Our assumptions and biases about knowledge creation are interwoven with our experiences, our interpretations of those experiences, and our identification with the experiences and interpretations. Patterns emerge and we craft a self through the mosaic and soon that mosaic can stand in for our self. When that mosaic of experience and interpretation is cultivated through authority and the authority of our own experience and sense of self, we will extend our sense of authority into the realm of that which we already know. In this we are setting up a subtle preoccupation with what we know and with the familiar way we arrive at knowledge while simultaneously we derive a prejudice against what we do not know and also any unknown means to cultivate the known.

For example, pretend I am a teacher with a PhD, many people have applauded my research and I publish books, give famous lectures and have tenure at a prestigious school. I feel confident in my work and consider myself to be an authority in my field. A student comes along who does not know me and takes my class for the first time. She questions my logic and says my class is a bore. She tells me my exams do not test her knowledge of the subject but instead test her ability to repeat my version of the subject. She writes a paper calling into doubt the major premises of my field, to which I have contributed the most popularly followed lines of inquiry and she proposes an entirely new approach to the field and ends her paper with grand questions about the nature of intellectual thought. How do I approach this? In a typical situation I would question the student’s credibility as a student. I would consider her farfetched and someone who is incapable of understanding the subject matter. I would have trouble finding a way to give her a passing course score. She would be a problem to fix or to solve or to ignore. Never would I consider that perhaps she had a point. Why? I assumed the ascendency of my own knowledge based on my own sense of authority. Because the student operated outside my realm of knowledge and outside my sense of appropriateness in the acquisition of knowledge, I decided she was wrong. Invisible to me are my own assumptions of authority, including my assumption that authority has validity. Even though I have a wide set of experiences related to a branch of knowledge I am unable to see that those experiences are necessarily limited because I have only had a certain set of them, no matter how vaunted, and that knowledge itself is limited because it is always about what is already known. So I approach my student as if she is a problem instead of approaching her as a person with insight that may also be valid and should be explored. If we use something that is already known to approach what is new, how can we really approach it? The new will consistently be framed according to its relationship or lack of relationship with what has been established. And as has already been stated, what has been established is where authority has been placed, including our reverence for all the things we have already authorized.

Many of us operate in this field of inquiry, discovery and selfhood and it is apparent when we review our written forays into the realms of global problem solving discourse. So often we conclude. So often we have answers and set approaches to solving problems. So often we solicit recommendations for action. But rarely do we ponder over, except that which we have relegated to philosophy. In the realms of activity (politics, business, economics, education, health, environment, etc.) we theorize action, take action or meet to form a new activity. We say events and circumstances are too urgent to stop for too much thought, but in our haste, our actions themselves lead to further reasons to have to meet again to reorient ourselves. Our writing becomes a part of this process. We write in order to validate our next action and we guide that writing according to what we think that action should be. We rarely write to discover the appropriate terms upon which our action should be based. We rarely question the terms upon which our previous action has been based. We rarely inquire into our standards, we just try to find novel ways to meet them.

What if our grand questions about the world ended with, “I don’t know.” Would that harm us? Does not knowing have to be accompanied by feelings of panicked desperation? Must we think ourselves inert if we do not have answers? What if we started with I don’t know? What will we do with Palestine and Israel? I don’t know. What will we do about hunger and miseducation? I don’t know. How will we live peaceably, without war and conflict? I don’t know. Is not I don’t know a better place to start than our usual conclusions, ideals and ideas? How is referencing what has already happened and what has already been thought (and what has not worked) a correct way to address how to move forward from right now? Perhaps in the ground of not knowing we have more possibility to create something new. We can put aside our predispositions and knowledge and simply give matters our attention. Indeed this may take more time. Or it may take no time at all. But the lunches, dinners, breakfasts, meetings, flights and arrangements accompanying our usual fast way of gathering together, sometimes for several days or weeks, to swiftly arrive at answers also takes time and over the course of years has substantially little to show as far as solving our grand world problems. It is obvious we don’t know, by the overall state of global affairs, so saying we don’t ought not be too challenging.

Let us all stop pretending. The urge to be right and definitive is ingrained into ourselves. We adore confidence and conclusions, especially if it is accompanied by a new technology and somebody says the word science. We write long reports about everything we know and every state of being we think we should have including bullet points for things we can do to be better. But rarely do we write about the world as it actually exists right now and how we have been utterly incapable of doing anything fundamentally different in it. This is not pessimism. Saying we are optimistic and having positive thoughts is not a substitute for critical inquiry. We are not going to smile ourselves into a better world. And just because we are smiling does not mean we care.

