The Fourth Great Transformation

by Don Simborg

The essence of each book chapter is described below.

Preface

“If we could replay the game of life again and again . . . the vast majority of replays would never produce (on the finite scale of a planet’s lifetime) a creature with self-consciousness.” 

—Stephen Jay Gould, Full House

We Homo sapiens are the only human species left on Earth. For 98% of our time on the planet, though, other human species coexisted with us. Why are we the only human survivors? I will attempt an explanation, but I am more confident of my ability to predict what happens next in human evolution. That will be our creation of Homo nouveau.

1 - Evolution and Speciation

“The essence of the ‘species problem’ is the fact that, while many different authorities have very different ideas of what species are, there is no set of experiments or observations that can be imagined that can resolve which of these views is the right one.”

—John Brookfield, Professor of Evolutionary Genetics,
University of Nottingham

A man named Darwin first had the notion that species evolved, rather than were created as is. That wasn’t Charles Darwin who wrote On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, but Erasmus Darwin (his grandfather) who lived in the 1700s. The key to Darwinian evolution is natural selection, which requires two factors: 1) organisms must change; 2) those changes interact with the environment, and those that enable the organism to best adapt will persist. In this chapter, the modern theory of Darwinian evolution is explained.

It is important to understand that there is no universally agreed upon definition of the word species. That, in essence, is the species problem. Under any definition, however, all humans today, in spite of our great variability, are one species. I have found the most useful definition of species to be that of Kevin de Queiroz, an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. He has proposed that “a species is a segment of a separately evolving metapopulation lineage.” This will be explained in detail. For a new human species to emerge from today’s Homo sapiens, a reproduction isolation barrier must appear. How that has happened in the past is entirely different from how I speculate it will happen in the future.

2 - How Did We Get Here?

“In other words, you do not need to change very much of the genome to make a new species.”

—Dr. Katherine Pollard, Director, Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology, University of California, San Francisco

How we got here is a 3.8 billion-year-old story starting with The First Great Transformation—the emergence of single-celled life on Earth. Our closest living relatives are the chimpanzees and bonobos. Chimps are not our closest relatives, however. Those would be the extinct Neanderthals. We did not evolve from either of them, even though we are a part of the great ape family. Two ancient pre-human species, characterized by their most famous fossils Ardi and Lucy, are probably our evolutionary predecessors. Homo ergaster were the first humans. They were upright walking bipeds with bigger brains leading the way toward The Third Great Transformation. Their successors, Homo erectus, left Africa about 2 million years ago and spread throughout the world. Some of them evolved into the Neanderthals. But Homo sapiens evolved after that in Africa and finally migrated to the rest of the world around 50,000-100,000 years ago and eventually outlasted all other humans.

3 - Tools

“The complexity of the brain is simply awesome. Every structure has been precisely shaped by millions of years of evolution to do a particular thing, whatever it might be. It is not like a computer, with billions of identical transistors in regular memory arrays that are controlled by a CPU with a few different elements.”

—Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, and Mark Greaves, computer scientist, MIT Technology Review

The evolution of tools parallels the evolution of the Homo sapiens brain. So, by looking at tools and their evolution, we get another view and description of TheThird Great Transformation. The Fourth Great Transformation will occur by the use of two of our most advanced tools: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and genetic engineering. Each of these tools will be discussed in depth in the next chapters. 

The Stone Age began about 3 million years ago and lasted well past the demise of all humans except Homo sapiens. Human brain size peaked with the Neanderthals about 400,000 years ago, but tool complexity has continued to increase on an exponential curve through today. The Bronze Age, beginning about 3000 B.C. and followed by the Iron Age shortly thereafter, ushered in the use of advanced metallurgy for tools of all types.

The so-called Scientific Revolution began in the 16th century and was followed by the Industrial Revolution a couple of hundred years later. These ushered in the modern era and our current Moore’s Law type of exponential increase in technology and tool complexity.

4 - AI: Human Intelligence in a Computer

“No, I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I’m after is just a mediocre brain, something like the president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.”

—Alan Turing, the father of AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be a key tool in the development of Homo nouveau in The Fourth Great Transformation. Its role in that regard will be described in Chapter 6. One of the problems in defining AI is our difficulty in defining human intelligence, which it is supposed to be emulating. In fact, neither AI nor human intelligence can be precisely defined. Nonetheless, AI software has become increasingly capable of emulating many functions considered aspects of human intelligence, such as pattern recognition, speech recognition, clinical diagnosis, stock selection, and game playing. In fact, AI’s progress in game playing, from chess to Go to poker, has paralleled its overall capabilities.

