Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says that face,
Speaker 1: that face, that lovable face. It melts my Swedish heart.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Focab, and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And I'm not supposed to be here for this episode.
Speaker 1: I was on vacation, but you guys actually decided to
Speaker 1: wait for me and let me talk about about human
Speaker 1: appearances changing over time, and it's so exciting to be well,
Speaker 1: we knew we were going to have to talk about
Speaker 1: what humans would look like in the future, and Jonathan,
Speaker 1: I think you are what humans are going to look
Speaker 1: like in the future. So sorry for all of humanity.
Speaker 1: We couldn't really do it without you. I appreciate that. No,
Speaker 1: I mean the more I've read into your notes and
Speaker 1: read the references and everything you guys had had really
Speaker 1: put together, I was really excited to hear this because
Speaker 1: this is pretty fascinating stuff. Oh yeah, and this is
Speaker 1: kind of part of our series. This originated as part
Speaker 1: of our series on what we don't see enough of
Speaker 1: in science fiction, right, though you do see some of this.
Speaker 1: But yeah, if you project forward a little bit in
Speaker 1: science fiction, look a few thousand years into the future.
Speaker 1: Part of the problem is you've got aliens who look
Speaker 1: alien and then unless it's Star Trek, in which case
Speaker 1: they look human, right or yeah, yeah, there's some sort
Speaker 1: of ridge somewhere on their face. And you've got humans
Speaker 1: who look exactly like humans look whenever the movie was made.
Speaker 1: Although you know, Patrick Stewart is captain Jean Loup Picard,
Speaker 1: you know what, you might be onto something about they
Speaker 1: look the future looks like me. He needs a goateee
Speaker 1: but yeah, yeah, and he needs to put on a
Speaker 1: few pounds. But other than that, yeah, no, we wanted
Speaker 1: to I'm okay with it now, we we we we
Speaker 1: really wanted to take a look at what will I mean,
Speaker 1: what what's the prevailing thought about what human appearance is
Speaker 1: going to be? And as it turns out, it's a
Speaker 1: very tricky thing to talk about for multiple reasons. Well,
Speaker 1: of course you can't really predict, right, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: one of those things where there's not a a clear
Speaker 1: projection that will be controlled by human behavior. Right, It's
Speaker 1: like kind of a it's kind of willy nilly, and
Speaker 1: it's kind of random. Right, there's not like a a
Speaker 1: simulation we can pull up where we just have a
Speaker 1: slider and we said, all right, let's just slide it
Speaker 1: forward fifty years. Oh, that's what we're gonna look like arms. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So we wanted to kind of talk about some of
Speaker 1: the scholarship behind this and the thoughts behind this, and
Speaker 1: really kind of dive into this topic and talk about
Speaker 1: some of the possibilities. Right. So, just last year, there
Speaker 1: was actually a funny news story and then a lot
Speaker 1: of back and forth between people in the media and
Speaker 1: the scientific community about this one particular article that Forbes published, Right,
Speaker 1: it went pretty viral. They published this this tech blog
Speaker 1: and or article and or content piece. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: exactly what, right um, it was called how the human
Speaker 1: Face Might look in a hundred thousand years. So this
Speaker 1: was June of last year. This was junect and h
Speaker 1: in it, Forbes staffer Parmi Olsen reported on work that
Speaker 1: had been done by by this digital artist named Nicola
Speaker 1: Lamb in collaboration with a computational genomist named Dr Alan Quan.
Speaker 1: I didn't even know computational genomist was a was a
Speaker 1: thing me neither. Pretty awesome, congratulations to that guy. And
Speaker 1: so in their work they speculated on what the face
Speaker 1: might look like in twenty thousand, sixty and a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand years. Okay, So so what did they come up with. Well,
Speaker 1: you guys might have seen a picture of this somewhere.
Speaker 1: It basically the furthest view out was the sort of
Speaker 1: anime character looking thing, right, okay, gigantic eyes, gigantic eyes,
Speaker 1: kind of weird big forehead. Uh and you're not so
Speaker 1: far sunny like me. Now, My eyes are not gigantic.
Speaker 1: I do have the weird big forehead though, That's okay.
Speaker 1: So their predictions fall into into a few broad categories. Okay.
Speaker 1: They suggested that the forehead will get longer and wider
Speaker 1: to accommodate a larger brain. We'll talk more about this
Speaker 1: way at the end of the podcast. Um that the
Speaker 1: eyes will get larger approaching and I quote unnerving lye large.
Speaker 1: This is what we call Disney princess large. As as
Speaker 1: we adapt to dimmer off earth environments and as we
Speaker 1: become more innocent, right. Um that our nostrils will get
Speaker 1: larger and our hair denser to help with breathing and
Speaker 1: heat retention off world. That way, I hope the timeline
Speaker 1: on this is really accelerated because that hair density thing
Speaker 1: is very very pertinent to me. Um. That our skin
Speaker 1: will get darker to help combat UV radiation outside of
Speaker 1: Earth's ozone, That we'll ditch wearable tech for subtle implants um.
Speaker 1: And that perhaps most importantly, genetic manipulation will render natural
Speaker 1: evolution moot um, likely resulting in increasingly normal human features
Speaker 1: with an emphasis on on symmetry and the golden ratio
Speaker 1: and that kind of ideal of human and normal normal
Speaker 1: and ideal there being in quotation really heavy quotation marks
Speaker 1: in case you can't tell my sarcasm voice, which I
Speaker 1: am told sometimes sounds a lot like my normal. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: now the exactly because normal, I mean, who defines what
Speaker 1: normal is in this case and this they're specifically looking
Speaker 1: at these these uh ideals which have been held up
Speaker 1: as ideals only by certain types certain cultures. Um. So yeah,
Speaker 1: you gotta take that with a grain of salt. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Another thing to note is that they're not suggesting that
Speaker 1: this is how humans will grow to look because of say,
Speaker 1: natural selection, they're saying that this is how we will
Speaker 1: basically decide will engineer, We will choose features and you know,
Speaker 1: so Gattica ask everyone will end up looking like Jude Law.
