“What would happen if women could order Brad Pitt’s sperm?"

The founding director of the Harvard Business School’s Life Sciences Project, Juan Enriquez, posed a question at a TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar, in April 2012. Enriquez’s question was one that he had been enthralling audiences with a lot. He spoke about the history of life, tracing it from the Big Bang, to the birth of the stars, to the perimeter of the galaxy, to parts played by the sun, earth, and man, a history that spanned 14 billion years, involved tril­lions of stars, and then he asked the audience one question: What was the purpose of all this? He moved on to the next PowerPoint slide to provide the answer: A photo of Pamela Anderson and then Michael Jackson—the point being that man is the almighty purpose, the be all and end all of life, after which, he claimed, evolution flatlines to the end. His next question was “Wouldn’t that be slightly arrogant? There has been something like twenty-five human species; why couldn’t there be another?”

Indeed, why couldn’t there, particularly if we were entering a mass extinction? Many scientists believe that natural selection operates mainly on the frontiers of change.

*

Seventy-seven thousand years ago, a human sat in a limestone cave in Africa on a cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean, cooled by a sea breeze and warmed by a small fire. He picked up a sharp rock and made a crosshatch design on a piece of reddish brown stone that scientists claim is the oldest known example of an intricate design made by a human being. It demonstrates the ability of man to communicate symbolically, which scientists believe sets Homo sapiens apart from other hominids on earth at that time.

This symbolic communicator with his stone tools and weapons had a competitive advantage as he moved out of Africa on the “Great Mi­gration” into territory occupied by other species of the Homo genus. Homo sapiens first traveled to Asia eighty thousand to sixty thousand years ago. By forty-five thousand years ago this new hominid had set­tled Australia, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia.

Keep in mind that by this point there may have been four different species on the planet: Homo sapiens, Homo floresiensis, Neanderthals, and Denisovans, the last a potential new human species described from a finger bone fragment found in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. But Homo sapiens eventually won out—the actual last man standing.

Harpending and Cochran think there has been significant evolu­tion in the past fifty thousand years between human populations sepa­rated by great distance and geographical barriers. “No Finn could be mistaken for a Zulu, no Zulu for a Finn. There have been substantial changes in the genetic makeup of humans since man spread out of Africa, and those changes have taken on significant characteristics in different populations,” they wrote in "The 10,000 Year Explosion."

Robert Fogel, a University of Chicago economist, while study­ing the effects of American slavery, discovered that over the past few centuries—particularly in the last fifty years—Americans in gen­eral have been growing taller, living longer, and getting thicker. In 1850, the average American male was five feet seven inches tall and weighed about 146 pounds. By 1980 he stood five feet ten inches and weighed 174 pounds. A team of economists extended the statis­tical search worldwide and found the trend was global.

It turns out that advances in medicine, better nutrition, better working conditions, cleaner water, and a general reduction in pol­lution have netted humans a biological advantage. It’s most dramatic when you consider age. When Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago, the average life expectancy was twenty years. By the year 1900 it had become forty-four years. Today it is closer to eighty years, almost doubling in only a hundred years. And these are heritable trends passed on from parents to chil­dren, generated by improvements in health and medicine.

So is there another species in the wings?

*

As we’ve shown, nature does better when there are multiple species of any animal. Our single species is a bit unnatural. Multiple species of man have historically been the norm, rather than the single spe­cies we have today. Nature prefers biodiversity. A single species is not a strong holding position to maintain for any animal. But how could another species evolve?

There are two dominant types of speciation: allopatric speciation and sympatric speciation, with two other variants, peripatric specia­tion and parapatric speciation, in between. Allopatric speciation oc­curs in geographic isolation; sympatric speciation, however, occurs in the presence of other species, such as a lake where fish might seg­regate in the water column—some to the top, some to the bottom— and over time become separate species. Species could also form by specializing on different types of food, as the finches of Peter Grant’s study on the Galápagos. Though Grant has yet to record a verifiable speciation, he has keyed into the possibility of that happening by studying how different sizes of seeds select for different beak sizes among the finches and how that selection pressure might produce another species.