Our writing reflects this. A tome of high sounding phrases, deferred promises and volumes of technical bureaucratic lexicon. To what end? Perhaps it is our desire to conclude that hampers us. Perhaps it is our desire to know. Perhaps it is our desire itself, or in operation with other facets of our personality. But certainly we are operating within a certain structure and we seem to be thus far unable to work ourselves beyond its limits. Maybe we can free ourselves with our writing. I am not suggesting this as a method or as an exclusive approach. But so often we come to know through the words that we read and too often it is in the realm of fiction only that we allow ourselves imagination, curiosity, the unknown. Let us introduce imagination into our non-fictive selves. When we seriously consider policy and law and action, can we remove ourselves from tradition? Can we start only with what is now? How else can we speak to the moment if not from the place it exists. Now is only informed by history if we are living in the past. This is not a call to replace an old ideology with a new one or to discount traditions which have lasted because they are just. This is simply a question about how we might write differently about the circumstances in the world burning for our attention. It is an offer to approach our writing about the world’s most serious matters from a point of doubt regarding our own understanding. It is a somewhat diffident rejection of conclusions and the way conclusions as construct have been organized into our lives as authority through the way we have been taught to write and express ourselves through writing, and finally to arrive at knowledge of ourselves and the world through what we write and what we have read. It is a question about how writing affects our thought and how our thought affects our world and how we remain ignorant of a process we have created ourselves and silently abide by.

(I feel an internal pressure to “wrap up” what I have written. But my intent was not to begin to reach a goal, an end. It was to explore a question. And for now that exploration is complete, although not in conclusion.)

In what could turn out to be a major breakthrough for the advancement of long-distance communications in space exploration, several problems are resolved — where if a civilization is eventually established on a star system many light years away, for example, such as on one of the recently discovered Goldilocks Zone super-Earths in the Gliese 667C star system, then communications back to people on Earth may after all be… instantaneous.

However, implications do not just stop there either. As recently reported in The Register [5], researchers in Israel at the University of Jerusalem, have established that quantum tangling can be used to send data across both TIME AND SPACE [6]. Their recent paper entitled ‘Entanglement Between Photons that have Never Coexisted’ [7] describes how photon-to-photon entanglement can be used to connect with photons in their past/future, opening up an understanding into how one may be able to engineer technology to not just communicate instantaneously across space — but across space-time.

Whilst in the past many have questioned what benefits have been gained in quantum physics research and in particular large research projects such as the LHC, it would seem that the field of quantum entanglement may be one of the big pay-offs. Whist it has yet to be categorically proven that quantum entanglement can be used as a communication channel, and the majority opinion dismisses it, one can expect much activity in quantum entanglement over the next decade. It may yet spearhead the next technological revolution.

[1] www.technologyreview.com/view/516636/physicists-discover-the…te-control
[2] Quantum Teleportation of Dynamics http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.0319
[3] Bounding the speed of ‘spooky action at a distance’ http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.0614
[4] http://www.universetoday.com/103131/three-potentially-habita…iese-667c/
[5] The Register — Biting the hand that feeds IT — http://www.theregister.co.uk/
[6] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/03/quantum_boffins_get_spooky_with_time/
[7] Entanglement Between Photons that have Never Coexisted http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.4191

Originally posted via The Advanced Apes

Through my writings I have tried to communicate ideas related to how unique our intelligence is and how it is continuing to evolve. Intelligence is the most bizarre of biological adaptations. It appears to be an adaptation of infinite reach. Whereas organisms can only be so fast and efficient when it comes to running, swimming, flying, or any other evolved skill; it appears as though the same finite limits are not applicable to intelligence.

What does this mean for our lives in the 21st century?

First, we must be prepared to accept that the 21st century will not be anything like the 20th. All too often I encounter people who extrapolate expected change for the 21st century that mirrors the pace of change humanity experienced in the 20th. This will simply not be the case. Just as cosmologists are well aware of the bizarre increased acceleration of the expansion of the universe; so evolutionary theorists are well aware of the increased pace of techno-cultural change. This acceleration shows no signs of slowing down; and few models that incorporate technological evolution predict that it will.

The result of this increased pace of change will likely not just be quantitative. The change will be qualitative as well. This means that communication and transportation capabilities will not just become faster. They will become meaningfully different in a way that would be difficult for contemporary humans to understand. And it is in the strange world of qualitative evolutionary change that I will focus on two major processes currently predicted to occur by most futurists.

Qualitative evolutionary change produces interesting differences in experience. Often times this change is referred to as a “metasystem transition”. A metasystem transition occurs when a group of subsystems coordinate their goals and intents in order to solve more problems than the constituent systems. There have been a few notable metasystem transitions in the history of biological evolution:

• Transition from non-life to life
• Transition from single-celled life to multi-celled life
• Transition from decentralized nervous system to centralized brains
• Transition from communication to complex language and self-awareness

All these transitions share the characteristics described of subsystems coordinating to form a larger system that solve more problems than they could do individually. All transitions increased the rate of change in the universe (i.e., reduction of entropy production). The qualitative nature of the change is important to understand, and may best be explored through a thought experiment.

Imagine you are a single-celled organism on the early Earth. You exist within a planetary network of single-celled life of considerable variety, all adapted to different primordial chemical niches. This has been the nature of the planet for well over 2 billion years. Then, some single-cells start to accumulate in denser and denser agglomerations. One of the cells comes up to you and says:

I think we are merging together. I think the remainder of our days will be spent in some larger system that we can’t really conceive. We will each become adapted for a different specific purpose to aid the new higher collective.

