraterrestrial tots are the putti, the flying babies popular in Renaissance and Victorian art. These infantile cloud dwellers are curious representatives of a spiritually advanced stage.

Among the flying babies of popular kitsch, the St. Valentine's Day Cupid seems particularly eager to participate in the evolutionary program. As a symbol the infant cupid unites neoteny—retarded development— sexuality, and weightlessness, a sure-fire recipe for speciation. Neoteny by itself has a well-established tendency to spawn species. As Ecologist Ramon Margalef notes in Perspectives in Ecological Theory, "The opening of new spaces to colonization creates new opportunities for the development of new species; such evolution does not take a slow and regular path but proceeds through neoteny or other nonhabitual or poorly understood evolutionary paths."

What space is be more likely to trigger nonhabitual modes of speciation than outer space?

The archetypal putto, shown here on Greek stone reliefs.

Every complex organism begins life as a zygote, which divides into an undifferentiated clump of cells before the cells give rise to specialized tissues. As the organism develops—as its ontogeny unfolds—it acquires more of the anatomy and morphology characteristic of its adult form. The tails, fangs, and wings that grow more conspicuous during development constellate into a distinctive bodily form, the adult form of the species. Lion, cobra, bat, and human embryos share a common form, initially, then differentiate into their specialized adult forms.

(Nineteenth-century German naturalist, Karl Ernst von Baer recognized this developmental trend of differentiation from a general form into a specialized one. Among biologists, Von Baer's observation has replaced the so-called biogenetic law of Ernst Haekel as the favored view. Haekel's law, which asserts that during development organisms pass through the adult stages of their ancestors, is summarized by the well known formula, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." This formula persists in popular contexts, but scientists today dismiss it as discredited. In 1988 the president of the National Academy of Sciences concluded, "The biogenetic law is as dead as a doornail" ["Ontogeny and Phylogeny Recapitulated," American Scientist, May-June 1988]. According to von Baer's law of progressive differentiation, neotenous descendants resemble the juvenile form of their ancestors—in contrast to Haekel's law, which predicts that neotenous descendants will resemble ancestral adults.)

All complex organisms share a common morphology—initially. They acquire their distinctive, specialized adult forms as they develop. By retarding development, neoteny produces adults with juvenile features. This de-differentiation of morphology provides adaptive advantages in rapidly changing environments, such as, one has to suppose, a high-tech environment.

In environments undergoing rapid change, neoteny enables organisms to adapt to the unstable conditions. It enables organisms to jettison adaptations that have outlasted their usefulness. As for the environmental changes that promote human neoteny, technology seems to be a major player. An example of the neotenous effects of technology comes from the work of anthropologist C. Loring Brace. He has discovered adult human skeletal remains that are peculiarly retarded—they're toothless. Brace explains the connection to technology: "Human skeletal collections from the Neolithic and subsequent periods contain the remains of individuals who had survived for years in a completely edentulous [toothless] state. No such evidence is available for any human population that did not use pottery. Pounding, grinding, and milling tools also become common late in the Pleistocene . . . and it seems likely that this may also have contributed to the relaxation of Pleistocene levels of selection, which had maintained large amounts of tooth substance." (Brace, C. Loring, Karen R. Rosenberg, and Kevin D. Hunt, "Gradual Change in Human Tooth Size in the Late Pleistocene and Post-Pleistocene," Evolution, 41(4), 1987, pp. 705-720. See also, "Human Teeth, Small Already, Continue to Shrink," The New York Times, August 30, 1988.)

Food-processing technologies reduce the need for big teeth, biology's natural grinding and milling tools. Big teeth become unnecessary and unable to return the metabolic investments that they require, once automation technologies, such as pounding, grinding, and milling tools, become available.

Technology Extends, then Supplants, the Body

"The first tools were probably conceived initially as simple extensions of the human body," surmises David Barash in The Hare and the Tortoise: Culture, Biology, and Human Nature, "the club a stylized and more powerful hand and fist, the bowl and pouch more efficient cupped hands, the flint scraper a heavy-duty fingernail. . . ." Marshall McLuhan made the same observation. His opus, Understanding Media, he subtitled "The extensions of man." Philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard defines the same relationship in The Postmodern Condition: "Technical devices originated as prosthetic aids for the human organs or as physiological systems whose function it is to receive data or condition the context."

As physical capacities get extended technologically, the corresponding body parts atrophy, as teeth do when they compete with food-processing technologies. L. Frank Baum, the author of the Oz books intuited this effect. The tin woodsman of Oz was originally flesh and blood. But, as he worked, his ax would rebel and chop off a part of his body. A tinsmith replaced each missing part until the woodsman was remade entirely from tin. Technology had supplanted his body completely. Mircea Eliade cites another version of this motif, in The Two and the One:

"The celebrated 'rope-trick' of the fakirs and conjurers creates the illusion that a rope rises very high in the sky, and the master makes his pupil climb it until he disappears from view. The fakir then throws his knife into the air and the young man's limbs fall, one after another, to the ground."

