RDH - Sugar-Resistant, Legless Superhumans

Sugar-Resistant, Legless Superhumans

February 23, 2007

Human beings have always been unsuited to live entirely in the natural world. And now that we've evolved to the point where we "chat" with each other and microwave our food, more than ever we are an anomaly on our own planet. For the purposes of the present discussion, I'll assume that the theory of evolution is somewhat true and that life forms change over time to meet the challenges of their environment, which itself is always in flux. (But, for what it's worth, if scientists like to imagine that we evolved from the lowest life forms, it seems equally likely that we arrived as a pair of alien infants stranded from the mother ship and that rather than wholesale evolution, we've gone through a series of minor, more recent adaptations to our new planet.*)

One thing is certain: we walk erect and, thanks to opposable thumbs and stereoscopic color vision that can make out hieroglyphics or scan the horizon for danger with equal aplomb, we have become masters of our environment.

Now What?

Part of our mastery has included, especially in the last century, the accelerated introduction of machines and chemicals that change the way we live. A full discussion of these innovations is far beyond the scope of the present forum; fortunately, they may be reduced to three broad categories, as follows:

1. The personalized all-terrain wheelchair. I'm talking about the automobile, especially the four-wheel-drive automobile with cup holders. These have begun to replace, especially in the United States, much of the work that the legs once did.

2. The audiovisual database device. Here I'm talking about the personal computer in all its forms—any one of which is primarily a form of entertainment and an aid to remote social interaction.

3. Mechanically processed, chemically enhanced foods, packaged individually for convenient consumption anywhere, anytime.

I've discussed the automobile at length elsewhere in this forum. Clearly, cars—especially the bigger ones—provide the vulnerable human form with a powerful carapace and vastly improved mobility, especially outdoors. There's every reason to expect that at some point all human beings will require them.

As for the second major innovation of the last hundred years, consider the obvious: most of you reading these words are looking at a screen (though you should know that my pages are "printer friendly"). The same superior human vision that has been so instrumental in the mastery of our environment and the recording and passing on of detailed information in the form of text has also proved to be the primary avenue through which we entertain ourselves and interact with other people. Add hearing and imagination into the mix, and you have in the human a creature who's fully capable of living within worlds created entirely of artificial images and sounds.

As for today's food, suffice it to say that it's everywhere (at least in the United States and, increasingly, in places like England and the more upscale neighborhoods of India) and that, unless you're picky or moderate, it's almost universally delicious. Best, it's invariably designed so that we can eat it in front of the computer or while we're driving.

Look on the bright side. It's not as scary as you might think. If we are simultaneously creating and adapting to an increasingly artificial environment, then, for one thing, we don't have to be all that concerned about the fate of the natural world.

The Road Ahead

Life as we know it, then, is somewhat different from life as Abe Lincoln knew it. Let's try and speculate about the ways in which we might be adapting to our new circumstances.

Perhaps the most obvious conclusion is that we humans are on our way to becoming giant-headed creatures with limitless insulin capacity and vestigial stumps where legs once were. But evolution doesn't happen overnight, and it seems doubtful, at least in the short run, that we will lose the use of our legs. After all, they are useful sometimes, especially in places like Manhattan. But it would be foolish to discount the possibility, especially as it is easy to imagine a society in the not too distant future that chooses to move everywhere in a sort of indoor-outdoor stair-climbing version of the Segway Human Transporter, one that mates seamlessly to larger vehicles similar to our own cars and light trucks.

I admit that the idea for larger heads is not all that original or scientific. And such a development would seem to be rather impractical or unlikely. For one thing, the human head is already so large that the women of our species can barely manage childbirth. And if some parts of the brain do grow larger as we become more adept at interacting with increasingly demanding audiovisual cues, this growth will more than likely be compensated for by a shrinking of those parts of the brain that help us to interact with the living environment and the creatures that inhabit it. Plus, soon we'll never have to remember anything at all. You know, like those discussions about who was in what film and when: we'll just look it up, on the spot, with whatever portable device we happen to have on hand. Perhaps we'll become a race of pinheads. But big heads are still a possibility, and if that's the way we're headed, we'll probably have to rely exclusively on clones to avoid the limitations of the relatively narrow human birth canal (or maybe women will adapt, developing wider pelvises and, if legs persist in human beings, stronger knees to support the more awkward angle from hip to floor . . .).

Perhaps the most likely evolutionary shift will center on the food issue—in particular, the need to develop a greater capacity for the breaking down of sugars. This change seems to be happening already, through the brutal process of natural selection. To put it another way, it seems almost certain that those who are prone to becoming obese and diabetic are the first victims of the need to adapt to a new environment. Everything is stacked against such people. If you're heavy and have type 2 diabetes, you are clearly not suited to thrive in the modern world. You need exercise that you don't get because you drive everywhere, and you can't resist all the delicious food. Time spent nearly motionless in front of a screen only exacerbates these problems. And the media, as everyone can see, is squarely on the side of the thin.

The timeline for any or all of these changes is likely to be shorter than we might think. After all, the rest of the world is blazing a trail in America's footsteps. India, for example, seems to get it—as the growth of the technology sector and the huge rise in obesity and diabetes would seem to indicate. They are almost certainly headed along the path toward the age of the new human. Russia, on the other hand, seems slated for extinction if they don't sort out their difficulties. It's one thing to be powerful for the sake of tradition and glory, and quite another to embrace the modern world. China, on the other hand, like India, certainly gets it. In fact, I suspect that the Chinese—with their easy mastery of every single facet of the twentieth century—may already have evolved long ago, through some sort of anticipatory biological mechanism. From the looks of it, they may simply be waiting for the rest of the world to rise to their level before they take center stage. All those skyscrapers going up so effortlessly since the 1980s have merely been their way of showing off.

So I guess that means that the majority of the non-Chinese among us are headed for the historical dustbin. In the meantime, we can enjoy the fact that our progeny, if they survive, will be better than we are: a race of intensely focused, sugar-resistant, legless superhumans.

*The timeline in the Bible—not to mention the somewhat fantastical concepts therein—would make more sense if in fact humans were not originally from Earth. Moreover, such a concept would explain the quixotic attempts to get to outer space: perhaps we are like adopted children, searching frantically for our birth parents.