A wild boar and domestic pigs from Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication
In 2001, Michael Pollan authored a fine popular science book called
The Botany of Desire. The work provides an interesting and insightful short history into four of the most common plants in our world: the tulip, marijuana, the apple and the potato. For each of these plants, we learn something of their origin, how they are grown today, and the path they've taken to become so utterly ubiquitous.
There are fascinating tales hidden under each leaf. Apples, as it turns out, do not "come true" from seed, and must be reproduced from grafted cuttings. As a result, every Red Delicious apple you've ever crunched into is a clone from a tree that popped up in Madison County, Iowa, some time in the middle of the 19th century. And if you were to plant the seeds from that apple, exactly none of them would look or taste like a Red Delicious. Instead you'd get apples of different colors and sizes, almost all of them just short of inedible.
The story behind each plant is so interesting that it's easy to miss Pollan's primary point. The subtitle of the book is A Plant's-Eye View of the World and that's just what he intended to do in the work: flip the way in which we usually understand the selective pressures behind domesticated plants on its human-centric head. Rather than looking at how we make plants into what we want, Pollan projects things in starkly different terms. How have some plants, by offering something that we desire (beauty, intoxication, sweetness, and sustenance in the canonical four), persuaded humans to remove them from their original, limited niches and turn them into worldwide champions? We usually look on it as people adapting plants to their needs. Pollan looks at it as plants enlisting humans to play the role of rather large bees.
It's similar to the argument that many authors have made about dogs versus wolves. Wolves, the ancestor of all domesticated dogs, are beautifully adapted predators—in a world open to creatures which need to roam long distances without being shot, blocked by fences, or flattened by automobiles. A few tens of thousands of years ago, a small group of wolves became uniquely fixated on the behavior of human beings. Currently, there are something on the order of 550 million dogs on planet Earth. There are perhaps a quarter of a million wolves. We may think that we've manipulated characteristics of a predator that was a threat (to our livestock if not ourselves) and turned them into helpmates and companions. You can look at it that way, or you can say that a few minor modifications were required to turn humans into a vector for spreading wolves around the planet.
But if it's valid to look at the relationship between people and plants, or people and animals, as being driven from either end ... how about the relationship between people and technology?
Head below the fold to find out.
Charles Darwin realized from the beginning that domesticated plants and animals were subject to selective pressures, and that their relatively rapid variation under human management served as both example and counterpoint to the kind of pressures organisms faced in "the wild." The Origin of Species spends a great deal of its pages discussing domestication, and when Darwin decided to bring out a multi-volume expanded version of the work, it was the section on The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication that appeared first. In fact, it was the only portion of the expanded work that appeared in Darwin's lifetime.
The variation of domesticated animals fascinated Darwin. Not only did domestic dogs display a much wider variety of sizes, shapes, coat colors, and behaviors than their wild relatives, the same is true of most every kind of domesticated plant or animal. Species, as it turns out, are wonderfully plastic and a bit of human intervention in the breeding process can exceed the effect of hundreds of generations in the wild.
One of the most remarkable features in our domesticated races is that we see in them adaptation, not indeed to the animal's or plant's own good, but to man's use or fancy. Some variations useful to him have probably arisen suddenly, or by one step... But when we compare the dray-horse and race-horse, the dromedary and camel, the various breeds of sheep fitted either for cultivated land or mountain pasture, with the wool of one breed good for one purpose, and that of another breed for another purpose; when we compare the many breeds of dogs, each good for man in very different ways; ... when we compare the host of agricultural, culinary, orchard, and flower-garden races of plants, most useful to man at different seasons and for different purposes, or so beautiful in his eyes, we must, I think, look further than to mere variability.
That domestication produces a great array of useful features is clear, but it doesn't do so all at once.
We cannot suppose that all the breeds were suddenly produced as perfect and as useful as we now see them; indeed, in several cases, we know that this has not been their history. The key is man's power of accumulative selection: nature gives successive variations; man adds them up in certain directions useful to him. In this sense he may be said to make for himself useful breeds.
It's this careful application of selective pressure in a singular direction that makes possible the rapid and diverse changes of animals and plants we see around a farmyard, or around our homes.
