What Comes After Homo Sapiens?: When and How Our Species Will Evolve Into Another Species

What Comes After Homo Sapiens?

DWS Publishing

Mill Valley, California

dsimborg@gmail.com

Copyright © 2017 by Don Simborg

All rights reserved

Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data

Simborg, Don.

What comes after Homo Sapiens?: when and how our species will evolve into another species / Don Simborg.

First edition. | Mill Valley, California: DWS Publishing, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-692-94603-9 (paperback) | ISBN 978-0-692-92001-5 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-0-692-94604-6 (ebook)

LCSH: Human evolution—Research. | Hominids—Speciation. | Evolution (Biology) | Genetic engineering. | Artificial intelligence.

LCC GN281 .S56 2017 (print) | LCC GN281 (ebook) | DDC 599.93/8—dc23

Project management: The Peter Beren Agency, peterberen.com

Book design: Mark Shepard, shepgraphics.com

Publisher’s Note

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system without prior permission in writing from the Publisher.

First Edition published September 2017

Contents

List of Figures

Introduction

Part 1: Getting to Homo Sapiens

Chapter 1: The Questions

Chapter 2: Taxonomy

Chapter 3: Species

Chapter 4: Speciation

Chapter 5: Genetics

Chapter 6: Getting Past the Chimps

Chapter 7: Getting to Humans

Chapter 8: Out of Africa

Part 2: Getting to Homo Nouveau

Chapter 9: How Might Homo Sapiens Evolve?

Chapter 10: Catastrophe

Chapter 11: Natural Selection

Chapter 12: Genetic Engineering

Chapter 13: Electronic Evolution

Chapter 14: The Answers

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Appendices

Glossary

References

List of Figures

Figure 1: Ape to Human

Figure 2: Homo Sapiens

Figure 3: Chihuahua and Great Dane

Figure 4: Malamute and Grey Wolf

Figure 5: Willow Flycatcher and Alder Flycatcher

Figure 6: Eurasian Golden Jackal and African Golden Jackal

Figure 7: Monarch Butterfly and Monarch Butterfly Caterpillar

Figure 8: Species Concept

Figure 9: Cladogenesis

Figure 10: Pea Color Heredity

Figure 11: Pea Color and Texture Heredity

Figure 12: Mammals

Figure 13: Hominidae

Figure 14: Hominidae Alternatives

Figure 15: Homo Sapiens Behaviors

Figure 16: Out of Africa

Figure 17: Out of Africa Alternative

Figure 18: Neanderthal and Modern Human

Figure 19: Brain Trait Speciation

Figure 20: Fertility vs. GDP

Figure 21: Genetic Engineering Speciation

Figure 22: Cognitive Focus

Figure 23: Homo Nouveau

Figure 24: Homo Nouveau Lineage

Introduction

"My intent is to write not a science fiction story but rather

a new story based on science."

We’re all here right now, living on this planet. But who’s up next?

What comes after Homo sapiens?

That simple question naturally leads to several more. First, how will we know when Homo sapiens (Latin for wise man) has evolved into some other species (let’s call that Homo nouveau)? Further, when will that happen, and what will that new species be like?

And, since none of us may be around when this new species arrives, why should it matter to any of us?

As you’ll see as we move through the discussion in this book, it will matter a great deal. Further, it may be unlike any shift in species that came before it.

Let’s start by looking at an evolutionary image—one I’m certain you’ve seen in some form—that shows the progression of humans from apelike creatures to our current state (figure 1).

Figure 1

This book will attempt to fill in the partially obscured figure at the end of this progression—the one just to the right of the Homo sapiens.

The Homo sapiens that looks just like every one of us.

Why should we take an interest in this? For one thing, we’re the only species in the 3.8-billion-year history of life on earth that is even capable of doing that! We alone are equipped to ask those kinds of questions, let alone suggest possible answers. After all, the very concept of species didn’t exist until Homo sapiens defined it.

We’re also the only ones who have the tools necessary to effectively address those kinds of questions. No other species understands evolution, genetics and the mechanisms of speciation, among other concepts.

Perhaps most exciting of all, if and when Homo nouveau emerges, we will be the first species ever to be able to recognize that we have evolved into another one. That will be a singular event in the vast continuum of evolution.

But this also raises many puzzling questions:

• Who precisely will discover this? How will it occur? Will it be a sudden insight by some future taxonomist or will it come through careful study of fossil and genomic records?

• Will Homo sapiens still, in fact, exist when this recognition occurs? Will there be two Homo species coexisting? (If so, it won’t be for the first time.)