Speaker 1: Well I'm okay with that too actually, but the uh
Speaker 1: pretty man. But anyway, the the what I was going
Speaker 1: to go into here is that, uh, if some of
Speaker 1: this kind of makes sense from sort of a top
Speaker 1: level approach, right, the idea that if we are to
Speaker 1: go colonize other planets, there will likely be uh situations
Speaker 1: there that will be different enough from what we have
Speaker 1: here at Earth that we would need some form of
Speaker 1: adaptation to be able to thrive on said planet. And
Speaker 1: so while it might not be uh efficacious for us
Speaker 1: to wait for evolution to take hold so that whichever
Speaker 1: humans survive that initial colonization end up producing generation upon
Speaker 1: generation upon generation. Uh you know, multiply that out ten
Speaker 1: thousand times. Do you get to a group of human
Speaker 1: beings or what used to be human beings who are
Speaker 1: ideally suited for that planet. It may it's more sense
Speaker 1: that we would be taking an approach where we're making
Speaker 1: those choices consciously. Well, I mean, these days, in the
Speaker 1: ideal scenario, we do all we can to prevent natural
Speaker 1: selection from happening to humans frequently. Yeah, I had a joke,
Speaker 1: but I'm going to leave it on this case. You cat,
Speaker 1: you can thank me later, all right. So an observation
Speaker 1: I had about their predictions is that if you just
Speaker 1: take them as like, these are some kind of fun,
Speaker 1: interesting guesses, I think they are interesting total to go with.
Speaker 1: But there's sort of the question of, like, at what
Speaker 1: level are these being pitched. Are they just saying, here
Speaker 1: are some interesting suggestions, or are they saying we've got
Speaker 1: a pretty good idea what humans are going to look like?
Speaker 1: And I think that exact distinction was embodied in a
Speaker 1: lot of the responses. Oh yeah, because there is this
Speaker 1: whole flurry of response on the internet. Do you, guys,
Speaker 1: do you believe that the Internet took something way more
Speaker 1: seriously than they perhaps should have and blew it out
Speaker 1: of proportion. Um. I'm sorry, that's my sarcasm voice is
Speaker 1: strong today. UM. And I do want to point out
Speaker 1: here that that Nicolae Lamb is the guy who created
Speaker 1: that average Barbie doll that also went viral in um.
Speaker 1: If you remember the side by side photos of a
Speaker 1: of a of a store bought Barbie with a barbie
Speaker 1: who is shaped more or less like a human person.
Speaker 1: Um uh, yeah, he's that guy. He also is behind
Speaker 1: the Lammily doll line, which he kicks started in two
Speaker 1: to work towards producing realistic shaped dolls for kids. Because Okay,
Speaker 1: a thing to keep in mind about Lamb's work is
Speaker 1: that he's really savvy about producing stuff that will capture
Speaker 1: the public's imagination and click throughs. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: like this could be something where uh he imagines a
Speaker 1: scenario and then and then frames it in such a
Speaker 1: way that it's compelling enough for people to look at,
Speaker 1: participate in discussion about, but doesn't necessarily indicate any kind
Speaker 1: of expertise necessarily that or or scholarship that went into
Speaker 1: the the ultimate design or or or guess I think
Speaker 1: very much that Um that you know that that he
Speaker 1: and the other fellow Quan were trying to make an
Speaker 1: interesting thing, perhaps more so than an extraordinarily accurate future prediction. Well,
Speaker 1: and and one other thing I would point out, and
Speaker 1: some of the other discussions we're going to to chat
Speaker 1: about will sort of fall into this as well, is
Speaker 1: that while we could go the engineering route to try
Speaker 1: and take tackle some of these these issues. Another thing
Speaker 1: we could try, besides, you know, altering ourselves, is altering
Speaker 1: the environment we're going into, and therefore you wouldn't have
Speaker 1: the environmental requirement to adapt. We could adapt the environment,
Speaker 1: which is pretty much what humans have been doing for
Speaker 1: the last couple hundred years. Yeah. Typically we don't biologically
Speaker 1: adapt to our environments anymore. We adapt the environments, or
Speaker 1: we technologically adapt, right, right, right, You don't need crazy
Speaker 1: anime eyes if you have lamp, right right, that's a
Speaker 1: good point a Pitch Dark couldn't have, or is it
Speaker 1: pitch black? Pitch Black? That Pitch Black couldn't happen because
Speaker 1: because you know, that's a that's actually a good Vin
Speaker 1: Diesel movie, and you're gonna destroy the few good I'm
Speaker 1: not going to take Pitch Black away from us, all right.