Surely that cell would be seen as deranged. Yet, as the agglomerations of single-cells became denser, formerly autonomous individual cells start to rely more and more on each other to exploit previously unattainable resources. As the process accelerates this integrated network forms something novel, and more complex than had previously ever existed: the first multicellular organisms.

The difference between living as an autonomous single-cell is not just quantitative (i.e., being able to exploit more resources) but also qualitative (i.e., shift from complete autonomy to being one small part of an integrated whole). Such a shift is difficult to conceive of before it actually becomes a new normative layer of complexity within the universe.

Another example of such a transition that may require less imagination is the transition to complex language and self-awareness. Language is certainly the most important phenomena that separates our species from the rest of the biosphere. It allows us to engage in a new evolution, technocultural evolution, which is essentially a new normative layer of complexity in the universe as well. For this transition, the qualitative leap is also important to understand. If you were an australopithecine, your mode of communication would not necessarily be that much more efficient than that of any modern day great ape. Like all other organisms, your mind would be essentially isolated. Your deepest thoughts, feelings, and emotions could not fully be expressed and understood by other minds within your species. Furthermore, an entire range of thought would be completely unimaginable to you. Anything abstract would not be communicable. You could communicate that you were hungry; but you could not communicate about what you thought of particular foods (for example). Language changed all that; it unleashed a new thought frontier. Not only was it now possible to exchange ideas at a faster rate, but the range of ideas that could be thought of, also increased.

And so after that digression we come to the main point: the metasystem transition of the 21st century. What will it be? There are two dominant, non-mutually exclusive, frameworks for imagining this transition: technological singularity and the global brain.

The technological singularity is essentially a point in time when the actual agent of techno-cultural change; itself changes. At the moment the modern human mind is the agent of change. But artificial intelligence is likely to emerge this century. And building a truly artificial intelligence may be the last machine we (i.e., biological humans) invent.

The second framework is the global brain. The global brain is the idea that a collective planetary intelligence is emerging from the Internet, created by increasingly dense information pathways. This would essentially give the Earth an actual sensing centralized nervous system, and its evolution would mirror, in a sense, the evolution of the brain in organisms, and the development of higher-level consciousness in modern humans.

In a sense, both processes could be seen as the phenomena that will continue to enable trends identified by global brain theorist Francis Heylighen:

The flows of matter, energy, and information that circulate across the globe become ever larger, faster and broader in reach, thanks to increasingly powerful technologies for transport and communication, which open up ever-larger markets and forums for the exchange of goods and services.

Some view the technological singularity and global brain as competing futurist hypotheses. However, I see them as deeply symbiotic phenomena. If the metaphor of a global brain is apt, at the moment the internet forms a type of primitive and passive intelligence. However, as the internet starts to form an ever greater role in human life, and as all human minds gravitate towards communicating and interacting in this medium, the internet should start to become an intelligent mediator of human interaction. Heylighen explains how this should be achieved:

the intelligent web draws on the experience and knowledge of its users collectively, as externalized in the “trace” of preferences that they leave on the paths they have traveled.

This is essentially how the brain organizes itself, by recognizing the shapes, emotions, and movements of individual neurons, and then connecting them to communicate a “global picture”, or an individual consciousness.

The technological singularity naturally fits within this evolution. The biological human brain can only connect so deeply with the Internet. We must externalize our experience with the Internet in (increasingly small) devices like laptops, smart phones, etc. However, artificial intelligence and biological intelligence enhanced with nanotechnology could form quite a deeper connection with the Internet. Such a development could, in theory, create an all-encompassing information processing system. Our minds (largely “artificial”) would form the neurons of the system, but a decentralized order would emerge from these dynamic interactions. This would be quite analogous to the way higher-level complexity has emerged in the past.

So what does this mean for you? Well many futurists debate the likely timing of this transition, but there is currently a median convergence prediction of between 2040–2050. As we approach this era we should suspect many fundamental things about our current institutions to change profoundly. There will also be several new ethical issues that arise, including issues of individual privacy, and government and corporate control. All issues that deserve a separate post.

Fundamentally this also means that your consciousness and your nature will change considerably throughout this century. The thought my sound bizarre and even frightening, but only if you believe that human intelligence and nature are static and unchanging. The reality is that human intelligence and nature are an ever evolving process. The only difference in this transition is that you will actually be conscious of the evolution itself.

Consciousness has never experienced a metasystem transition (since the last metasystem transition was towards higher-level consciousness!). So in a sense, a post-human world can still include your consciousness. It will just be a new and different consciousness. I think it is best to think about it as the emergence of something new and more complex, as opposed to the death or end of something. For the first time, evolution will have woken up.

Spread the word!

