Dolphins are Diplomatic

Dolphins, like me in a bar surrounded by large angry dudes, do there best to talk their way out of fights:

“Burst-pulsed sounds are used in the life of bottlenose dolphins to socialise and maintain their position in the social hierarchy in order to prevent physical conflict, and this also represents a significant energy saving,” Bruno Díaz, lead author of the study and a researcher at the BDRI, which he also manages, said. … According to the experts, the tonal whistle sounds (the most melodious ones) allow dolphins to stay in contact with each other (above all mothers and offspring), and to coordinate hunting strategies. The burst-pulsed sounds (which are more complex and varied than the whistles) are used “to avoid physical aggression in situations of high excitement, such as when they are competing for the same piece of food, for example,” explains Díaz.

Transhumanism Has Already Won?

Michael Anissimov makes one compelling case, starting with Pocahontas Dances with Ferngully in Space:

The mainstream has embraced transhumanism. A movie about using a brain-computer interface to become what is essentially a transhuman being, Avatar, is the highest-grossing box office hit of all time, pulling in $2.7 billion. This movie was made with hard-core science fiction enthusiasts in mind. About them, James Cameron said, “If I can just get ‘em in the damn theater, the film will act on them in the way it’s supposed to, in terms of taking them on an amazing journey and giving them this rich emotional experience.” A solid SL2 film, becoming the world’s #1 film of all time? It would be hard for the world to give transhumanism a firmer endorsement than that.

I’d qualify the description of Avatar as SL2 by noting that the “alien” culture is aboriginal American with some unique Gaia theory bioconnectivity thrown in for fun. It isn’t that alien, but his point is well made nonetheless. The best counterpoint I can make at the moment is that people don’t know they already support transhumanist ideas, because they compartmentalize their ethics: for example, twins are “normal,” but a cloned child is scary. But on the whole, Anissimov is right about the societal and economic impacts that will emerge as transhumanist technology progresses. Much like the way the rise of deism and atheism lead to the increase in religious fundamentalism, I suspect the bioconservative and technopessimist movements will become more entrenched and vocal as transhumanism becomes more and more mainstream.

A Twist On Anti-Aging

Transhumanists like to talk about immortality, anti-aging, and life-extension. These three ideas are often used interchangeably and for most debates, such as over issues of Malthusian catastrophes or existential boredom, they apply. But what if we only conquered the middle of the three; what if we could only slow the aging process, but not add years to our lives? What would the world look like? What would life be like?

Unlike life-extension or immortality, anti-aging is merely research into technology and medicine that would prevent our bodies from beginning to decay and shut down, albeit very slowly, after about the age of twenty-five. Let us presume that science discovers the trigger that starts the slow version of aging, but is unable to find the trigger that causes the  degradation we see in someone who is approaching the 80 year mark.  In short, my question is: what if there was no middle age? What if you turned 21 and then maintained that youth, vigor, and mental flexibility for the next fifty years? You would still know you were probably going to die around age 70 or 80. You would still know that you weren’t immortal or invulnerable. You would still die at approximately the average age for a human being in the developed world. The aging/longevity debate suddenly changes: Malthusian horrors are irrelevant; the “old guard” will still die off, leaving room for youthful ideas and change; mental problems of super long life (existential boredom, cynicism, etc) are gone; and “nursing home” time will remain what it is now.

So what you have is people living a normal life-span, but with none of the physical ailments of middle-age. Problems such as a risk of pregnancy complication or birth defects after the age of 35 would be gone in women, meaning that a couple could wait until they were in their late forties before having a family with no risk of complications. Age related diseases, particularly cancers, would be as likely for someone at the age of sixty as someone at the age of twenty. All the aches, pains, strains, creeks, wrinkles, gray hairs, saggy skin, and countless other tiny problems associated with aging either wouldn’t exist or would be dramatically slowed to the point that a sixty-five year old might look like your average thirty-year old today. This isn’t an issue of pure vanity, but simple biological signaling. Youth is often immediately visible, but what if it wasn’t?

The first, and perhaps weirdest thought that came to mind is how this would affect the dating scene. Whether or not it’s right, the prevailing trend is for men to date younger women – this trend works in both directions, with women often preferring older men and men often preferring younger women. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, endorsing this norm. In fact, I think it’s likely that a scenario in which age was not immediately visible would do wonders for balancing out the sexes. As it stands, a man can largely eschew serious relationships/ family in his early years to establish a career, earn wealth and reputation, and then begin a family with a woman significantly his junior without much controversy. There are myriad exceptions and reasons why this isn’t a great idea, of course, but my point is that a woman doing the same thing is almost inconceivable, both because of beauty norms (though it seems “cougars” are having a moment) and because older mothers simply have more biological complications. People wouldn’t have to focus so much on dating someone their “age” but instead someone their “maturity” and who is in the same life stage as they are.

Here is the kicker. In a society where everyone looks like a twenty-year old, vanity would become significantly less important. Instead of desperately trying to prevent aging or fight its effects, people could just do their thing. A twenty-year old who fell for a fifty-year old wouldn’t have to worry about people raising their eyebrows as they walked hand-in-hand down the street because no one could tell. Ever notice that, no matter how ridiculously a twenty-something dresses, they can usually pull it off, but not so for a sixty-something? Aging almost mandates we “mature” at a certain rate in a certain way. So what if we didn’t? Sex-drive wouldn’t flag, mental flexibility would remain high, health care costs would plummet and that would all be great, but on top of it one wouldn’t instantly be discriminated against for looking too old or too young. My little thought experiment exposes just how much truck visible-aging has with other forms of signaling, like wealth and fashion.