Speaker 1: I think the thinking is that huge anime eyes would
Speaker 1: help protect the environment because you wouldn't need to use
Speaker 1: as much energy on lamps or in situations where energy
Speaker 1: is scarce. I'm pretty sure that our energy problem, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I'm pretty sure, and I know you're you're
Speaker 1: you're making a joke, but I have to be the
Speaker 1: jerk who who who comments on this. I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: by the time we're colonizing other world's we've kind of
Speaker 1: nailed the energy problem because that would necessitate us being
Speaker 1: able to get to said other world. But off world
Speaker 1: is always like the like the crazy wild West. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we always have to fusion reactors. Okay, Lauren, you mentioned
Speaker 1: a couple of the people who responded to the original
Speaker 1: article in the illustrations that these people did. What what
Speaker 1: were some of the responses? They were interesting, and we're
Speaker 1: talking a lot about this particular this particular prediction because
Speaker 1: the conversation that it generated really was fascinating, even if
Speaker 1: it was blown out of proportion. So George Dvorsky for
Speaker 1: I OH nine thought that Lamb and Quain's ideas actually
Speaker 1: didn't go far enough. He suggested that they should have
Speaker 1: taken into deeper account the possibility of technological additions and
Speaker 1: innovations to human biology, including the idea that we might
Speaker 1: be totally cyborgs, or have uploaded our consciousness, or be
Speaker 1: controlling robotic avatars from a distance. He he didn't really
Speaker 1: comment on the idea that humans might want to stay
Speaker 1: human looking, which is that's something I want to talk
Speaker 1: about in a bit here, but we can save that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I got I've got some stuff. I think Joe and
Speaker 1: I are going to throw down in that in that
Speaker 1: part of the conversation, I hope. So all right, just
Speaker 1: keep the fight on that side of the table. There
Speaker 1: was actually another writer for Forbes responded, though, uh yeah.
Speaker 1: Matthew Herper wrote a fairly snippy response entitled and I
Speaker 1: quote no, this is not how the human face face
Speaker 1: might look in a hundred thousand years um. In it,
Speaker 1: he he suggests that the genetic engineering that quantum Lamb
Speaker 1: hypothesized about is going to be taking place much sooner um,
Speaker 1: and also points out that a hundred thousand years is
Speaker 1: only about half the time that Homo sapiens have existed.
Speaker 1: As such, you know that that this is right, right right,
Speaker 1: This is basically minus you know, grooming and a little
Speaker 1: bit of skull size difference. This is how we've looked
Speaker 1: for that long. So so you know, a, it's unlikely
Speaker 1: that major facial changes will happen in so short and
Speaker 1: evolutionary period of time, and and be that it's impossible
Speaker 1: to say what tastes and trends will be like in
Speaker 1: the future. So therefore, Guessing what features we as as
Speaker 1: geneticists and or consumers are going to select in the
Speaker 1: future is just pure sci fi speculation, right. I mean,
Speaker 1: for one thing, we cannot anticipate what a generation that's
Speaker 1: five years removed from our own is going to perceive
Speaker 1: as being desirable or attractive. I mean, a fallout has
Speaker 1: taught us many things. But no, but but seriously, we don't.
Speaker 1: We can't predict what people are going to find attractive
Speaker 1: about the human form in one way or another. And
Speaker 1: that's part of what will really go into our discussion
Speaker 1: little bit later too. But so so yeah, it's really
Speaker 1: difficult to suggest that. Also as far as this this
Speaker 1: genetic engineering thing about how it's going to happen much sooner. Uh,
Speaker 1: that one I'm really curious about because I I foresee
Speaker 1: there's gonna be a lot of resistance on that front
Speaker 1: for a long time, for for for various reasons, including ethics.
Speaker 1: So you're saying it's not just that we might not
Speaker 1: have the technological expertise to do it, but that there
Speaker 1: might be reasons not to do There will be cultural
Speaker 1: and social taboos against genetic engineering, at least in certain
Speaker 1: parts of the world. For are a good long time,
Speaker 1: is my guess. That's a guess because we don't have
Speaker 1: enough right now to really say one way or the other.
Speaker 1: But just based upon the reactions we've seen to basic
Speaker 1: foundation research that would lead maybe one day to genetic engineering,
Speaker 1: we've already seen examples of people really kind of putting
Speaker 1: up barriers. Oh sure. Also, I think, and I think
Speaker 1: that a few of these nice people brought this up,
Speaker 1: um that if we're going to do genetic engineering, we're
Speaker 1: probably not going to be peddling around with eye color.
Speaker 1: We're going to be say, like wiping out really terrible
Speaker 1: diseases and stuff like that first and then maybe after that, Like,
Speaker 1: you know, my nose is a little bit big, I'd
Speaker 1: like to give my daughter a smaller nose. Is that possible?
Speaker 1: Stuff like that. Yeah, I've got more to say about
Speaker 1: that in the next setting too, just because just because
Speaker 1: human history is filled with people altering themselves. So my
Speaker 1: hair is blue right now, so so I totally get that,
Speaker 1: But I want to be born with blue hair. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure anyway. So uh. There was a response actually
Speaker 1: to Herper's response, and a response to the response, Yes,
Speaker 1: Kwan actually wrote him this really sick burn email that
Speaker 1: was the computation who worked on the original hypothesis here,
Speaker 1: and in which Kwan said, and I think this sums
Speaker 1: up his I mean, it was a really long email,
Speaker 1: so I'm just going to quote part of it, but
Speaker 1: I think it sums up his overall argument really well. Okay,
Speaker 1: so here we go. The operative word might, as in
Speaker 1: this is what the human face might look like in
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand years, makes the statement an existential statement,
Speaker 1: which means that there is a non zero possibility that
Speaker 1: a given event may occur. Given that we agree that
Speaker 1: no one can make an absolute statement about the future,
Speaker 1: by the same token, you cannot claim to know the
Speaker 1: negation of an existential statement. This is not how a
Speaker 1: face might look like or it's equivalent. There is no
Speaker 1: chance that the human face will look like this, all right,
Speaker 1: But I see this other thing in our notes here.