What makes it possible to turn a wolf into a Pug or Pharaoh Hound, is the great deal of flexibility inherent in the genetic toolkit. After all, "wolf" is just a formula—a list of instructions for the order and sequence of proteins and the timing of production and expression that leads to a big shaggy gray thing with shiny white teeth and a heart-stopping howl. If you think of DNA as the sheet music and the mechanisms for its duplication and implementation as the orchestra, then the same instruments that perform wolf can also play the tune of salamander and swan, Bactrian camel and bread mold. Producing a curly tail and a goofy smile is really just a minor variation on a theme.
But what happens if you discard the sheet music? What happens when you throw out all the instruments? What happens if you start over with nothing but the idea for how the music should sound, but none of what's made it possible in the past?
In 1976, Richard Dawkins coined the term "mimeme" or "meme" in an essay for his book The Selfish Gene. It's a term that's gained wide use, and even wider misuse, since then, but at its heart what Dawkins proposed was that packets of information could be spread from person to person. These packets might be passed around unchanged, or like their genetic analogs, they could be subtly altered, transformed, rearranged, mingled and modified. A whole new field of "memetics" appeared to study how information is modified over time.
The rules of memetics are a lot less codified than those of genetics. There's even a fair bit of argument around whether they ever will be nailed down in a way that provides meaningful results. That's only to be expected. After all, genetics is dealing with a very small set of notes and the instruments on which genetics is played can only be "heard" in the form of proteins. Even so, you can get some very complex results (salamander, swan, etc). Of course, it does make for rather lengthy sheet music. Something like 4 billion stanzas are required to "play" one of Pollan's potatoes.
On the other hand, memetics is relatively wide open. Both the range of notes and the range of instruments on which they can be played is much broader. Perhaps infinite. Memes can describe how chipped bits of stone can form an ax. They can explain how a fire can be built hot enough to draw molten iron from rusty red ore. How steam can drive a piston. How spinning magnets can generate electricity. How transistors can be made ever smaller.
So, can you make the same inversion with mimetics as you can with genetics? If it's possible to look at a dog or a potato in terms of how it manipulated human beings into spreading its genes through the expression of traits we find desirable, can the same thing be said about technology? We—the big mass human "We"—are the creators of technical artifacts, but can it also be said that those artifacts perpetuate themselves by the use of memes and human hands?
Let's go back to the titular iPhone. At the time of this writing, the iPhone has existed as a commercial product for about seven years. In that time, better than 500 million of them have been produced. The race between the number of iPhones and the number of dogs on the planet is a tight one. In the short term at least, I wouldn't bet on dogs.
And of course when we speak of iPhones, we really need to expand our scope a bit. The iPhone is just one breed of multi-function touchscreen hand computer and communicator (you can certainly see why they didn't go with that as a name). It's just the, let's say "Golden Retriever" of the bunch. Amiable, attractive, and popular. But it doesn't define the whole of Smartphonus domesticus. There are an ever-growing number of other "species" out there. Some of them are quite similar. Some of them have unique new fiddly bits that extend their capabilities.
Put them all together and ... they may well outnumber us.
If we were to consider smart phones through the Pollan lens of "how successfully have they gotten us to spread them by offering us something we like" the answer is very well. Extremely well. Insanely greatly well.
In a matter of a few years, the idea—the collection of memes—that is a small, glass-fronted computer has spread over the planet converting not an insignificant amount of our available resources into them. No creature, plant or animal, has ever achieved that kind of spread. Even the Black Death doesn't reach either the rate of transmission or the population density that smartphones have managed.
Miraculous as the toolkit of biology may be, with abilities and potential squirreled (and elephanted and bacteriaed) aware over billions of years, there are limits. When it comes to recorded information and its physical expression in technology, those limits are ... well, at least some distance from being seen, much less achieved.
We want to draw a line between natural selection and the pressures human beings bring to bear in domestication. We want to draw another line between how we apply these pressures to the existing suite of living things, and how we exert these forces against inorganic elements. But there's a good argument to be made that these lines only exist because of our hubris. We want to make domestication a distinct process, because we think that we are distinct. After all, plants are constantly under pressure from herbivores. Herbivores are constantly under pressure from predators. Pronghorns (the animal that many Americans in the western states refer to as an antelope) have staggering abilities to run at very high speeds for a very long time, an ability that was honed through generations of culling by speedy (and now extinct) predators. We consider that as a factor in natural selection. Angus cattle are under pressure from men in large hats. We consider that domestication. The next generation of smartphones is under pressure from customer expectations. But are any of these really more "artificial" than the others? When we single out the pressure humans exert as opposed to other forces, aren't we really placing humans in a special position?