One question is whether AI will ever equal or exceed human intelligence and, if it does, will that be a boom or a threat to humankind? Currently, AI systems primarily augment humans rather than replace them. That is often called IA—intelligence augmentation—rather than AI. There is still much work to be done to eliminate unanticipated biases that get built into AI systems and to make their decision processes understandable and transparent to users. Multiple organization are working on making AI safe.

5 - The Singularity: Science or Science Fiction?

“The singularity is near.” 

—Ray Kurzweil

“The singularity isn’t near.” 

—Paul Allen and Mark Greaves, MIT Technology Review

“What I find is that it’s a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad.” 

—Douglas R. Hofstadter, Pulitzer Prize–winning author,
speaking about Ray Kurzweil and singularitarians.

A technological singularity is the point at which technological growth and capability become uncontrollable and irreversible, possibly constituting an existential threat to humans. Many fear that is where AI is heading. Although there are different types of singularities, the most famous version is that promoted by Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering. In his book, The Singularity is Near, he describes the singularity as the point in which the human brain and computers will become interchangeable and indistinguishable. To Kurzweil, this will be a good thing for humanity. He believes the steps to achieving the singularity will be the full emulation of the human brain in a computer by 2030, the ability to download the human brain into a computer by 2040, and computer/brain interchangeability by 2045. The latter, he suggests, will be achieved with the use of nanotechnology.

There has been great progress in some of the technologies required to achieve the Kurzweil singularity. These include progress in determining the complex connections of the human brain, called the connectome, brain/computer interfaces, nanotechnology and much more. Nonetheless the skeptics (including myself) believe that the singularity is not near. The Fourth Great Transformation will occur without it.

6 - Genetic Engineering: The Second Ultimate Tool

“I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.”

—Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems,
speaking of genetic engineering, nanotechnology
and AI, in Wired magazine

Genetic engineering will be the tool that we use to create Homo nouveau. AI will be the enabler of that tool. Darwinian evolution occurs as the result of random mutations in our genome, some of which lead to improved ability to procreate through a process called natural selection. The goal of genetic engineering is not necessarily to improve procreation, nor is it natural or random. It is deliberately controlled by us.

We first attempted genetic engineering long before we understood anything about genes, inheritance or evolution. It began about 12,000 years ago, when we transitioned from hunters and gatherers to farmers. We started to selectively breed plants and animals to make improved food products, or stronger animal work tools, or better traits in something else. The modern era of genetic engineering was born in the 1970s when we learned how to create recombinant DNA in a laboratory. We now create thousands of genetically modified plants and animals (GMOs) for food, medicines and other human needs, in spite of some strong public resistance to GMOs.

In the 1990s we crossed the barrier from GMOs to GMHs (genetically modified humans). This is our attempt to cure genetic diseases which began slowly, and sometimes disastrously, to our current rapidly accelerating pace in curing a multitude of genetic disorders including some cancers. The process remains complex and risky. Modern genetic engineering tools such as CRISPR give hope that both will be reduced.

To date, with one scandalous exception, genetic engineering has been limited in all countries to modifying human genes only in individual patients in a manner that is not passed on to their progeny. That is, we genetically alter somatic cells rather than germline cells. An in vitro fertilization procedure called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which is NOT genetic engineering, may ultimately lead to a change in attitudes about germline genetic engineering. It is hypothesized here that AI will assist in overcoming the risks of all genetic engineering and that germline genetic engineering is inevitable. That will lead to Homo nouveau.

7 - A Hypothetical Future

“Knowledge is telling the past. Wisdom is predicting the future.”

—W. Timothy Garvey, American endocrinologist

This chapter is complete speculation. A number of predictions are made regarding the future use of genetic engineering. Global warming is the biggest threat facing humanity in the 21st century and genetic engineering will play a role in its combat. A hypothetical path to creating Homo nouveau is described. It is only one of many that could have been chosen.

8 - The Fourth Great Transformation — Explained

“If we had been privileged enough to observe the origins of our species and our lineage, we would have been struck by one thing – nothing very much happened.” 

—Robert Foley, Humans Before Humanity

For those interested in the detailed molecular biology involved in the example of Homo nouveau creation in Chapter 7, a detailed description of how the reproductive isolation barrier was created is graphically presented.

Epilogue

This book is entirely nonfiction except for Chapter 7, which is fiction, and Chapter 8, which explains the genetics and molecular biology of Chapter 7. I have described in detail one of many possible scenarios that could create a new human species by using genetic engineering augmented by AI. The Fourth Great Transformation won’t necessarily map to that particular scenario, which is just one example of how speciation can occur at the hands of humans in the future. This hypothesis does not imply that evolution by Darwinian natural selection has ended in humans. Random mutations and Darwinian natural selection will continue indefinitely, having some effect on the evolution of Homo sapiens, Homo nouveau and other future human species. How these future human species will coexist is described.