• Just who will do the recognizing: Homo sapiens or Homo nouveau?

• How will we get along? Will we get along?

Tack on some pertinent questions of your own and you can start to see what a significant and provocative topic we’re about to explore.

The Coming and Going of Species

It’s helpful to back up at this point a bit and review some facts for greater perspective. We know that more than 99 percent of all species that once existed no longer do.1 Species come and go—a seriously inconvenient truth. Additionally, their arrival and departure aren’t necessarily uniformly spaced. For instance, there have been relatively short periods when new species appeared in great numbers, like the Cambrian period 540 million years ago.2 In this case, short is still measured in millions of years.

Likewise, there have been relatively short periods of mass extinctions, defined as the loss of at least 50 percent of the species. There have been five such mass extinctions, the most recent one being 66 million years ago, which wiped out the dinosaurs and most other species.3 In fact, we may be undergoing a sixth mass extinction as we speak, which may be relevant to discussion later in this book.4 5 On the other hand, we believe some species like some cyanobacteria—bacteria that live through photosynthesis—have been on earth for billions of years and have survived these massive changes relatively intact.6

Most species, however, came into being gradually over millions of years. Most have subsequently died out gradually over a similar amount of time through the process we call evolution.

So where do we—the species Homo sapiens—fit in? For one thing, we’ve only been around in our current form for about 200,000 years—a mere sliver of the time there has been life on earth. To illustrate this, stretch out your arms wide in each direction. The distance from the tip of your right middle finger to the tip of your left middle finger represents the total time of life on earth. If you trim either fingernail, you cut off the total time that Homo sapiens has been around—not very long! Further, chances are we won’t be around very much longer, evolutionarily speaking.

The Face of Evolution

Since we’re discussing the evolution of our species, let’s get a handle on what that involves.

Evolution occurs by random genetic change interacting with the environment. We’ll get into that in more detail later. But that broad statement leads to other more specific and compelling questions:

• Does it take just one genetic alteration to change a species—or thousands?

• How do we draw the line from one species to the next? Where’s the exact point where one species changes into another?

• Does species change happen over a small number of generations or are there increments of species change over many generations on some kind of continuum?

• If things aren’t so consistent, does that mean that it’s somewhat arbitrary when species change actually occurs?

Of course, there’s always the possibility that nature will toss aside some of the rules that governed evolution to this point. Maybe the transition from Homo sapiens to Homo nouveau will occur in a completely different manner. Maybe it will happen faster than it has in the past.

It’s also possible that completely new forces will play a role in this evolutionary change. Will Homo nouveau be induced by genetic engineering? By computers? By other technology? By a global catastrophe? Lastly, give some thought to the most remarkable possibility of all—will we ourselves be the ones who create this new species? In effect, will Homo sapiens create Homo nouveau?

Those are all powerful questions. The objective of this book is to address them as comprehensively as possible.

That said, a great deal of science and technology will be discussed. But you won’t need to be a scientist or particularly technologically savvy to understand and enjoy it.

On the other hand, I don’t want to exclude scientists and technologists. Through this book, I hope to generate discussion on my website, whatcomesafterhomosapiens.com. Hopefully, the scientists and technologists whose work I have covered will comment on my conclusions and provide their own.

Since the overall scope of this topic is so enormous, I have by necessity summarized and synthesized much of the research I cite. To some scientists and technologists in those fields covered, this may seem superficial, incomplete and even misleading and incorrect. I welcome such feedback on my website. My intent is to write not a science fiction story but rather a new story based on science.

The Greatest Challenge of All

Another interesting element to this project is that there are really no experts on this particular subject. That is because it is not a single field of study, but rather many. In that respect, there’s really no one who’s qualified to write about this topic, at least by the traditional definition.

That’s made this project an enormous challenge. But it’s what has also made this project so exciting—an excitement I’m certain you’ll come to share. 

Here’s why.

In his heavily researched book Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe, John Hands nicely summarizes the core challenge that this book addresses:

To be a successful scientist today means spending a career on colloid chemistry or palaeoarchaeology or studying chimpanzees, or some equally if not more specialized field. This narrowness of inquiry has produced a depth of knowledge but has also carved out canyons of expertise from which its practitioners find it difficult to engage in meaningful dialogue with other specialists except where canyons intersect in a cross-disciplinary study of the same narrow subject.