Speaker 1: This is kind of interesting to me. Uh, the question
Speaker 1: about whether or not we will be taller. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is something that I think has often sort of been imagined.
Speaker 1: It might be that we will get taller in the future,
Speaker 1: or that we are currently very tall compared to our ancestors,
Speaker 1: which I mean, if you've ever been in an old house, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: or a castle. I just I just walked around a
Speaker 1: few castles and there were times where I had to
Speaker 1: duck my head and I am not a tall person.
Speaker 1: Well it depends on which ancestors, it turns out, and
Speaker 1: that's going to come into something. But um so, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's this question have we grown taller than we used
Speaker 1: to be as a species and will we continue to
Speaker 1: grow taller as time goes on? So I want to
Speaker 1: start with one fact. A March paper in the Oxford
Speaker 1: Economic Journals found that from the mid eighteen hundreds to
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty, the average height of European adult males grew
Speaker 1: eleven centimeters. That's about four point three is significant. Wait
Speaker 1: that was in the Oxford Economic Journals. Was it based
Speaker 1: upon how expensive it is to build higher doorways? No,
Speaker 1: it turns out actually studying human height uh factors into
Speaker 1: economic papers a lot interest. It may reflect certain economic conditions,
Speaker 1: like a little bit of a spoiler, but for how
Speaker 1: this discussion is going to turn out. But there was
Speaker 1: also this other thing I found online that was funny.
Speaker 1: It was quote a living bar graph, So it was
Speaker 1: a comparison of height distribution among students at Connecticut State
Speaker 1: Agricultural College comparing photos taken in nineteen fourteen and then
Speaker 1: nineteen seven. So they had different bars basically with like
Speaker 1: a you know, five ft two, five ft three, and
Speaker 1: then they'd have the students who measured those heights line
Speaker 1: up behind each bar, so you'd get a bar graph
Speaker 1: made out of actual humans in the phototch and you
Speaker 1: can see over time that the distribution of males students
Speaker 1: goes up. So the average height of the male students
Speaker 1: was sixty seven point three inches in nineteen fourteen, and
Speaker 1: that increased to seventy point one inches in nine seven.
Speaker 1: That's a difference of two point eight inches or seven
Speaker 1: point one centimeters in just eighty three years. Now. Of course,
Speaker 1: there may be some self selection in this, because the
Speaker 1: Connecticut State at Agricultural College started offering scholarship packages to
Speaker 1: taller students in the nineteen fifties. That's yeah, that was
Speaker 1: just tough. I mean, you know, if you if you
Speaker 1: were below average height, you got the short end of
Speaker 1: the stick on that one. Okay, that was totally a joke.
Speaker 1: They did not offer scholarship packages to taller students. No,
Speaker 1: the students actually wasn't a joke, because to be a joke,
Speaker 1: you have to be funny first. Okay, so they add
Speaker 1: the student. The male students actually did get taller on average. Um,
Speaker 1: so there are more comparisons of average male height over
Speaker 1: time than average female height. For example, the ving barographed
Speaker 1: from Connecticut. There are no women in the nineteen fourteen photo.
Speaker 1: The women in the nine photo average sixty four point
Speaker 1: eight inches. But don't worry, in another eighty three years
Speaker 1: will be able to compare both men and women. I'm sure.
Speaker 1: So can we get a can we get a more
Speaker 1: general estimate? Like? Does this apply to women too? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems like it. So. In a nineteen guest article
Speaker 1: for Scientific American, the biologist Michael J. Doherty claimed that
Speaker 1: the average height of humans in industrialized countries had grown
Speaker 1: by about ten centimeters or four inches over the past
Speaker 1: century and a half. Okay, well, let me ask you
Speaker 1: this joke. Does this mean that we as a species
Speaker 1: are evolving rapidly to become like the next generation of
Speaker 1: NBA players? Is that what this is all about? Sadly no,
Speaker 1: So what scientists have discovered is that they think we
Speaker 1: are not evolving to grow taller and There are a
Speaker 1: bunch of reasons for thinking this. Number one is that
Speaker 1: it has been a steady progression of much shorter people
Speaker 1: long ago, too much taller people now. Instead, if we
Speaker 1: study history, it seems to be inconsistent. People get taller
Speaker 1: and then they get shorter, and then they get taller again.
Speaker 1: Are there any correlating effects that seem to go along
Speaker 1: with this taller shorter, taller thing, which perhaps we may
Speaker 1: have alluded to spoiling this part of the podcast. So Yeah,
Speaker 1: we observe around the world and in recent history that
Speaker 1: generations of children who suffer poor nutrition in early development
Speaker 1: remain shorter as adults, and when economic conditions improve in
Speaker 1: the next generation receives better food, those children tend to
Speaker 1: grow up to be taller adults. Is what we seem
Speaker 1: to observe. There's this study called anthropometric history, and that's
Speaker 1: the study of historical trends in human height. In the
Speaker 1: past couple of decades, people in this field have largely
Speaker 1: used the historical distribution and human height to study environmental
Speaker 1: and economic conditions, not population genetics. Yeah, makes sense. Uh.
Speaker 1: And finally that as far as we can tell, we
Speaker 1: sort of seem to have leveled off. So while these
Speaker 1: increases in average height can be charted over the past
Speaker 1: century and a half, were a lot taller on average
Speaker 1: than we were a hundred and fifty years ago, people
Speaker 1: in industrialized nations aren't really getting much taller anymore. We
Speaker 1: we seem to have kind of hit the max. Oh okay, well,
Speaker 1: you know that's all right. I wasn't expecting to grow
Speaker 1: any taller than I already have figured that my growth
Speaker 1: spurts were behind me every day. To be a little taller,
Speaker 1: a taller. Well, you know we should. We should put
Speaker 1: a little mark on the wall and just have it
Speaker 1: being Lauren's height, and we just have our stand under it.