P.S. You can interact with the author of the book at https://www.facebook.com/groups/thehumanracetothefuture/

Amber Alert for Human Freedom

By Michael Lee

We’re witnessing increased violations of the air space of sovereign nations by drones and of the privacy of individuals by a variety of surveillance and monitoring technologies. And, as Al Gore pointed out in his latest book, The Future, the quality of democracy has been degraded in our times, largely as a result of the role of big money lobby groups influencing public policy to the exclusion of “citizen power”.  Ironically, deep below the surface of the high tech, liberating mobile-digital world evolving in front of our bedazzled eyes, our Western concept of freedom is undergoing its sternest test since the end of the Cold War.

For behind the glittering success of the communications revolution powered by internet and mobile telephony, a battle is being waged for global control of the means of information. In the eyes of owners of the digital  means of information, whether governments or corporations, the privacy of the individual has been subordinated to the value and leverage of digital content.

Regarding the threat to our privacy represented by these developments, on a scale from low (green) to severe (red)[1], I’d suggest we’ve already reached an amber (orange) alert, the second highest level. Let’s assess intrusions into air space and into our privacy.

• Edward Snowdon has made disclosures about a state surveillance program called PRISM. It’s a clandestine national security electronic surveillance program which has been operated by the National Security Agency (NSA) since 2007.[2] It appears to empower the government to take customer information from telecommunications companies like Verizon and internet giants like Google and Facebook, enabling the monitoring of phone calls and emails of private citizens. Some senior EU officials say they’re shocked by these reports of state spying on private persons as well as by the bugging of EU offices in Brussels and Washington DC. The PRISM program is clearly intrusive. And it’s endorsed by a democratically elected liberal president.
• Drones are being used extensively on both domestic and foreign soil under Obama’s presidency, whether reconnaissance drones or ones armed with missiles and bombs. They’re operated by the US Air Force and the CIA. FBI Director Robert Mueller has recently admitted in public that drones have been used domestically for surveillance of some American citizens.[3] (My jaw literally dropped when I saw him matter-of-factually confirm this inappropriate Big Brother-style deployment of military technology, however “targeted”.)
• Google Street View and satellite photography peep inside the perimeters of people’s homes to expose them to unsolicited public and governmental viewing. Without permission, Street View cameras take photos from an elevated position, overlooking hedges and walls specifically erected to preclude public viewing of some areas of private homes. It seems homes and back gardens are now under the spotlight of Google and the government as they attempt to digitally map out our lives as comprehensively as they can. This is virtual trespassing into the world’s residential areas.[4] It’s an Orwellian practice. To read Google’s viewpoint see http://www.google.com/help/maps/streetview/privacy.html[5]

• Physical movements of citizens in cities and towns are under increasing surveillance by a growing number of CCTV cameras as well as GPS devices in mobile phones.
• Financial transactions are all tracked by card associations, networks and financial institutions. In addition, card schemes are aggressively attempting to inaugurate the cashless society in order to obliterate the anonymity and privacy afforded by cash payments, while card and bank details on customer databases are all-too frequently hacked and stolen by fraudsters and identity thieves.
• Digital profiles of individuals are routinely compiled by both corporations and governments for marketing and monitoring purposes.
• Social media broadcast on their global platforms personal (and sometimes intimate) photos and comments, unwittingly exposing the material to unsolicited viewing by undesirable persons such as sexual predators and online bullies, even though this is an unintended consequence since the material was voluntarily submitted by the social media users.

In addition to these forms of surveillance of the individual and populations, there’s also the ingrained practices of thought control and groupthink often operational in academia and in the media. As an example, political correctness has created an atmosphere of reverse intolerance, whereby primarily conservative thinkers, and billions of religious persons, who may believe in traditional values frowned upon by the advocates of correctness, are subjected to the very name-calling and insults I assumed political correctness would be keen to eradicate if it aspired at all to be even-handed.[6] True scientific thinking, by contrast, creates an ideology-neutral atmosphere for healthy, open-minded intellectual discussion and efficient production of knowledge.

In sum, the following aspects of an individual’s life are being tracked, mapped and monitored: his/her private home, physical whereabouts, transactions, data, personal communications, thoughts and values. Taken together, all these kinds of intrusion into private lives of individuals and populations add up to total surveillance. That equates to a subtle, but comprehensive, assault on privacy.

 Figure 1 shows technologies monitoring, mapping and policing our physical world: drones used for assassinations and for surveillance, Google videos of residential areas, satellite photos of our homes and gardens and CCTV cameras recording our movements in cities and on urban premises. Digital profiles of our homes and lives are assembled, which can be used for both marketing and surveillance, usually without our consent. On top of that, as already mentioned, there’s increased thought control in education and in the media under the regime of correctness.

What does this brave new world of total surveillance of the individual mean for human freedom? Are we all destined to become unwitting Trumans in a reality show written, directed and produced by powerful figures in corporations and governments?

Figure 2: Poster for the Truman Show

In the global struggle to control the means of information, we’re being offered a deal, a Faustian pact for the digital age. We’re being asked to exchange our claim to privacy for a kind of remotely monitored freedom and security. While there are undoubtedly some public benefits arising from this increased surveillance, such as fraud prevention in financial services and provision of CCTV evidence for crimes and misdemeanours, even a cursory cost-to-benefit analysis shows that we’re already paying too high a price for increased security measured against the diminishment of our freedom.