Few scientists transcend their specialist field to address fundamental questions of human existence such as what are we? The few who do rarely engage in open-minded debate. Too often they are unable to see the bigger picture and from their canyons they tend to fire a fusillade of views derived from the training, focus, and culture of the narrow academic discipline in which they have spent their professional lives.7

Think about that for a moment. Eminent scientists, researchers and others possess extraordinarily levels of knowledge and insight, yet rarely piece that together with other knowledge to address even greater questions.  In a sense, the specific focus of their impressive credentials effectively creates a barrier that cripples their ability to gain greater perspective.

So, who then can see what these accomplished scholars often cannot?

You and me, for starters. Let’s attempt to cross those canyons.

My Preparation for Writing this Book

With regard to myself, my background in medicine and scientific research has prepared me well to undertake a project like this. I’ve published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and have served on the faculty in the schools of medicine at Johns Hopkins and the University of California, San Francisco. My training and practice were in internal medicine, and my specialty is medical informatics—using computers for electronic medical records, diagnosis and other purposes. I founded and led two companies focused on clinical decision support and electronic medical records.

Although I have a strong background in medicine and scientific research, I’m not an expert in any of the fields this book touches on (evolutionary biology, genomics, paleontology, speciation, artificial intelligence, neuroscience and many more). This has allowed me to analyze the pertinent data without any sort of biased or filtered eye.

That, I suspect, is the same sort of perspective you as the reader will also bring to this book—a fresh, untouched viewpoint that will make our shared process of investigation and discovery all the more compelling.

Because I took on this project with an unbiased perspective, this book was a true investigation on my part—a pure learning experience. This was not an attempt to justify some preconceived theory on my part. Each avenue I explored seemed plausible at first. Some paths led to likely threats to our very existence, like artificial intelligence, which I now believe to be our greatest existential threat (a surprise to me.) On the other hand, nanotechnology, the branch of technology focusing on dimensions of less than the width of a human hair, could be either an existential threat or the savior of humankind.

Surprises

There were a great many more surprises and unexpected paths to follow. Here are a few:

• I learned how brilliant and correct Darwin was for all the right reasons.

• I also learned how correct Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the famous French biologist, was for all the wrong reasons.

• Gregor Mendel led us to an understanding of genetics that is dramatically oversimplified; his work was possibly falsified, yet Mendelian genetics is still foundational.

• Ray Kurzweil is predicting, The singularity is near. Bill Joy is the cofounder of Sun Microsystems. They have opposite views of our future, but both are equally frightening.

• The genome—the genetic material of an organism—is so magnificent and complicated that it may take centuries for us to fully understand it.

• We have about the same number of genes as a mouse, but it is the epigenome—the part of the genome that regulates our genes—that really makes us human.

• I had never heard of the species problem before my research. I still don’t understand it.

• We don’t know for sure how and when Homo sapiens got here, but Svante Pääbo and his team are revolutionizing our understanding of human evolution.

• Our main differentiator is our brain, not our upright posture. We still don’t know why the latter evolved.

• Our tools to study the brain are brilliant examples of the epitome of evolution, but our understanding of how the brain works is still in the future.

• CRISPR will take us closer to the Methuselarity. You will soon learn about both.

I’ll save the discussion of these and other surprises for later in the book. The overriding point is that, unlike many scientists and researchers, my perspective was in no way limited by what I already knew or, perhaps all the more important, what I expected to find.

That’s an advantage you enjoy as well. So, let’s begin our journey.

Part 1

Getting to Homo Sapiens

Chapter 1

The Questions

"Homo sapiens will likely still exist when Homo nouveau emerges. 

That really makes it interesting!"

Lots of questions were raised in the introduction. I’m going to attempt to answer all of them. The main one of course is what comes after Homo sapiens? Before I begin discussing the answers, however, I need to clarify the questions and my process for getting to the answers; otherwise, the answers will be meaningless. Please resist the temptation to skip ahead to Chapter 14. You’ll be so much better prepared to appreciate and understand the answers if you follow along with me. And it will be a lot more fun.

We are here today—the only species of humans left standing after a couple of million years since the earliest human species showed up on earth. There were many human species before Homo sapiens. I’ll talk about the other humans later. But for now, I want to focus on the question of where we’re heading—where we’re evolving. Yes, we are still evolving. Sooner or later, we will evolve sufficiently to the point where at least some of us won’t be considered Homo sapiens any more. What exactly does that mean? How will we know? When might that happen? How might that happen?