Even if we slowed aging a bit, say, stretching genuine youthful vigor and health into our forties, it would be a huge boon for society. There have got to be a hundred variables and possible effects this would have on society that I left out, but that’s what I’ve got at the moment.

Cultural Selection

Don’t you love it when something you’ve been harping on is supported by hard evidence? Biologists are discovering that culture is affecting evolution at the genetic level:

The best evidence available to Dr. Boyd and Dr. Richerson for culture being a selective force was the lactose tolerance found in many northern Europeans. Most people switch off the gene that digests the lactose in milk shortly after they are weaned, but in northern Europeans — the descendants of an ancient cattle-rearing culture that emerged in the region some 6,000 years ago — the gene is kept switched on in adulthood.

Lactose tolerance is now well recognized as a case in which a cultural practice — drinking raw milk — has caused an evolutionary change in the human genome. Presumably the extra nutrition was of such great advantage that adults able to digest milk left more surviving offspring, and the genetic change swept through the population.

This instance of gene-culture interaction turns out to be far from unique. In the last few years, biologists have been able to scan the whole human genome for the signatures of genes undergoing selection. Such a signature is formed when one version of a gene becomes more common than other versions because its owners are leaving more surviving offspring. From the evidence of the scans, up to 10 percent of the genome — some 2,000 genes — shows signs of being under selective pressure.

And the working definition of “culture” in this article is “broadly defined as any learned behavior, including technology.”

Dating While Racist

Robin Hanson, as is his wont, finds a third-rail and grabs it with both hands. I’m posting most of it because it is hard to take any one of these paragraphs out of context:

So dating is our last refuge of overt racism because … preferring people based on race isn’t racism if its for dating, especially if minorities do it?!

Of course its racism, if anything is.  But is it good racism?  The obvious reason to allow mate racism is that people better enjoy mating when they better like their mates, and people think they care about the race of their mates.  But this same reason suggests allowing racism by firms, schools, and clubs.  Firms are full of people, including employees, customers, suppliers, and investors, any of which might care about the race of folks they must deal, mingle, associate, etc. with.  At schools, the teachers, students, and ultimate employers of those students may also care about race.

Yes people may be mistaken about how much they care about the race of their associates, and perhaps this justifies government policies forbidding overt racism at firms, schools, or clubs.  But why doesn’t this apply just as well to mating?  Sure it is impossible to legislate away all racism in dating, but the same is true for hiring etc.  Why don’t we at least forbid overt mating racism, such as race-based searches?  We could even collect stats on the race of folks that people contact at dating sites, just as we check now on rates rates in hiring at firms, etc.

One explanation is that we naively think that imposing rules on firms only hurts those abstract entities, not the people associated with them.  Or we think such rules only hurt investors and managers, who we don’t care about.   Perhaps we only dislike racism that changes incomes, not happiness — yet mates often change income a lot.  Another explanation is that we only don’t care about racism in the “personal” sphere, though this just changes the question to what exactly is “personal” and why do we care differently about such things.  What do you think?

This phenomenon has always troubled me. It is far to complex a topic to try to answer Hanson’s question in a blog post, but if I had to try, I would guess that it is a result of not race, but culture built around race. That word “ethnicity” is an effort to get at that idea. The debate over Obama’s “whiteness” or “blackness” was not about his race, it was about his ethnicity. I suspect that the issues Hanson is exploring here are those of ethnicity, where culture maps so closely onto race that what appears to be racism is, in fact, ethnic identities that have a difficult time relating to one another. As dating is so personal and the dating pool is so vast, we are attracted to similar ethnic groups, because that sets up foundational similarities on which a relationship can be built. Whether or not that assumption is correct is another issue entirely. Clearly, this deserves a lot more thought.

Animal Cultures

Gwen at Sociological Images does a quick survey of yet another place where humans and non-human animals seem to have a brightline but do not: culture.

Ideas in the Rear View

Richard Eskow has a great post up on IEET about the Singularity Summit and the hurdles still faced by the transhumanists.

Objects in the rear-view mirror—those artifacts of human history that may seem archaic to some in the Transhumanist community—are likely to be sources of substantial public resistance. The artifacts in question include religion, patriotism, attachment to old family structures, and the other quotidian pleasures of many people’s lives. Confronting those artifacts with derision will not be an effective strategy for selling the enhancement vision. Even relatively simple “enhancements” like birth control and other reproductive technologies have been met with a firestorm of religiously-based resistance. In fact, this country has actually moved backwards from the widespread acceptance these techniques enjoyed had in the 1970s.

That fact was brought home for me when I was researching Spider-Man as an example of what I call “zero-sum” enhancement characters from religion, legend, and popular culture. (“Zero-sum” figures are those who receive special talents or gifts, but pay an equivalent price in other parts of their lives to preserve the balance of nature. Think Icarus, Iron Man, or Dorian Gray.) I learned that Marvel Comics released a pamphlet for Planned Parenthood in the 70s in which Spider-Man explains why teenagers should not get pregnant and explaining the services available to them. If Marvel did that today they’d face a nationwide boycott—so much so that there’s little chance they would even try.

I agree. The threat of old social norms and institutions is precisely why I focus on critical theory and gender studies as much as I do. The battles already being fought by feminists, liberaltarians, and progressives are indicative of the enormous power of entrenched culture. I agree it’s going to take a lot of work, but the recent sobriety and mainstreaming of the transhumanist/ human-enhancement philosophies is an extremely good sign. More and more discussions are shifting from “what might be” and “what if” to questions of rights, autonomy, personhood, justice, and self. I, for one, am excited.

["Objects in Mirror are Closer than They Appear" at IEET]