Here the blade's cleaving of body parts is associated with ascent. And the motif is pervasive. Though associated mostly with India, Eliade finds it in cultures as far flung as those of China, Mexico, and Ireland.

The technological environment appears to be a milieu of gadgets whirring and chugging in space and time in lieu of human bodies. Freud, for one, welcomed the prosthetic effects of technology. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he declares, "With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent."

Evolutionary pressures for metabolic economy allow tools to supplant the specialized—adult—body parts that they functionally simulate (and outperform). By extending the functions of specialized body parts, technology relaxes selection pressures for the maintenance of those parts. Hence, technology and neoteny proceed hand in hand. McLuhan called the process, "autoamputation."

This ability of tools to shape the species finds a more formal theoretical foundation in the gene-culture coevolution hypothesis of sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson. Humankind was synthesized by "a sustained autocatalytic reaction in which genetic and cultural evolution drove each other forward," Wilson and colleague Charles Lumsden propose in Promethean Fire. "This largely unknown evolutionary process we have called gene-culture coevolution: it is a complicated, fascinating interaction in which culture is generated and shaped by biological imperatives while biological traits are simultaneously altered by genetic evolution in response to cultural innovation."

Although Wilson and Lumsden tend to restrict their use of "culture" to behaviors, clearly the concept must include artifacts, implements, devices—technology. The notion of "epigenetic rules" that they use to link genes and social behaviors in a feedback relationship applies as readily to the linking of genes and the crafting and use of tools. In this view, a species that modifies its environment technologically becomes locked into an evolutionary feedback circuit in which it and its technologies mutually shape one another, symbiotically.

Techneoteny—The Primary Mode of Gene-Culture Coevolution

Neoteny and technology feeding off each other—techneoteny—is humankind's primary mode of evolution. Neoteny is an adaptation to the manufactured environment. A more common term for this phenomenon is domestication.

What was true of neolithic cookery should apply to subsequent generations of technologies: they each should contribute to the autocatalytic cycle of neotenous gene-culture coevolution. If we fast forward from the Pleistocene to the present, we see the techneotenous gyre tightening and taking a particular toll on the more highly differentiated male phenotype.

Though technology tends to be associated with the prerogatives of the masculine, it produces environments increasingly hospitable to the feminine. Havelock Ellis noticed the connection already at the end of the nineteenth century. In his Man and Woman: A Study of Human Secondary Sexual Characters, he observes, "Savagery and barbarism have more usually than not been predominantly militant, that is to say masculine, in character, while modern civilization is becoming industrial, that is to say feminine, in character, for the industries belonged primitively to women, and they tend to make men like women." This feminization is neotenous, Ellis contends, citing what he calls the "infantile diathesis" of women: "When women differ from men, it is the latter who have diverged, leaving women nearer to the child-type. Women are nearer to children than are men [and] the child represents a higher degree of evolution than the adult."

Trends in Allometry: Terrestrial human ontogeny reads from left to right. Post-terrestrial post-human phylogeny reads from right to left.

The ancient world similarly perceived a link between the industrial and the feminine. Early metallurgists, for example, built their lore on a mythos of gestation and incubation. "Very early on we are confronted with the notion that ores 'grow' in the belly of the Earth after the manner of embryos," comments Mircea Eliade in The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy, "Metallurgy thus takes on the character of obstetrics. Miner and metalworker intervene in the unfolding of subterranean embryology: they accelerate the rhythm of the growth of ores, they collaborate in the work of Nature and assist it to give birth more rapidly." Eliade goes on to cite the traditions of the Atonga, who "have a custom of throwing into the furnace a portion of the placenta to ensure the success of the smelting."

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein gives a more overtly anthropomorphic form to the notion of the industrial feminine. Critics conventionally interpret the story through the lens of its Promethean subtitle, but critic Steven Lehman interprets it as an allegory of male womb envy. He argues, "[Dr. Frankenstein's] problem—and it is the central thematic problem of the novel—is that modern science obviates the biological gender distinctions upon which our psychology and society have been built." (Lehman, Steven, "The Motherless Child in Science Fiction: Frankenstein and Moreau," Science Fiction Studies, No. 56, 1992, pp. 49-58.) Technology cures Dr. Frankenstein's womb envy by enabling him to give birth to artificial life. It allows Victor Frankenstein to mother the prototypical problem child. If technologies are extensions of the body, then inventing must be a birthing.