As long as we hand over our basic privacy to our digital masters, and don’t make a stink like Edward Snowdon, we’ll be left in peace. Until we start to think and believe differently from the mainstream, that is. Then individuals can be targeted with soft power like spying software and phone taps, with medium power like vilification in the media or, in exceptional cases, with hard power from a military drone which can blow human targets up in their vehicles in any public place on earth with pinpoint accuracy.

So we can be free as long as Google street cars and satellite cameras can film our back yards and driveways, as long as drones can violate the air space above us, as long as our emails and phone conversations can be tapped, as long as we conform to political correctness.

In essence, the freedom on offer for our digital age is being stripped of human privacy and of its distinctly human character of independence.  But freedom without privacy and independence lacks real substance. Freedom to think and to believe differently is being sucked out of public life. Freedom is becoming an empty shell.

I don’t believe human populations are going to continue to buy this false offer of compromised freedom or to put up forever with surveillance “creep” by the owners of the global means of information. This kind of conformist, highly monitored, impersonal freedom sucks.

As today’s digital masters continue their conquest of the physical world,  trying to map it out, digitize it and control it, we notice there’s no underlying social contract between the current powers-that-be and the populations of nations. That’s because the digital world is largely unregulated and borderless, whereas social contracts (such as democracy), which govern politics and society in the real world, go back to a previous era dominated by largely democratic nation-states.

But there’s no social contract for the Information Age. There’s no social contract for Internet. Nothing has been negotiated between population groups and the digital powers of corporations and governments. This represents a dangerous global power vacuum. No wonder our human freedom is dissipating. And all the while, technology is accelerating faster than both knowledge accumulation and the evolution of governance.

It’s the creeping totality of surveillance and the combined use of intrusive technologies which is menacing, not Google Street View on its own, or drone attacks, or the tracking of financial transactions, or the use of CCTV on street corners. Absent a social contract for the digital age, these technologies and practices are turning us into the unfree subjects of a new commercially driven world we can call Globurbia.

Privacy is dying all around us. Independence of thought is shrinking. Democracy is being diluted and undermined by abuses of virtually unbridled power. Information and data are being aggregated and bureaucratized. Nothing is private, nothing is sacred. We’re in the thrall of the owners of the means of information, the new masters of society. It’s not so much a police state as a soul-less vacuum.

If we’re not vigilant, we’ll all end up, within this generation, living in a conformist, militarized, paranoid, drone-policed society of powerless, remotely monitored, robotic individuals, spiritually drugged by consumerism and mentally bullied by correctness.

Conclusions

We urgently need a new international political protocol for the digital age which promotes the protection of privacy, freedom and independent thinking. We need to embrace an ideology-neutral scientific ethos for solving common human and social problems.

The next steps for halting surveillance creep in order to protect human freedom would be for Google to permanently ban Street View cars from all residential areas, for the current  imperialistic drone policy[7] to be completely overhauled, for a new Digital Age political protocol to be developed and for global scientific progress, guaranteeing freedom and independence of thought, to be embraced.

Michael Lee’s book Knowing our Future – the startling case for futurology is available at the publisher http://www.infideas.com/pages/store/products/ec_view.asp?PID=1804 or on Amazon.com.

Acknowledgements & websites

Bergen, P & Braun, M. Drone. September 19, 2012. Drone is Obama’s weapon of choice.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/05/opinion/bergen-obama-drone

Center for Civilians in Conflict. http://civiliansinconflict.org

Clarke, R. (Original of 15 August 1997, latest revs. 16 September 1999, 8 December 2005, 7 August 2006). Introduction to Dataveillance and Information Privacy, and Definitions of Terms.   http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/Intro.html

Gallagher, R. Separating fact from fiction in NSA surveillance scandal. http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/sunday-commentary/20130628…candal.ece

Gore, A.  2013. The Future. New York: Random House Publishing Group.

http://www.algore.com

Surveillance Studies Network (SSN). 2006. A Report on the Surveillance Society: Summary Report

http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/index

Surveillance & Society — http://www.surveillance-studies.net/

Wikipedia — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_attacks_in_Pakistan

Too fit for its own good

In 1874, a swarm of Rocky Mountain Locusts descended on the American midwest. They covered the sky and shadowed the earth underneath for hundreds of miles. A single cloud was larger than the state of California. Once on the ground, they ate everything that was green, leaving behind a dust bowl. The earth was thick with egg masses, ready to renew the plague the following year.

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote in her childhood memoir (in the third person)

Huge brown grasshoppers were hitting the ground all around her, hitting her head and her face and her arms. They came thudding down like hail. The cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping, whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm. Laura tried to beat them off. Their claws clung to her skin and her dress. They looked at her with bulging eyes, turning their heads this way and that. Mary ran screaming into the house. Grasshoppers covered the ground, there was not one bare bit to step on. Laura had to step on grasshoppers and they smashed squirming and slimy under her feet.