Speaker 1: Every day we take another picture. Just the power of wishing.
Speaker 1: That's a scientific experiment. It sounds like testing the power
Speaker 1: of how tall the heels I can wear? Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: how about brains? Huge, huge brains. Part of that that
Speaker 1: facial features guestimation was was the four head will grow
Speaker 1: because our brains will get bigger, right, so therefore we'll
Speaker 1: need more space in our our heads to hold those
Speaker 1: those big old brains of ours. Have you ever seen
Speaker 1: a movie called This Islander? Yes? I have. You're talking
Speaker 1: about the aliens with the enormous brains to two different kinds,
Speaker 1: two different kinds, Lauren, let me parce it for it. First,
Speaker 1: you had the regular human looking aliens. They just have
Speaker 1: human looking is being general. They have hilariously huge foreheads,
Speaker 1: like you just had to cram an extra brain in there,
Speaker 1: so they made the skull bigger, which is yes, almost.
Speaker 1: It's why the MST three K version of it has
Speaker 1: one of the characters one of the robots. Just every
Speaker 1: time the the alien leader has a line to the
Speaker 1: humans and he's posing as a human. Is you just
Speaker 1: hear one of the robots say, but I'm not an alien.
Speaker 1: But then later in the movie you get an alien
Speaker 1: this brain mutant. So it's just got a huge, bulging
Speaker 1: brain and that's basically its head and expose giant brain
Speaker 1: with goggles. Is that what we're going to be because
Speaker 1: obviously we want our we want our brains to get
Speaker 1: more powerful. If we're thinking that we're going to continue
Speaker 1: to upgrade our intelligence, if we can genetically engineer ourselves
Speaker 1: to be smarter, that's gott I mean, we're going to
Speaker 1: have gigantoid brains. Right. Well, first of all, let's let's
Speaker 1: let's look back at history, right, we need to look
Speaker 1: back at our our ancestors and the and the and
Speaker 1: the predecessors to the humans. Sure, and it's certainly true
Speaker 1: that that human brains are a hominid brains at the
Speaker 1: very least have gotten much bigger over the past, say
Speaker 1: two to three million years. Yeah, that's right, So our
Speaker 1: brains have more than doubled in size since more than
Speaker 1: more than two two and a half million years ago.
Speaker 1: But does that necessarily mean that size is directly correlated
Speaker 1: with intelligence. There are some correlations, but it's not a
Speaker 1: totally direct correlation, right, It's not one to one certainly. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there there are some studies that show that
Speaker 1: that brain size and intelligence are not so closely correlated
Speaker 1: that you know, you would say, oh, this persent has
Speaker 1: a larger brain, therefore they are automatically smarter than this
Speaker 1: other person. Right, So, one example I'd like to give
Speaker 1: is that on average, men have slightly bigger brains than women.
Speaker 1: But don't take this and run with it, you woman
Speaker 1: hating jerks. That does not mean men are smarter than women.
Speaker 1: In fact, men are not measurably smarter than women. It
Speaker 1: seems that For example, one one thing explaining part of
Speaker 1: this is that women have more densely crowded neurons in
Speaker 1: some parts of the brain, the cerebral cortex. Uh. Women
Speaker 1: may have up to twelve percent more neurons in the
Speaker 1: cortex than men. And then there is the fact that
Speaker 1: it's actually the brain to body mass ratio that is
Speaker 1: a little bit more predictive of intelligence. But even then
Speaker 1: you have some variation with that. Sure. Well, like like
Speaker 1: an elephant's brain can wait four times is that of
Speaker 1: a humans? Um? And they, as far as I know,
Speaker 1: don't do many of the complex things that we do.
Speaker 1: If they do, they're really good at hiding it. Um. No,
Speaker 1: they need those those big brains to control their huge
Speaker 1: muscle blocks. Well that makes sense. Um, there's there's also okay,
Speaker 1: so within the human species itself, the largest Homo sapiens
Speaker 1: brains on record belong to the chro Magnets, which were
Speaker 1: a subset of early modern humans who lived some forty
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. And and some people theorize that they
Speaker 1: needed those bigger skulls, uh, not to you know, do
Speaker 1: computational science, but but rather to chew their less refined
Speaker 1: food or you know, simply having a thick skull to
Speaker 1: like survive infancy. That's really useful. They might have been
Speaker 1: calculating how long it would take them to chew that food.
Speaker 1: It's don't I don't know. I've never asked one. I
Speaker 1: want to throw an even bigger wrench into this and say, okay,
Speaker 1: so we've established that it's not necessarily just a brain
Speaker 1: size issue. Brain size is correlated to intelligence, but it's
Speaker 1: not a one to one thing. But this is the
Speaker 1: craziest thing. Our brains may not even right now be
Speaker 1: the biggest they've ever been. Modern humans we should probably
Speaker 1: say are the most intellectually advanced SPECIs as far as
Speaker 1: we know. I mean, but the most intellectually advanced ones
Speaker 1: that we've encountered at any rate, and not including dolphins
Speaker 1: and and certainly for smarter overall than Cora magnets. Probably, yeah,
Speaker 1: most likely. But what if our brains had been bigger
Speaker 1: than they are now? Yeah? There is evidence that they
Speaker 1: have been shrinking recently. According to paleo anthropologist John Hawks
Speaker 1: in this really great Discover magazine article, um over the
Speaker 1: past twenty years, the average volume of the human male
Speaker 1: brain has decreased from about one five cubic centimeters to
Speaker 1: about one thousand, three hundred and fifty um and that's okay.
