When Do We Evolve?
How Greg Bear, Charles Darwin, and Claudio Sanchez end up in the mosh pit of sci-fi
I keep a fairly long list of ideas for this newsletter - work, technology, music, culture, observations on life. Occasionally they start to network and attract each other and a fully formed piece comes together, while other snippets are digital post-it notes wandering through the notebooks I use to keep things somewhat organized.
Here’s the backstory: About a decade ago I decided that one of my retirement projects would be a somewhat serious college course based on the music of Coheed and Cambria. There are enough space opera, sci-fi and political themes in their first five albums to generate a syllabus that would terrify any student (although now, the students’ parents were likely fans of the early canon). One of the themes is that of a human transmissible engineered virus that causes ecosystem - and solar system scale - damage when activated; my first thought for companion reading was Greg Bear’s “Darwin’s Radio".
Bear explores the conditions under which homo sapiens may evolve - we’ve been sitting in the post-Neanderthal evolutionary pocket for a while and and it’s matter of time until genetic variation (natural mutation or accelerated through genetic editing) or genetic adaptation (due to climate change, food shortages, or changing diets amplified by both) actually evolves humans into whatever is next. In a few hundred pages Bear captures a sci-fi time lapse of the social and political upheaval that evolution coupled with technology might bring (and it was written before social media further amplified those signals, good or bad).
That’s as far as I got through 30 months of writing and some live Coheed and Cambria shows. And then Greg Bear passed away three months ago, and I not only went back to this three-sentence prompt but picked up George Dyson’s “Darwin Among The Machines.”
Dyson’s book is also a bit dated, written well before GPT and transformer large language models have made us rethink human-computer interaction. It got me thinking about the evolution of generative artificial intelligence, brought me back to Greg Bear’s equally accelerated views of evolution on a human scale, and here we are.
Whether through genetic engineering, climate and food catastrophe, or some other need to interact with each other and the planet in a less species-challenging way, humans will evolve — likely too slowly for us to notice at any point in time. Annalee Newitz’s “Scatter, Adapt and Remember” is a superb blueprint for dealing with the century-duration impacts of those same problems.
If I ever do create the course — probably as a Coursera offering — the final exam will involve creative answers to these existential challenges — those central to both hard sci-fi and hard core emo music. I expect students to use ChatGPT to generate their essay answers, which will be acceptable if the prompts — the existential questions posed to generate sensible answers — reflect an awareness of the material.
Isn’t that what Douglas Adams’ Deep Thought computer asked us to do when we found out the answer to life is 42?