The locusts returned in several more seasons, but the last reported sighting of a Rocky Mountain locust was in 1902. There are preserved specimens in museums and laboratories today, but no living locusts. Entomologists interested in the locust’s rise and fall travel to the glaciers of Wyoming, mining hundred-year-old ice for carcasses that they might study.

Where did they go?  The Rocky Mountain Locust drove itself to extinction by overshooting its sustainable population.

Every animal species is part of a food web, and depends on an ecosystem to survive. If the ecosystem collapse, it takes down every species and every individual with it. Because of their mobility, the locusts were able to devastate many ecosystems, denuding one landscape, then flying hundreds of miles to deposit their children in a fresh location.  Animals that can’t fly become victims of their own greed much more quickly than the locust. If the lions killed every gazelle on the Serengeti, how long would it be before the lions were gone, too?

Evolution of Individuals and Groups

How would an evolutionary biologist describe this situation? Were the locusts too fit for their own good? To capture this story, you have to distinguish between individual fitness and collective fitness. Individually, these locusts were super-competitors. Collectively, they were a circular firing squad.  The science of individual fitness and collective fitness is called Multi-level Selection Theory, and it has been spearheaded by David S Wilson of Binghamton University, based on theoretical foundations by George Price.  MLS is regarded with suspicion by most evolutionary biologists, but embraced by a minority as sound science.

Selfish organisms that consume as much of the available food species as possible may thrive for a time. They may crowd out other individuals of the same species that compete less aggressively.  But as soon as their kind grows to be the majority, they are doomed – they wipe out the food source on which their children depend.

Animals are evolved to be “prudent predators”†.  Species that have exploited their food sources too aggressively, or that have reproduced too fast have become extinct in a series of local population crashes.  These extinctions have been a potent force of natural selection, counterbalancing the better-known selective pressure toward ever faster and more prolific reproduction.

How did Evolutionary Theory go Wrong?

This is an idea that has common-sense appeal to anyone who thinks logically and practically about evolutionary science. In order not to to appreciate this idea, you need years of training in the mathematical science of evolutionary genetics. Evolutionary genetics is an axiomatic framework, built up logically from postulates that sound reasonable, but the conclusions to which they lead are deeply at odds with the biological world we see. This is the “selfish gene” theory that says all cooperation in nature is a sort of illusion, based on a gene’s tendency to encourage behaviors that promote the welfare of other copies of the same gene in closely-related individuals.

The “selfish gene” is an idea that should have been rejected long ago, as absurd on its face. Yes, there is plenty of selfishness and aggression in nature.  But nature is also rich with examples of cooperation between unrelated individuals, and even cooperation across species lines, which is called “co-evolution”.  Species become intimately adapted to depend on tiny details of the other’s shape or habits or chemistry.  Examples of this are everywhere, from the bacteria in your gut to the flowers and the honeybees.  In the same way, predators and their prey (I’m using this word to include plant as well as animal food sources) adapt to be able to co-exist for the long haul.  It is obvious to every naturalist that there is a temperance in nature’s communities, that when ecosystems are out of balance they don’t last very long.

It makes good scientific sense that extinctions from overpopulation are a powerful evolutionary force, and it is part of Darwin’s legacy as well. Natural selection is more than merely a race among individuals to reproduce the fastest. The very word “fitness” came from an ability to fit well into the life of the local community.

But beginning some forty years after Darwin’s death, mathematical thinking has led the evolutionary theorists astray. They have forgotten the first principle of science, which is that every theory must be validated by comparing predictions from the theory to the world we see around us. Predictions of the selfish gene theory work well in the genetics lab, but as a description of nature, they fail spectacularly.

Understanding Aging based on Multi-level Selection

If we are willing to look past the “selfish gene” and embrace the science of multi-level selection, we can understand aging as a tribute paid by the individual in support of the ecosystem.  If it weren’t for aging, the only way that individuals would die would be by starvation, by diseases, and by predation.  All three of these tend to be “clumpy” – that is to say that either no one is dying or everyone is dying at once. Until food species are exhausted, there is no starvation; but then there is a famine, and everyone dies at once. If a disease strikes a community in which everyone is at the peak of their immunological fitness, then either everyone can fend it off, or else everyone dies in an epidemic.  And without aging, even death by predation would be very clumpy.  Many large predators are just fast enough to catch the aging, crippled prey individuals.  If this were not so, then either all the prey would be vulnerable to predators, or none of them would be.  There could be no lasting balance between predators and prey.

Aging helps to level the death rate in good times and bad. Without aging, horde dynamics would prevail, as deaths would occur primarily in famines and epidemics. Population would swing wildly up and down. With aging comes the possibility of predictable life spans and death rates that don’t alternately soar and plummet.  Ecosystems can have some stability and some persistence.

Aging is plastic, providing further support for ecosystem stability

This would be true even if aging operated on a fixed schedule; but natural selection has created an adaptive aging clock, which further enhances the stabilizing effect. When there is a famine and many animals are dying of starvation, the death rate from old age is down, because of the Caloric Restriction effect.  In times of famine and other environmental stress, the death rate from aging actually takes a vacation, because animals become hardier and age more slowly.