Speaker 1: Conversions are awkward. From metric to imperial that's like six
Speaker 1: and the third cups of brain to about five and
Speaker 1: two third cups of brain are like three point two
Speaker 1: points to two point eight five points. It's a chunk
Speaker 1: about the size of a tennis ball. Um and and
Speaker 1: and and women's brains, for the record, have have shrunk
Speaker 1: proportionally as well. So wait a minute, how are they
Speaker 1: explaining this? Are we getting dumber than we used to be? Um? Well, okay,
Speaker 1: so so they've tread carefully. Different paleontologists and anthropologists have
Speaker 1: different theories about why and how and the exact effect
Speaker 1: that this is having on on humans as a society. Um.
Speaker 1: The first is that, yeah, we're getting dumber, um uh.
Speaker 1: And and and Magnans were not less intelligent. I either
Speaker 1: do to something like have you guys seen idiocracy? Um yeah,
Speaker 1: just just the lowest common denominator becoming the greatest denominator?
Speaker 1: Um uh. And or that as a society, you know,
Speaker 1: being a society means that we don't have to be
Speaker 1: so smart to stay alive individually. There is not as
Speaker 1: much of an imperative for intelligence because collectively we're able
Speaker 1: to handle so much, right. Um. Another theory put forth
Speaker 1: is that our brains are getting more efficient, um, both
Speaker 1: more agile and also more energy efficient, allowing us to
Speaker 1: concentrate less on food and more on playing really awesome
Speaker 1: guitar riffs well sure, um. Or perhaps that we've domesticated ourselves. Um.
Speaker 1: A marker of tame animals after many generations is a
Speaker 1: smaller brain size, which again kind of goes back into
Speaker 1: that idea of they don't need as large a brain
Speaker 1: because they don't have They don't have to rely so
Speaker 1: much on survival skills because I got a big old
Speaker 1: dumb human taking care of them, right right um. Or finally,
Speaker 1: that are changing diet means that our food is so
Speaker 1: much easier to eat that our skulls don't need to
Speaker 1: be as big for us to chew it. And also,
Speaker 1: I mean, I I don't think that we mentioned this before,
Speaker 1: but a definite uh impediment to you know, ludicrously large
Speaker 1: unnervingly large brains is that the human birth canal is
Speaker 1: not getting proportionately larger anytime soon. I don't think, I
Speaker 1: mean like like it would require the birth canal to
Speaker 1: get larger, or or human hips to get larger. Well,
Speaker 1: by that time, we'll all be born in artificial wombs.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, yeah, like the matrix will just be in
Speaker 1: little pods. Okay. I think by that time, we're actually
Speaker 1: gotten to the point where our brains are just in jars,
Speaker 1: and so then you'll be bragging to everyone else about
Speaker 1: how big your jar is. Okay, yeah, I want to
Speaker 1: switch to a different topic. Okay, please do. Are we
Speaker 1: gonna become the borg? Because this is what everybody imagines, right,
Speaker 1: So we were heading towards the singularity. We're gonna start
Speaker 1: incorporating more technology into our brains, into our bodies to
Speaker 1: supplement all the things we can't do with these weak,
Speaker 1: puny little muscles and the gray matter up here. Why
Speaker 1: not just cram computers into our skin so we'll have
Speaker 1: little wires and circuit boards popping out everywhere. I feel
Speaker 1: like this sort of ties into divorce. These comment on
Speaker 1: the first the first article we were talking about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, he seemed to think we weren't going far enough. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, if I could replace one eye
Speaker 1: with little blinking LEDs that say something clever and morse
Speaker 1: code I probably would today. Okay, there you go. Alright, well, Joe,
Speaker 1: I want to hear I want to hear your your
Speaker 1: point of view on this because then I want to,
Speaker 1: uh to engage in a discussion about this, because I
Speaker 1: have I have some thoughts on my own. Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 1: Well I kind of doubt that. I mean, I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe because of course human culture and what we find
Speaker 1: attractive is it's adaptable. We know to some extent, we
Speaker 1: don't know to what extent. And I would guess, based
Speaker 1: on my affinity for something called the biophilia hypothesis, that
Speaker 1: we probably aren't going to want ourselves to look to
Speaker 1: computer y and machine e so that that hypothesis is
Speaker 1: the EO. Wilson one. Right, Yeah, So this is put
Speaker 1: forth by EO. Wilson. There have been a lot of
Speaker 1: people who have written about it, and the biophilia hypothesis
Speaker 1: is what it sounds like. It's the idea that living
Speaker 1: organisms like humans have an inherent, deeply instinctual affinity for
Speaker 1: other living organisms and living systems, so that we are
Speaker 1: always going to prefer organic life to artifactual synthetic types
Speaker 1: of objects, and that humans, you'd always prefer a forest
Speaker 1: to room with concrete walls, and that that and that
Speaker 1: that goes deep. It's not just sort of a cultural
Speaker 1: institution like, uh, yeah, you know forests are nice because
Speaker 1: I learned that when I was a kid. It's it's
Speaker 1: part of the animal that we are to prefer those things.
Speaker 1: That that's sort of I mean, it's still a hypothesis.