Robert C. Stebbins studied populations of a small salamander at UC Berkeley in the 1940s. He proposed that Ensatina originated in the state of Oregon and spread south among the mountains on both sides of California’s Central Valley, the valley floor being too dry and hot for salamanders. As the pioneering populations moved southward, they evolved into several subspecies. Each subspecies had new color patterns as well as adaptations for living in different environments. But by the time they met again at the southern end of the Central Valley, they had evolved so much that they no longer interbred— even though they blended into one another and had interbred in the mountains around the valley rim. This minimum of isolation was all it took to differentiate a species.

Are we overstating geological separation as a starting point for the next species?

Could we do it with sympatric speciation—splitting into two in the presence of others? What evolutionary pressures in the human population might produce another species of modern man?

Could sympatric evolution be achieved by another formula? Har­vard’s Enriquez says that isolation could be achieved by what he calls the “sexy geek syndrome.” This might occur if computer program­mers are put in isolation and interbred. Such a scenario already exists at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. Nicknamed Googleplex, it’s like a college campus filled with employees wear­ing jeans, wandering around among the dogs, bicycles, and volleyball courts. Google sends out special luxury buses to pick up its work­ers, which prevents pairings with non-Google people on the drive to work.

Googleplex buildings have high ceilings, lots of natural light, and open cubicles for offices. There are a number of cafeterias where em­ployees can sit around tables, argue algorithms, listen to rock music, and eat free gourmet food. You can even bring your dog to work. Google guards its employees jealously, offering them high compensa­tion, a work environment that provides all their needs, and a system that allows employees to work about one day each week on their own projects, giving everyone the opportunity to be the next Larry Page or Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. How do you walk away from that?

Is this enough isolation to achieve speciation one day? Perhaps— especially since many computer jobs require twelve-hour days, which in itself limits the number of hours one can search for a mate.

*

We’ve proven we can change the genetic makeup of plants and ani­mals, so how about us? We don’t need to wait for natural selection: we can start selecting right now. The cost of genomic sequencing, the key to moving modern medicine from reactive standards to per­sonalized prevention, has fallen astronomically. When the Human Genome Project was announced in 1990, deciphering the genome of one man was budgeted at $3 billion. By 2001 the cost was down to $3 million. In 2010 it was below $5,000. By 2012 it was below $1,000. At this rate, in ten years a fully sequenced human genome should cost about $10.

As genetic screenings become more common, designing the body to alter genetic weaknesses will be more common as well. Angelina Jolie getting a double mastectomy because of a gene in her body that makes her more susceptible to breast cancer is just the start. It may one day be possible to change the gene rather than the result. The negative aspect is that many genes perform more than one function. Changing a gene to match a given result may have unintended conse­quences. Trial and error will be necessary here.

What will be the big forces behind genetic manipulation? The University of Washington’s Peter Ward sees parents as strong se­lective forces, since many will want their offspring to live long, look good, and be brainy. “If the kids are as smart as they are long-lived— an IQ of 150 and a life span of 150 years—they could have more chil­dren and accumulate more wealth than the rest of us,” wrote Ward in a January 2009 article for Scientific American. Socially they would be drawn to others of their kind, which could lead to speciation.

Parental desires could provide the big necessary push for the cre­ation of designer genes if only to ensure that their children will be talented, the right height, or the right weight. Such considerations could be a major force for not just designer genes but designer chil­dren. Stanford University’s Rob Jackson speculates, “What would happen if women could order Brad Pitt’s sperm from the back of a magazine? Even better, what if they could mix Will Smith’s smile and George Clooney’s eyes from a catalog? It will fundamentally change the human race.”

What if we could alter male genes to make the perfect soldier? Ac­cording to Henry Harpending, “The Chinese talk about that often— without batting an eye.” The perfect soldier . . . what about the perfect nuclear physicist?

Each of our cells contains our entire genome. Every one of your cells has the genetic blueprint to make an entire you. In 2009, Chinese scientists took skin cells from a mouse and turned them into stem cells. Then they took those stem cells and allowed them to regrow, differentiate, and give birth to a live mouse. Which could then repro­duce normally.

The mouse, Xiao Xiao (“Tiny” in Mandarin), was born from one of its mother’s skin cells. What this means is that, in theory, it should be possible to take any one of our cells and create a clone. Remember Dolly, the cloned sheep? Though society has frowned on repetitions of cloning, how long will it take before someone decides they are so special that there needs to be more than one of them? The ability to clone ourselves from skin cells, to change our organs at will, could lead to an explosion of hominid species.