When we ask “Why does an animal live longer when it is starving?” the answer is, of course, that the ability to last out a famine and re-seed the population when food once again becomes plentiful provides a great selective advantage.  This may sound like it is an adaptation for individual survival, consistent with the selfish gene.  But we might ask the same question conversely: “Why does an animal have a shorter life span when there is plenty to eat?” When we look at it this way, it is clear that tying aging to food cannot  be explained in terms of the selfish gene.  In order to be able to live longer under conditions of starvation, animals must be genetically programmed to hold some fitness in reserve when they have plenty to eat, and this offers an advantage only to the community, not to the individual.

Hormesis is an important clue concerning the evolutionary meaning of aging. This word refers to the fact that when an individual is in a challenging environment, its metabolism doesn’t just compensate to mitigate the damage, but it overcompensates. It becomes so much stronger that it lives longer with challenge than without. The best-known example is that people (and animals) live longer when they’re underfed than when they’re overfed. We also know that exercise tends to increase our life expectancy, despite the fact that exercise generates copious free radicals (ROS) that ought to be pro-aging in their effect.

Without aging, it is difficult for nature to put together a stable ecosystem. Populations are either rising exponentially or collapsing to zero. With aging, it becomes possible to balance birth and death rates, and population growth and subsequent crashes are tamed sufficiently that ecosystems may persist.  This is the evolutionary meaning of aging:  Aging is a group-selected adaptation for the purpose of damping the wild swings in death rate to which natural populations are prone.  Aging helps to make possible stable ecosystems.

___________

“ The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” — R P Feynman (from the Galileo Symposium, 1964)

† Here “predator” can mean herbivore as well as carnivore.  This is the common usage in ecology.

This one-of-a-kind collection features ten debates that originated at ImmortalLife.info, plus 36 articles, essays and diatribes by many of IL’s contributors, on topics from nutrition to mind-filing, from teleomeres to “Deathism”, from libertarian life-extending suggestions to religion’s role in RLE to immortalism as a human rights issue.

The book is illustrated with famous paintings on the subject of aging and death, by artists such as Goya, Picasso, Cezanne, Dali, and numerous others.

The book was designed by Wendy Stolyarov; edited by Hank Pellissier; published by the Center for Transhumanity. This edited volume is the first in a series of quarterly anthologies planned by Immortal Life

Find it on Amazon HERE and on Smashwords HERE

This Immortal Life Anthology includes essays, articles, rants and debates by and between some of the leading voices in Immortalism, Radical Life-Extension, Superlongevity and Anti-Aging Medicine.

A (Partial) List of the Debaters & Essay Contributors:

Martine Rothblatt Ph.D, MBA, J.D. — inventor of satellite radio, founder of Sirius XM and founder of the Terasem Movement, which promotes technological immortality. Dr. Rothblatt is the author of books on gender freedom (Apartheid of Sex, 1995), genomics (Unzipped Genes, 1997) and xenotransplantation (Your Life or Mine, 2003).

Marios Kyriazis MD, MSc, MIBiol, CBiol. founded the British Longevity Society, was the first to address the free-radical theory of aging in a formal mainstream UK medical journal, has authored dozens of books on life-extension and has discussed indefinite longevity in 700 articles, lectures and media appearances globally.

Maria Konovalenko is a molecular biophysicist and the program coordinator for the Science for Life Extension Foundation. She earned her M.Sc. degree in Molecular Biological Physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. She is a co-founder of the International Longevity Alliance.

Jason Xu is the director of Longevity Party China and Longevity Party Taiwan, and he was an intern at SENS.

Mike Perry, PhD. has worked for Alcor since 1989 as Care Services Manager. He has authored or contributed to the automated cooldown and perfusion modeling programs. He is a regular contributor to Alcor newsletters. He has been a member of Alcor since 1984.

David A. Kekich, Founder, President & C.E.O Maximum Life Extension Foundation, works to raise funds for life-extension research. He serves as a Board Member of the American Aging Association, Life Extension Buyers’ Club and Alcor Life Extension Foundation Patient Care Trust Fund. He authored Smart, Strong and Sexy at 100?, a how-to book for extreme life extension.

Eric Schulke is the founder of the Movement for Indefinite Life Extension (MILE). He was a Director, Teams Coordinator and ran Marketing & Outreach at the Immortality Institute, now known as Longecity, for 4 years. He is the Co-Managing Director of Immortal Life.

Hank Pellissier is the Founder & Senior Editor of ImmortaLife.info. Previously, he was the founder/director of Transhumanity.net. Before that, he was Managing Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology (ieet.org). He’s written over 120 futurist articles for IEET, Hplusmagazine.com, Transhumanity.net, ImmortalLife.info and the World Future Society.