Speaker 1: Of course, that's not something that's proven to be true,
Speaker 1: but that it seems to ring true to me. Interesting,
Speaker 1: so uh and of course sorry, to complete the thought, sure,
Speaker 1: how this would apply to humans would be to say
Speaker 1: that no, maybe our our cultural appreciation for what humans
Speaker 1: should look like it can change, but it doesn't go
Speaker 1: that far. It doesn't go to the point where we
Speaker 1: want humans to stop looking organic. Sure, Like, you know,
Speaker 1: taking it back to the board kind of reference, there's
Speaker 1: probably a reason that the board were these horrifying villains
Speaker 1: and not really the good guys. Until we got a
Speaker 1: sexy lady borg. It was okay to be one of
Speaker 1: the good guys because we had taken most of that
Speaker 1: weird computer stuff off. Well, and there's some things and
Speaker 1: we've we've referenced some of this earlier there's some things
Speaker 1: that if you were to change them about the human face,
Speaker 1: they do for most people, uh, illicit a sense of
Speaker 1: unease or even horror. We've seen that used to great
Speaker 1: effect in horror movies where you often have um villainous
Speaker 1: human characters or quasi human in the case of some
Speaker 1: of these, because they have appeared to have some sort
Speaker 1: of supernatural et right, but they often have faces that
Speaker 1: are asymmetrical, or you will end up creating a sense
Speaker 1: of horror by taking a person's face and then suddenly
Speaker 1: distorting it in some way. There's the scene in In
Speaker 1: the Ring where it's a very quick flash of a
Speaker 1: person whose face has been distorted so like their nose
Speaker 1: has been this place, their eyes get a little out
Speaker 1: of alignment, and it does created a really shocking sense
Speaker 1: of unease among a very wide audience. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: just one of those kind of reactions. Uh and and
Speaker 1: quick quick sidetrack on that one. I think that that's
Speaker 1: what uh lamb and quon we're talking about with the
Speaker 1: golden rule and end symmetry, because you mean the golden ratio,
Speaker 1: the gold under you ive by that rule, Yes, the
Speaker 1: golden ratio. Thank you, Joe that yes, and because um,
Speaker 1: one of the markers of beauty, and and I mean,
Speaker 1: of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder
Speaker 1: and all of that kind of stuff. But no, it's
Speaker 1: it's also scientific, um that that a symmetrical face is
Speaker 1: considered beautiful. Well, a couple of things I wanted to say.
Speaker 1: One of them is actually in the notes, which is that, uh,
Speaker 1: they any sort of technological enhancements do not necessarily mean
Speaker 1: we are going to have great cosmetic changes in a
Speaker 1: person's appearance. Right. That's one thing I predicted is that, well,
Speaker 1: it seems pretty obvious that if we can give you,
Speaker 1: if we can upgrade your brain with computers, we can
Speaker 1: probably do it in a way that's not going to
Speaker 1: be too visually obtrusive. Right. There might be some that
Speaker 1: people choose to have, Like you were talking about an
Speaker 1: LED light that blinks out Morse code in place of
Speaker 1: an eye lareen. But that was just a Patrick Stewart
Speaker 1: Bard reference. But even so, even though that's that's a
Speaker 1: joking reference, I could easily see technological enhancements or body
Speaker 1: modification being something that gets embraced by perhaps at first
Speaker 1: a yeah subculture, but then get embraced by a larger culture.
Speaker 1: And the reason why I feel pretty confident about that
Speaker 1: is that human history is filled with examples of people
Speaker 1: undergoing various types of body modification in pursuit of some
Speaker 1: sort of perceived beauty that was supported by that culture.
Speaker 1: There were a lot of different reasons for something to
Speaker 1: be seen as beautiful depending upon the culture. For example,
Speaker 1: there's the foot binding in Chinese culture, which was in
Speaker 1: part seen as a a you know, the ideal of
Speaker 1: female beauty was to have that lotus foot. It was
Speaker 1: also in part as a means of subjugating women. So
Speaker 1: it's all, you know, culturally tied up. It's not just
Speaker 1: like this is what we considered to be beautiful. It's
Speaker 1: very complex exactly. But the fact that we've seen things
Speaker 1: like piercings and tattoos become more more accepted in a
Speaker 1: Western culture over the last I mean even in my lifetime,
Speaker 1: I've seen that the fact that I have a shaved
Speaker 1: head and that is considered to be culturally fine in
Speaker 1: in America, that has changed. When I first started doing it,
Speaker 1: it was before you saw it pretty frequently, and so
Speaker 1: I don't know if guys just were holding onto their
Speaker 1: hair more back then, but I frequently encountered people who
Speaker 1: had not really talked to anyone who had ever shaved
Speaker 1: their head. It was it was really an unusual experience
Speaker 1: for them. So I had a lot of people asking
Speaker 1: if they could touch my head. Thankfully, that part of
Speaker 1: my life is behind me, I guess, because now we've
Speaker 1: hit a kind of u uh, you know, saturation point
Speaker 1: of bald guys, particularly the bald guys would goatee Heisenberg appearance.
Speaker 1: So at any rate, we've seen changes like changes and
Speaker 1: ideas of beauty and modification happened over the past. So
Speaker 1: I don't think that we will necessarily see a future
Speaker 1: where this sort of thing isn't embraced, and perhaps at
Speaker 1: first it'll be a very niche cultural kind of thing.
