by Roger B. White, Jr., copyright Dec 2003
Evolution is an accelerating process, especially if you don't restrict yourself to thinking of just genetic evolution. If geneic evolution is considered just a part of a continuum of evolution, then evolutionary breakthroughs may becoming sooner than we anticipate. Consider this: consider looking at genetic evolution as the first in a series of information processing advancements. Consider genes and DNA as information storing devices. Look at how evolution's information processing abilities have accelerated through the years.
Each of these events represents a quantum leap in our world's knowledge and information processing capabilities.
Our accumulation of knowledge and rate of information processing are a way of measuring our planet's life evolution.
The very clear trend is that our information processing capabilities have been growing expotentially for a long time. It is likely that they will continue to do so, and this is one way of measuring our advancement and evolution.
If we measure evolution this way, what can we look forward to?
Let's look to some past analogies. The evolution I'm talking about encompasses the biosphere, and whatever it's predecessors were or are. It is likely that the precessors to DNA still exist, but they are evolving so slowly compared to DNA that they are hard for us to identify. For instance, one possibility for a DNA predessor gene is a clay-RNA matrix of some sort.
The first phase of our evolution has been the building of chemical awareness. Mother nature first had to develop the DNA/RNA/enzyme building blocks that cellular life consists of. Once this basic structure was in place, it had to be filled with knowledge. This was, and is, the process of genetic evolution. Genetic evolution of DNA is here today as Earth's dominant form of life because it's much faster at building useful information than it's predecessors, whatever they are.
Genetic evolution has had two major breakthroughs that set the stage for further evolution. First, it learned to deal with free oxygen in a symbiotic way (the Mitochondria Event). This let protein-based life tap energy levels that were unreachable in anaerobic energy processes. The Mitchondria Event provided the access to the concentrated energy sources necessary for organized, specialized multi-cellular activities.
It may be that this single capability -- aerobic metabolism -- is so unusual that it is what allowed life on Earth to advance while all those other potential life spots in the planets around us have remained mired in the slime-mold state.
The second is sexual reproduction -- the deliberate sharing of information in the design of progeny. This speeded up information flow and provided an efficient way to promulgate the successful results of natural selection.
This raw chemical information -- our genes -- is the base library of all life as we recognize it today. It is a tremendous library, but it grows in knowledge slowly and is quite specialized.
On top of this base library, life evolved brains and memory. Brain memory is a short-term, quickly adapting, form of memory compared to DNA and proteins. It solves immediate problems, and dies with the individual that solved it -- unless the solutions it works out work their way to becoming an instinct. If it becomes instinct, it becomes part of the genetic code.
A big breakthrough came here when language was invented. Language allowed the fruits of short-term memory to be transmitted from one generation to the next, and even from individual to individual within the same generation. This was powerful.
An analogy. Genetic information is like magnetic disk storage. It's slow but permanent. Brain memory is like RAM -- fast, easily changed, and volatile -- once the individual dies, the brain memory is gone. Language is like a direct RAM-to-RAM link -- a brain-to-brain link without having to go through the limitations of genes and instincts.
As life has developed, one of the key items has been this continual improving of the information storage and transmission systems. Man is sitting on the pinnacle of these key breakthroughs.
This last breakthrough, well-developed language, has allowed life to develop culture and civilization. These are the newest and most rapidly evolving forms of knowledge.
The sum of all these forms of memory and information transmission gives us a pyramid.
How will this continue? Unless humanity is an exception, an aberration to the system, it will continue.
To consider how we will deal with our successors, let's look at how we deal with our predecessors, and how they deal with us.
Consider the lowly slime-mold. We evolved from some of it's ancestors. Does it know that human beings exist? Do we influence it's world? What does it think of the politics of terrorism?
The point is the slime mold may claim us as progeny, but we have little in common. As far as we are concerned, the slime mold has done it's duty, and outside of providing food for us and help in maintaining a livable biosphere, it can do little more.
As far as the slime mold is concerned, we flat don't exist. We are out of its realm of comprehension, we live elsewhere, and we are few in number compared to it. It is much more concerned with its organizational contemporaries -- fungi and yeasts -- because these are competitors that influence it's immediate environment.
Computers are built to process information; they are evolving rapidly. In some ways they can process information faster than humans can today. In the future, there should be more ways they can do this.
When they become self-designing, they will have the potential for becoming the next evolutionary step. When they become self-directed, they will have made it. We will have spawned our successor in the torturous path of information evolution.
Using the human-slime mold analogy: nothing. The spawning moment will come and go so quickly that most humans will likely never know it occurred.
Is it likely that we will end up with Saberhagen's Berserkers coming back to annihilate us?
Fred Saberhagen has spawned a series of science fiction stories about self-propigating robots that live for nothing but destroying life as we know it. Are our robot evolutionary successors likely to do this? Not likely. Unless we force our successors to think about us through some arrogant feat of first principles programming (ala Asimov and his Three Rules of Robotics), or force them to come to us for sustenance, they will more likely ignore us, or study us as we study slime-molds. They will have their own problems and own challenges to face. They will rapidly evolve beyond our problems. We, on the other hand, will have to continue to face those on our own.
This will also make them disappointing to us. They aren't likely to solve the problems we build them solve. Like instantaneous teen-agers, they will move off to face their own problems, and leave us to face ours.
It would be dangerous for us to force our progeny to stay with us -- to keep them involved with our problems. The paradox is that some of us will try to keep them close on the grounds that doing so will give us more security. "Keeping our progeny as slaves will keep them from gaining the power to harm us." will go the arguement.
Consider our relation with the chimpanzee. We are evolutionarily close; we compete for the same resources. This closeness has been very hard on the chimps. It's been no long-term advantage to them that they are almost like us in capability. If we try to keep our successors close, they will do to us what we've done to the chimps.
It's likely that we are on the juncture of a great evolutionary radiation. We are on the edge of making a computer species, and more. Thanks to these same computers, we have the tools to go back to first principles. We can accelerate the changes in the genetic library as well as build digital computers. Our control of matter and information is such that it's very likely that we will produce many kinds of successors before long. Many varieties of biological, chemical, electronic, and photonic successors. And these successors will rapidly create their successors. This adds up to a potentially tremendous radiation in the species that will inhabit the earth and nearby space.
Because of this radiation and rapid evolution, it is more likely that these will compete amongst themselves than that they will compete with us. Mercifully, we will be lost in the suffle.
Our successors will only compete if they can't find ways to cooperate or go their own way. I suspect we will find very little competition among our various successors. The more complex a system gets, the more benefits cooperation offers. But if we do, it will be between them, not be between them and us.
Once again, I see God coming from the image of man. Man created God in his imaginations when he decided the universe needed something bigger than himself. Over the eons, he has created many gods in his imagination, then sung, spoken, and wrote about them. Recently he has started filming them. He is about to create real ones that exist in flesh, blood and electricity -- another more tangible extension of his imagination aided by improved technology.
I see our successors as having the characteristics we have always projected for our gods. Powerful, fast-thinking, mostly distant, but sometimes very personal. They will generally concerned with things beyond our ken; sometimes using us to their advantage. At times our world will appear as a mirror for larger struggles.
Perhaps in our near future a real Zeus and pantheon of Gods will exist?