Franco Cortese is on the Advisory Board for Lifeboat Foundation on their Scientific Advisory Board (Life-Extension Sub-Board) and their Futurism Board. He is the Co-Managing Director alongside of Immortal Life and a Staff Editor for Transhumanity. He has written over 40 futurist articles and essays for H+ Magazine, The Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies, Immortal Life, Transhumanity and The Rational Argumentator.

Gennady Stolyarov II is a Staff Editor for Transhumanity, Contributor to Enter Stage Right, Le Quebecois Libre, Rebirth of Reason, Ludwig von Mises Institute, Senior Writer for The Liberal Institute, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator.

Brandon King is Co-Director of the United States Longevity Party.

Khannea Suntzu is a transhumanist and virtual activist, and has been covered in articles in Le Monde, CGW and Forbes.

Teresa Belcher is an author, blogger, Buddhist, consultant for anti-aging, life extension, healthy life style and happiness, and owner of Anti-Aging Insights.

Dick Pelletier is a weekly columnist who writes about future science and technologies for numerous publications.

Joern Pallensen has written articles for Transhumanity and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

CONTENTS:

Editor’s Introduction

DEBATES

1. In The Future, With Immortality, Will There Still Be Children?

2. Will Religions promising “Heaven” just Vanish, when Immortality on Earth is attained?

3. In the Future when Humans are Immortal — what will happen to Marriage?

4. Will Immortality Change Prison Sentences? Will Execution and Life-Behind-Bars be… Too Sadistic?

5. Will Government Funding End Death, or will it be Attained by Private Investment?

6. Will “Meatbag” Bodies ever be Immortal? Is “Cyborgization” the only Logical Path?

7. When Immortality is Attained, will People be More — or Less — Interested in Sex?

8. Should Foes of Immortality be Ridiculed as “Deathists” and “Suicidalists”?

9. What’s the Best Strategy to Achieve Indefinite Life Extension?

ESSAYS

1. Maria Konovalenko:

I am an “Aging Fighter” Because Life is the Main Human Right, Demand, and Desire

2. Mike Perry:

Deconstructing Deathism — Answering Objections to Immortality

3. David A. Kekich:

How Old Are You Now?

4. David A. Kekich:

Live Long… and the World Prospers

5. David A. Kekich:

107,000,000,000 — what does this number signify?

6. Franco Cortese:

Religion vs. Radical Longevity: Belief in Heaven is the Biggest Barrier to Eternal Life?!

7. Dick Pelletier:

Stem Cells and Bioprinters Take Aim at Heart Disease, Cancer, Aging

8. Dick Pelletier:

Nanotech to Eliminate Disease, Old Age; Even Poverty

9. Dick Pelletier:

Indefinite Lifespan Possible in 20 Years, Expert Predicts

10. Dick Pelletier:

End of Aging: Life in a World where People no longer Grow Old and Die

11. Eric Schulke:

We Owe Pursuit of Indefinite Life Extension to Our Ancestors

12. Eric Schulke:

Radical Life Extension and the Spirit at the core of a Human Rights Movement

13. Eric Schulke:

MILE: Guide to the Movement for Indefinite Life Extension

14. Gennady Stolyarov II:

The Real War and Why Inter-Human Wars Are a Distraction

15. Gennady Stolyarov II:

The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences — turning the tide for life extension

16. Gennady Stolyarov II:

Six Libertarian Reforms to Accelerate Life Extension

17. Hank Pellissier:

Wake Up, Deathists! — You DO Want to LIVE for 10,000 Years!

18. Hank Pellissier:

Top 12 Towns for a Healthy Long Life

19. Hank Pellissier:

This list of 30 Billionaires — Which One Will End Aging and Death?

20. Hank Pellissier:

People Who Don’t Want to Live Forever are Just “Suicidal”

21. Hank Pellissier:

Eluding the Grim Reaper with 23andMe.com

22. Hank Pellissier:

Sixty Years Old — is my future short and messy, or long and glorious?

23. Jason Xu:

The Unstoppable Longevity Virus

24. Joern Pallensen:

Vegetarians Live Longer, Happier Lives

25. Franco Cortese:

Killing Deathist Cliches: Death to “Death-Gives-Meaning-to-Life”

26. Marios Kyriazis:

Environmental Enrichment — Practical Steps Towards Indefinite Lifespans

27. Khannea Suntzu:

Living Forever — the Biggest Fear in the most Audacious Hope

28. Martine Rothblatt:

What is Techno-Immortality?

29. Teresa Belcher:

Top Ten Anti-Aging Supplements

30. Teresa Belcher:

Keep Your Brain Young! — tips on maintaining healthy cognitive function

31. Teresa Belcher:  

Anti-Aging Exercise, Diet, and Lifestyle Tips

32. Teresa Belcher:

How Engineered Stem Cells May Enable Youthful Immortality

33. Teresa Belcher:

Nanomedicine — an Introductory Explanation

34. Rich Lee:

“If Eternal Life is a Medical Possibility, I Will Have It Because I Am A Tech Pirate”

35. Franco Cortese:

Morality ==> Immortality

36. Franco Cortese:

Longer Life or Limitless Life?