Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Escaping Biology















Humans have since the time we came down from the trees been on a quest. That quest has been defined in many different ways, but my personal description of this quest is “escaping biology”. My views have been shaped by almost two thirds of a century of reading, observing and thinking about what I see in humans.
Biologically, we are a mammal that evolved from primates. In fact we are genetically 98 percent like other primates alive today. What distinguishes us from the other biological species is our quest to go beyond the boundaries of our biology and not to be limited by our genetic code. This is evident in some of human's very first innovations such as taming fire and using the hides of other animals to protect us from the environment.
Our bodies are biologically designed to survive in a tropical climate for about three generations (about 40 years or so). This is long enough to mature, raise offspring and pass along the what we have learned in the process. Biologically, sometime around 40 we become obsolete and serve as a liability to the species. However, our quest has been to try to escape these biological bounds by not only surviving beyond our biological limits but thriving outside them.
We have been so adept in this quest, that our problem has become not one of our biological limits, but one of recognizing how far outside those limits we are existing. Very few of us will spend most of the day hunting or gathering our food. In fact some of us have never even seen the flora or fauna from which our food has been processed. Unlike any other species we escaped biology by removing ourselves from the food chain. We even find the act of killing other animals as repulsive, but we still like those hamburgers and pork chops.
In 1900 the average life expectancy was 47 years which is close to our biological limit. Today, with our prosthetic eyewear, hearing aid, artificial hip, knee, bypass surgeries, chemotherapy, blood pressure, cholesterol medicines and hundreds of other pharmaceuticals, we expect to live nearly 80 years which far exceeds that which we are designed. We have escaped the biological age limits.
We have become so insulated from our biology, that we fail to recognize how much it still drives our behavior, particularly in the first 40 of our 80 years. Technologically, we may have escaped biology, but behaviorally we are still bound. All the sexual, aggressive and deceptive things we do have biological roots. We have behaviorily evolved very little over the past 10, 000 years. This may be the demise of our species.
But our biological escape continues. Science fiction and science fact has all kinds of cyborgs, androids, downloaded brains, etc around the corner that have little or no biology to them at all. The issue is can our behavior adapt to our non biological becoming?

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