UPLOADING THE MIND

There are other variations on this copying thing. One is uploading your brain. Ed Boyden, a synthetic neurobiologist at MIT, is currently attempting to map the human brain. There are more than 100 billion computational elements in our brain. So Ed designed his own way of isolating brain circuits. He learned how to take stuff out of algae and use it to illuminate and activate specific brain pathways. He can then use the light to watch what is happening inside a brain as a mouse moves an arm, sees, touches, or smells something.

To get beyond simple neural mapping, I hopped a fast train from London Paddington to Oxford station and then took a cab that cir­cled the Oxford campus through stately old buildings that I recog­nized from watching British mysteries, finally arriving at the Future of Humanity Institute at the edge of the Oxford University campus.

Nick Bostrom, a confident, cerebral man of medium height and slim build, met me in his second-story office overlooking the his­toric city. Bostrom likes to spend his time contemplating the various threats to our existence—their probabilities and what we might do about them. Bostrom thinks there is a big gap between the speed of technological advance and an understanding of the dangers it has for man.

That overcast day, however, we were talking about the possibilities involved in uploading one’s mind, though Bostrom didn’t ignore its dangers. Bostrom believes that as technology accelerates, “at some point the technology of mind uploading becomes available and we may transform the human brain into software.” He said this could be possible by making high-resolution scans of thinly sliced layers of the brain and then uploading those scans to a computer. He felt it was not that far away.

The idea is that human consciousness could well exist in a ma­chine after the body has been discarded or, more likely, outlived. “The main pressure for this could come from people who are termi­nally ill and want to try immortality,” Bostrom said. He thought our neural architecture might exist on a computer, but our consciousness might “reside in a robot in the real world or as an avatar in a virtual reality.”

There is precedent for this in the computer game world. Second Life is a 3-D online community that has millions of users who take regular walks in a virtual world where everyone is beautiful. It is the creation of Linden Lab in San Francisco and provides its users with a real-time experience on their personal computers, allowing them to wander around castles, deserted islands, other fantastic 3-D environ­ments, and meet thousands of online participants, talk, and even have simulated sex. The company reports that the average player spends about twenty hours a week in these environments.

Bostrom claimed that once society is uploaded, it would be practi­cal to separate our abilities into nodules that could perform different tasks. After all, it would be more efficient to hire a math nodule rather than waste a lot of time doing math. One of the goals of artificial intelligence—to make all knowledge accessible to all people—could be accomplished much more easily if we were all connected pieces of software. And Bostrom feels this will naturally breed specialization.

Once specializations are standardized, copying oneself would be­come logical, because it would increase the worth and the assets of the individual. He said that there would still be people who would like to do things themselves—for example, hobbyists who would enjoy planting vegetables or knitting their own sweaters—but they would be outcompeted by people that didn’t need such things. The old argu­ment that man needs rest and relaxation once in a while would disap­pear in an uploaded world, since software packages don’t need to rest.

In such a world, Bostrom sees simulated life splitting into two groups. One group would replicate current human values by engaging in such enjoyable stuff as humor, love, game-playing, art, sex, dancing, social conversation, food, and the like. Though Bostrom thinks those activities may have been adaptive in our evolutionary past, he wonders if they would be adaptive in the future. “Perhaps what will maximize fitness in the future will be nonstop high-intensity drudgery—work of a drab and repetitive nature—aimed at improving the eighth decimal of some economic output measure,” said Bostrom.

The competing superpowers of Bostrom’s future uploaded world would be the all-work-and-no-fun group, or what he calls the “fitness­maximizing competitors,” versus the “happiness and well-being group.” He envisions the fitness-maximizing competitors as eventu­ally taking over the capital of the day from the happiness-and-well­being group, since the latter might still like to play now and then—an activity okay for today’s organic brains, but unnecessary, time wasting, and fruitless to our future software selves.

This would result in a future world where everyone is a fitness-maximizing competitor or where some happiness-and-well-being agents continue to survive, but their activities would go on under­ground.

Bostrom thinks that if we want to continue with this interest in occasional happiness, we might need to pass laws that tax fitness-maximizing activities while subsidizing happiness-and-well-being cognitive architectures. For example, some fraction of our resources might be set aside in a happiness-and-well-being conservation fund. We might also have to pass laws against building artificial intelligences that are hostile to human values—another of Bostrom’s worries.

Excerpted from "The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man" by Michael Tennesen. Published by Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2015 by Michael Tennesen. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.