More recently, male womb envy has taken a digital turn. Computer programmers have adopted the creation of "artificial" or "virtual" life as a technical grail. Programmers claim that their growing, replicating, and adapting software constitutes a new life form. Such Frankensteinian aspirations express the male urge to deliver life, but, despite any joy that their ersatz motherhood might bestow, the men of industrial society give birth to their own undoing.

In The Mechanical Bride McLuhan renders an image of male impotence at the hands of industry: "Under complex conditions of rapid change, the family unit is subject to special strain. Men flounder in such times. The male role in society, always abstract, tenuous, and precarious compared with the biological assurance of the female, becomes obscured. Man the provider, man the codifier of laws and ritual, loses his confidence." Given the dire circumstances, a men's movement may have been inevitable. Poet Robert Bly, a central figure in the movement, winces at the link between industry and immaturity: "If you walk from Boston to Labrador, you’re more mature when you arrive; If you drive, you’re more infantile when you arrive. The Industrial Revolution brought central heating and the automobile. Not only does maturity fail, but a positive movement toward regression is taking place. There’s a connection between technology and infantilism. It’s sad." (Interview in EastWest, March 1986, p.72.) Despite technology’s more immediate undermining of traditional male roles, ultimately the specialized roles of male and female will converge on the generic child type. "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and a little child shall lead them," as the prophet foresaw.

Folklores often describe the first humans as androgynous and describe their differentiation into male and female forms. Similarly, a fertilized egg—first human—is not obviously male or female, but differentiates along gender lines as it develops. And folklores typically include a reintegration that restores the original, undifferentiated, androgynous form. Native extraterrestrials will stage this alchemical script as they revert to infantile morphology.

Mircea Eliade comments on the ubiquity of the androgyne as a symbol of the divine, de-differentiated aboriginal human form: "Certain apocryphal texts use paradoxical images to describe the Kingdom or the overturning of the Cosmos occasioned by the coming of the Saviour. It is to be noted that these images are used side by side with those of androgyny and of a return to the state of a child."

Today family members gather around the electronic hearth to consume as a unit the same cultural fare, with adults content to watch cartoon shows and children eager to imbibe celebrity sex scandals. Psychological de-differentiation drives cultural de-differentiation. "Being There," Jerzy Kozinski's parable of the divine naif, captures the trend. The novel's protagonist, "Chauncey Gardiner," grows up in seclusion, nursed by a TV. The tastes, concerns, and socialized personality of a normal adult never take root in him. The plot expels a disoriented Gardiner into the adult world, his only social skill being his ability to rattle off folksy platitudes. Ironically, innocence proves disarming. Gardiner ascends the political ranks and lands in a position of magical influence. He assumes a political function along the lines of that later filled by Nancy Reagan's astrologer, an oracle.

"Being There," in its movie form, suggests the next stop in humankind’s neotenous evolutionary trip. Director Hal Ashby takes liberties with the novel when the infantile Chauncey Gardiner makes clear the allegory by walking on water. By deifying the naif, the weightless conclusion of "Being There" points to a way around humankind's terminal regression. Gravity yields to levity.

Space Colony: The Extended Womb

Technology's extension of the body would seem to culminate in a comprehensive surround. Within an all-encompassing synthetic-prosthetic environment, biological metabolisms will stop investing in specialized adaptations left over from wild, ancestral environments. The encapsulated ecosystem of the space colony is that comprehensive environment—the body extended in toto. The Freudian project of human industry aims at the construction of an immortal mother. With an immortal mother, biology can remain eternally embryonic. This is where the feminine energies inherent in industry complete their project, as the collection of industries takes the form of a comprehensive synthetic womb. Weightlessness adds the finishing touch of authenticity. Evolution is preparing to spawn intrauterine extraterrestrials. Philosopher Herbert Marcuse, in Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia, saw the logic in technology's potential to complete itself by turning inside out and liberating libido from its discontents:

"The achievements of repressive progress herald the solution of the repressive principle of progress itself. It becomes possible to envisage a state in which there is no productivity resulting from and conditioning renunciation and no alienated labor: a state in which the growing mechanization of labor enables an ever larger part of the instinctual energy that had to be withdrawn for alienated labor to return to its original form, in other words, to be changed back into energy of the life instincts. It would no longer be the case that time spent in alienated labor occupied the major portion of life and the free time left to the individual for the gratification of his own needs was a mere remainder. Instead, alienated labor time would not only be reduced to a minimum but would disappear and life would consist of free time."

On Earth, the transition from womb to world is traumatic for the newborn. In the exowomb of the space colony, human descendants might not notice the transition—a smooth glide from one buoyant comprehensive life-support environment to another. In weightlessness the purported benefits of underwater birthing will be put to the test. The psychological effect on future generations of the elimination of the trauma of birth is a sideline ripe for speculation.