There are several implications of this. First, Homo nouveau will be a different species from Homo sapiens, so I examine what, exactly, a species is and how we will define the difference between the two. For example, there was once another human species called Homo neanderthalensis—or Neanderthals. They are now extinct. I’ll describe the difference between Neanderthals and us in order to help project what might be the difference between Homo sapiens and a future Homo nouveau.

Second, I am assuming that Homo nouveau will still be considered a human. I’ll elaborate on what that means and discuss what alternatives there might be for that.

One final implication is that Homo sapiens will still exist when Homo nouveau first arrives. That really makes it interesting! Therefore, I am not talking about events that happen on earth if and when Homo sapiens disappears from the earth. I am not trying to predict doomsday for our species or the earth in general; in fact, it is just the opposite. I’m presuming that Homo sapiens will survive long enough for our successor species to emerge. I’m saying that when Homo nouveau emerges, there will be two human species coexisting on earth at least for some period of time. That sounds weird, but actually that has been the usual circumstance in our evolutionary history. What may be unusual is how we get there, but that’s for later.

If by some chance some catastrophe happens that wipes out Homo sapiens, as it did to the dinosaurs sixty-six million years ago, the question becomes moot. There will be no Homo nouveau in this case, as I discuss in chapter 10. There are other existential threats to Homo sapiens that could prevent us from evolving further, which I’ll discuss as well.

Will Homo nouveau be superior to Homo sapiens in some way? Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on which path we take to get there. I’ll leave that to the reader’s judgment and provide enough information to make that call in chapter 14.

The question of describing the difference between Homo sapiens and Homo nouveau revolves around the definition of the word species. As shown in chapter 3 that is not as easy to define as one might expect. How different will they have to be? Who will decide? Lots of very interesting questions. We have many differences now within our population. Do we already have Homo nouveau?

I explore in chapter 4 how new species have emerged in the past, which is a process called speciation. I have considered also how speciation might be different going forward. In any case, species and speciation both require some understanding of genetics. That won’t change, so I will dive into that in chapter 5. Hopefully the dive is not too deep. My goal is to provide just enough knowledge of genetics to allow understanding of the ensuing discussion. I moved a lot of material about genetics into appendix 4 (Everything You Didn’t Want to Know about Genetics) if you want to learn more—but you can skip that and still understand the answers.

It was informative in this process to understand how we got to be Homo sapiens in the first place. Yes, figure 1 implies we came from the apes, but is that really true? Will the apes of today become humans one day? What exactly happened to get to humans? Chapters 6–8 will review what I learned about that and it was any eye opener to find out both what we know and don’t know. That learning process helped me focus on the future pathways. That will take us to Homo sapiens and complete Part I of the book.

Then the more speculative part of the book begins. Part II will take us to Homo nouveau.

Will evolution for us continue more or less as it has in the past? In chapter 9 I’ll describe the most likely alternatives. There are four major possibilities.

Chapters 10–13 will examine each of these possible pathways to Homo nouveau. Although the discussion of each is speculative, they are examined in reference to what is already known about the sciences of genetics, evolution and speciation.

This will lead to the answers in chapter 14.

Chapter 2

Taxonomy

"Did King Philip Call Out For Good Soup?"

I hated taxonomy when I studied it in college. It was boring and required a lot of memorization. So don’t worry, we’re just going to touch on it here. There are only a small number of taxonomic concepts that are important to this discussion.

The Taxonomy of Living Things

King Philip Called Out For Good Soup. That’s one of the many mnemonics people used when I studied it to remember the taxonomy of living things like plants and animals: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. It is a hierarchy of all living organisms from the most broad to the most specific. Most of those layers are not relevant to our discussion. Our focus is on the bottom of this massive classification system of all living things: species. You can’t say what something living is without stating its species.

The great geneticist of the early twentieth century, Theodosius Dobzhansky, pointed out two things about taxonomy:

It is the great diversity of living organisms that led to the need for some type of classification system, and

It is the discontinuity of this diversity that enables a classification system.

That is, living and extinct diversity is not one big, single continuous array of characteristics. Instead, there are these gaps between groups of organisms that don’t have clear intermediaries.8 Without those gaps, it would be near impossible to develop the taxonomy.

Dobzhansky is quick to point out that evolutionary theory implies there have been gradual and continuous changes to organisms, and if we were able to assemble all of the organisms that ever existed, we would not have these gaps that enable our taxonomy. It is only because the intermediaries are extinct that we have them. That makes it a lot easier to distinguish closely related species. As you’ll see in the next chapter, sometimes the gaps are very small and very debatable.