Even drawing a line between those men and their cattle, and the factories full of tiny nimble fingers where new smartphones are "born" may not be racist, or even species-ist, but is it... carbon-ist? All boundaries are to some extent arbitrary, but in drawing a line between our relationship to our living and non-living creations, do we risk missing something important?
We dipped into the preexisting potential of wolves and carefully, over thousands of years, drew forth dogs. We looked into the potential of electronics and shaped up a new kind of helper. In both cases, one of the things reshaped in the process was ourselves. Both culturally and biologically humans have grown up not just using the results of our biological tinkering, we've developed in harmony with them. We built the domestic dog, the cow, the chicken, wheat, corn, rice, potato... and the domestic human. You wouldn't have us, without them.
The same has always been true of our technology. Did our nimble fingers shape chipped stone to a fine point, or are our fingers nimble because of the demands of making a better arrowhead? It's both, actually. We're in a feedback loop with our creations, both those that have their own lives and those that don't.
The sharpest difference in our relationship to domesticate animals and our experience of technology is simply this: speed. The whole category of smartphones crawled out of the dumb phone muck only a decade ago, and the iPhone Explosion triggered a burst of new varieties a few years after that. If all this was expressed in biological terms, the average span of a "species" of phone has been less than a year, and we've seen shifts in dominance happen in eye blinks. The great Blackberry family has been reduced to a few living fossils from a time when keyboard phones ruled the 2G world. A period of giantism has erupted, driving the size of phone screens up and up in a trend that only now seems to be slowing. Phones have sprouted cameras on front and back that exceed the quality of what most of us carried as, well, cameras before these things were around. It's quite likely that there are already more dead smartphones littering the bottom of charity bins, than all the Wooly Mammoths that existed over the course of several hundred thousand years. And soon enough, the whole grand smartphone superfamily is likely to dwindle down to a remnant, as most of its functionality is usurped by ... something else.
Our technology is advancing very, very quickly. To some extent, so are we. Human beings are fortunate in that their mental and physical makeup is that of a powerful generalist. We're at home in tropical forests, and dragging sledges over ice. That flexibility has served us extremely well in the past, and now it's allowing us to deal with devices that adapt and multiply with the speed of bacteria.
Will that always be true?
It's quite easy to imagine a world in which we are outpaced by our devices. One in which technology becomes so dominant that, either intentionally or simply through benign neglect, human beings fall by the wayside. Quite recently some Very Smart People, from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk, have raised warnings about the dangers implicit in artificial intelligence. It's easy to see why. We don't live in a world in which new technology is vetted by some central authority (and probably don't want to). Both entertainment and our own guts tell us that it's quite possible that someone, somewhere, right this moment could be developing a system that could take the critical step from tool to competitor.
But there is one thing that might be a bit comforting: where is the pressure? Pronghorns only got so quick because they were pursued by quick predators. Cameras get sharper and smartphones get "smarter" to meet the needs of people who use them. Both are adjusting to a continued pressure. Just what selective pressure is a work to drive systems beyond the point where they serve us? Might we be saved from truly threatening levels of AI simply because we don't have a compelling need to create them?
That's not to say that technology can't be massively, and even intentionally destructive (see: bomb, atomic; gasoline, leaded; virus, computer; and any of a long line of ways for simply converting brute force into broken skulls). However, the selective pressure that would push technology into a completely inimical territory ... may be pretty weak. After all, no one wants to buy an iPhone that will eat them. I don't think. Still, if I ever hear that the new iPhone 10 was actually designed by the iPhone 9, and that we're turning over the factory keys I may go back to dealing with well-chipped stones.
Having naively thought that we had survived the transition to a technological age, we've only recently begun to realize that a technological age is all transition. It's all journey, no destination. There may not be as many monsters lurking in the brush as some would indicate, but it doesn't hurt to look.
Author's Note—Those that have been around this place long enough might recognize this piece as fitting into the series of essays that were eventually collected as The Evolution of Everything. You'd be right. Unfortunately, the publisher of that work has gone to the great bookstore in the sky, so I'm drafting a few new pieces, and updating the old ones, with an eye toward producing a second edition later this year. And once again, I'm making you suffer through the misery of first drafts. Thanks for putting up with it.