But this much seems evident: the developmental transition from Freudian psychology's Pleasure Principle to its Reality Principle, a transition that in the Freudian model accounts for much psychological distress and dysfunction, might not occur at all in a space-based civilization. A fetal mentality could remain unchallenged and unadulterated in an environment that reproduces with sufficient fidelity the life-support functions of the womb. The weightless technologically comprehensive environment of the space colony recalibrates all standards of psychological and physical adaptation, because it promises to radically truncate psychological and physical development through radical neoteny.

Weightless encapsulation will unchain neotenous de-differentiation. An extreme prospect is that of the unfettered expression of oncogenes. These genes would seem to be natural vehicles for neoteny, because their job is to retard cellular differentiation. Masses of undifferentiated tissue occur twice during the lives of complex organisms: once early in embryologic development and later in the form of the cancerous tumor. Both situations involve oncogenes. In the course of embryologic development, cells differentiate into the many tissues of the adult organism. But tumors don't differentiate. They remain undifferentiated tissue. What’s more, given a sufficiently supportive culture, these undifferentiated masses—neoplasms—behave oddly. They don't die. This peculiarity of tumors contributes to the mythical dimension of the hypothesis. It suggests a literal heavenly immortality.

"Prominent among the kinds of cell lineages potentially immortal in culture are cancerous ones; hence the study of such cells in culture has been vigorously pursued in recent years," writes William T. Keeton of Cornell University in the college textbook "Biological Science" (third edition, 1980, W. W. Norton and Company). "The HeLa cell line is derived from a carcinoma of the cervix of a young black woman named Henrietta Lacks, who died of her cancer in 1951. This was the first stable, vigorously growing line of cultured human cells used in cancer research. Today HeLa cells are found growing in medical and research laboratories the world over."

"Culture" denotes a manufactured environment that preserves its occupants in a state of arrested development, whether it be the cosmopolitan milieu of the neotenous urbanite or the petri dish of the laboratory tumor. Cancerous neoplasms in this context appear to be premature posthuman extraterrestrials, as if they were mutations waiting for appropriate environments (weightless cultures) in which to emerge as evolutionary players. The messianic myth is one of returning to the womb. Weightlessness is the promised messiah.

As bodies and technologies fuse, and today's virtual reality systems evolve into semisynthetic skins that mediate molecular exchanges between body and environment, evolution in space will erase all distinctions between Gaia and Techne. Both will be subsumed into a generic, extropic stuff, an amorphous technorganism.

This prospect suggests all kinds of alien morphologies and the potential for a new endosymbiosis. The original endosymbiosis was the process by which ancient bacterial cells, prokaryotes, merged to form the first eukaryotic cells. (Eukaryotic cells are the complex cells that make up plant and animal bodies.) The juvenilizing effects of weightlessness presumably would retard all species, not just humans. Assuming that our descendants haul their pets and possibly livestock into space, the several species will revert together and converge on the common embryonic form. And the tendency already is in place. What earlier was referred to as "techneoteny" is essentially the process of domestication, which is technology-driven juvenilization. House cats are domesticated felines, companion dogs are domesticated canines, and humankind is the domesticated primate. Each species is a potential contributor of genes to an aggregate descendant that will stand in complexity to its constituents as our cells do to the prokaryotes, the simple bacteria. The convergence of species inside a weightless solid-state environment will set the stage for an exo-Cambrian explosion of evolutionary novelty. The animal rights and humane farming movements might be setting the stage for, or be early expressions of, such an interspecies convergence.

Already we can see that silicon will play a leading role in the transition, and, in good science-fiction form, could even replace carbon in part or whole as the main building block of organisms—though at that point biology will have evolved/metamorphosed into something postbiological. The reappearance of silicon at the end of biology mirrors its initiating role, a parsimonious symmetry.

Ultimately, the microscopic devices known collectively as nanotechnology, acting as intracellular prostheses, could enable coils of DNA to control technological systems remotely. Nanotechnologies, if realized as advertised, could function as prostheses for the tools of molecular genetics. They might obsolesce RNA molecules, amino acids, ribosomes, and the other machinery of protein synthesis. The overlooked dimension of nanotechnologies is their potential to translate genetic blueprints for cells, organs, and organisms directly into microprocessors, supercomputers, and space colonies—prosthetic extensions of cells, organs, and organisms.

Something superhuman is weaning itself of its dependence on human beings.

That thing is the local expression of the universe's ontogeny. The religious vision turns out to be merely clairvoyant, not transcendent—Heaven is the sky, a niche for weightless evolution.

NEXT > Exo-Psychology Revisited

The solarized feminized extraterrestrial carried by neotenous attendants.

Enter your search terms Submit search form   web starlarvae.org starlarvae.blogspot.com		Social Media = Social Mediocrity: rue or alse?

Text Copyright ©2004-2012 Advanced Theological Systems. All Rights Reserved.