Speaker 1: But I don't necessarily think that we're going to have
Speaker 1: uh people avoiding it forever either. It may be that
Speaker 1: humans sixty thousand years into the future look extremely different
Speaker 1: because they have modified themselves in numerous ways. I mean,
Speaker 1: I can imagine being able to give yourself like electrically
Speaker 1: glittery skin or that kind of thing. You know, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's definitely in that realm of science fiction, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of anime style in a way. But I don't
Speaker 1: think it's necessarily beyond believability. I think the prime time
Speaker 1: to introduce glittery skin body mods would have been, you know,
Speaker 1: five or six years ago, whenever it was Twilight Big.
Speaker 1: Really it would have been in the mid nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: with David Bowie glam Rock. Okay, either are going to
Speaker 1: be really necessary. Way, Well, I want to offer another,
Speaker 1: uh concession to what you say, is that we may
Speaker 1: adapt to it. I thought also that getting all borged
Speaker 1: out could in the future become an example of a
Speaker 1: kind of performative consumption. Right, so if it if it
Speaker 1: costs money to get cybernetic implants and things like, it's
Speaker 1: a status symbol exactly. It could be the future's equivalent
Speaker 1: of wearing expense of jewelry and driving flashy sports cars.
Speaker 1: You you advertise your financial value by gluing computer parts
Speaker 1: to your face and all this. You might even have
Speaker 1: people faking it, like they don't actually have cybernetic implants,
Speaker 1: they're just sticking stuff on their bodies. So this would
Speaker 1: be an intermediary step from the brains and the jars
Speaker 1: in my jar is bigger than your jar. Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: saying it could be and bigger than. If this were
Speaker 1: the case, it's sort of be a question of competition
Speaker 1: between the need to show your value and this desire
Speaker 1: to fill the natural biophelia. If that, in fact is
Speaker 1: is true. You know, I think again, I can totally
Speaker 1: understand people saying that this hypothesis rings true, this biophelia hypothesis. Uh, certainly,
Speaker 1: there are plenty of examples if we just look at
Speaker 1: our fiction of that being true, where you either have
Speaker 1: the perfect hero and the disfigured villain, or you have
Speaker 1: the disfigured hero who whom everyone treats as a villain
Speaker 1: unfairly do simply because of their their appearance. But then
Speaker 1: it's revealed that the this person is actually beautiful on
Speaker 1: the inside and it becomes you know, an object lesson
Speaker 1: for for the reader. Yeah, exactly, so, there there's plenty
Speaker 1: of examples just in human experience that support this hypothesis. Obviously,
Speaker 1: that's not, you know enough, from a scientific perspective. It's
Speaker 1: merely anecdotal, But it's anecdotal supported by at least in
Speaker 1: Western culture, hundreds of years of literature and and uh,
Speaker 1: and in theater and that sort of thing. Well, and
Speaker 1: there are actual scientists debating this. Toime, it's not just
Speaker 1: speculations right right now, I'm just saying that, you know,
Speaker 1: we can't we don't have the scientific uh you know,
Speaker 1: uh consensus on this yet, but there seems to be
Speaker 1: quite a bit of support from other parts of the
Speaker 1: human experience or you know. The other thing we could
Speaker 1: say is that even if it is a deeply rooted,
Speaker 1: deeply instinctual genetic predisposition, we have to prefer things that
Speaker 1: look living versus things that look ARTIFICI shoal today, maybe
Speaker 1: we'll evolve that could be a thing that we change
Speaker 1: about ourselves. So at any rate, this has really been
Speaker 1: a very interesting discussion. I mean, it's it is something
Speaker 1: that's interesting to think about, like what are people going
Speaker 1: to look like in the future? Will we And we've
Speaker 1: got plenty of examples in science fiction of the idea
Speaker 1: of cosmetic surgery gone run amuck, where people have have
Speaker 1: taken the what we consider to be uh, either the
Speaker 1: ideal or examples of outliers of cosmic surgery today and
Speaker 1: then they just multiply that by a hundred so that
Speaker 1: we get these truly at least to us outrageous examples
Speaker 1: of of modification that who knows, perhaps in uh in
Speaker 1: in several thousand years, these things that seemed completely extreme
Speaker 1: and ludicrous to us might not seem that way in
Speaker 1: the future. It may very well be that these things
Speaker 1: that we think are absurd now are just the norm. Yeah. So, ultimately,
Speaker 1: when it comes down to what are humans gonna look
Speaker 1: like in the future, we have to say we do
Speaker 1: not know. There is there is no mean, there's no
Speaker 1: way of predicting it because so many different factors are
Speaker 1: come into play when it comes to human appearance, and
Speaker 1: human preference is one of those, and that changes from
Speaker 1: generation to generations or a minute a minute, Yeah, it
Speaker 1: just takes me back to college. So anyway, guys, Uh,
Speaker 1: I think this was a fun topic. It was not
Speaker 1: something that we would normally tackle, right, It was a
Speaker 1: little bit outside of it. And but I love that
Speaker 1: it's also in that kind of things that are not
Speaker 1: always addressed in science fiction realm, and I love that
Speaker 1: we're doing these sort of topics. So you guys, if
Speaker 1: you enjoy these topics, make sure you get in touch
Speaker 1: with us. Let's know what you like. Uh, let's know
Speaker 1: if there are any topics specifically that you think we
Speaker 1: have to tackle. You know, why is it in science
Speaker 1: fiction films you never see X and um, I'm sure
Speaker 1: we're gonna get some interesting examples and I can't wait
Speaker 1: to read them. So let's know. On Twitter, on Facebook,
Speaker 1: or Google Plus. You can find us with the handle
Speaker 1: f W Thinking and we will talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. For more on this topic and the future
Speaker 1: of technology, visit Forward Thinking dot Com Problem brought to
Speaker 1: you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,