On the other hand, Stephen Jay Gould argued that the opposite might be true and that the gaps in the fossil record may be real reflections of evolution. He argued that much of the fossil record demonstrates long periods (many millions of years) where individual species do not change at all. This is coupled with the sudden appearance of a new species that is dramatically different from its predecessors. He referred to this as punctuated equilibrium, in contrast to the more widely accepted gradualism model of evolution.9

This debate continues to today and is very relevant to whether Homo nouveau will be a big leap from Homo sapiens or a barely perceptible modification.

(Every so often in these chapters I will highlight a key sentence as above that is a clue to the answers.)

Even our taxonomy is evolving.

I don’t want to get into all the ins and outs of taxonomy because my focus is only on one component: species. Even more narrowly, we are focusing on species within the Homo genus. There are living things other than plants and animals, and it wasn’t until after I got out of high school that the taxonomists decided that there was a classification level higher than kingdom, called domain. Bummer! I had to relearn my mnemonic to be Did King Philip Call Out For Good Soup. But again, this book is not about taxonomy; it’s about our species, Homo sapiens.

However, as you will see, domain actually will become relevant regarding one possibility for Homo nouveau.

—  —  begin sidebar  —  —

Taxonomy of Homo sapiens

Domain: Eukarya

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Chordata

(subphylum: Vertebrata)

Class: Mammalia

Order: Primate

Family: Hominidae

Genus: Homo

Species: Sapiens

—  —  end sidebar  —  —

Taxonomy Conventions (the boring part)

Note that the convention when referring to a species is to use two Latin terms, italicized, the first of which is capitalized and refers to the genus (in this case, Homo). The second refers to the species within the genus (in this case, sapiens). I suppose in order to go along with convention, I should refer to Homo nouveau as Homo aliusus (other human), Homo novus (new human), or some other Latin name. The grandson of Charles Darwin, Charles Galton Darwin, suggested the name Homo sapientior (wiser man) when speculating about a future Homo species. Of course, that would imply that the next species is wiser than the current one—something we don’t know at this point. I’m going to stick with Homo nouveau.

As we’ll see later, we’re in a paradigm shift with regard to evolution, so our semantics can shift as well.

What exactly is Homo sapiens?

Carl Linnaeus, who originated this classification scheme in the mid eighteenth century, was a bit of a classification junkie. He wanted to fit just about everything, including non-living things, into neat and orderly groups. The sidebar above shows this orderliness for Homo sapiens in the Linnaean version of taxonomy. What does that really mean? Simply put, we Homo sapiens have declared that there exists a species called Homo sapiens—and we are it.

When I say we are it, I mean everyone we think of today as human beings. It includes Hispanics, Caucasians, Africans, Asians, Inuits, Islanders, Aborigines, Native Americans, tall people, dwarves, people with genetic abnormalities, people born with one kidney, people with six fingers on each hand, people with an extra Y chromosome, and combinations of any of the above. We are all Homo sapiens.

I used the term human beings, but that is not really a technical term even though everyone knows what we mean by it. Technically, the word human refers to our genus, Homo, not our species. If there were Neanderthals or other species of the Homo genus still alive today, they would also be called humans or human beings. It turns out that the only surviving species of the genus Homo is Homo sapiens, so human beings that are alive today are all Homo sapiens. That is not true for all of history, of course, and it won’t be true when Homo nouveau emerges. They will be humans.

I have refrained from using the term the human race. Similar to human beings, it generally refers to all Homo sapiens. However, the term race introduces the notion that Homo sapiens are often divided into groups that are called races. When other species are subdivided into groups, we refer to those groups as subspecies. Are human races subspecies of Homo sapiens? This raises a subject that is fraught with controversies, biases, historical misunderstandings and many other difficulties. I will attempt in later chapters to tease out the science from the myth associated with this topic, but for now, I will dodge this topic and not use the term race as a subgroup of Homo sapiens.

Chapter 3

Species

"Is there an official list of species? Yes, many of them

—and they all differ from each other."

What exactly is a species? When I started the research for this book, I had not anticipated how much time and effort I would have to devote to this question. Probably like you, I just assumed there was a widely accepted answer. There isn’t. It is a question that has been debated at least since the time of Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient Greeks.10 The debate through the past two millennia has been intertwined with philosophy, religion, and logic, and more recently with genetics and molecular biology. If you expect a definitive answer after my research, you will be disappointed. Nonetheless, if we are going to talk about what species comes after Homo sapiens, we need to agree on what we mean by the word species.

The Species Problem

A typical definition of species is provided by dictionary.com: "the major subdivision of a