Happy Valentine’s Day

This week every sitcom, column and podcast dutifully released a Valentine’s Day episode. Studio 360’s solicited ideas on resdesigning the holiday and produced this bacon bouquet. Which is awesome.

Romantic and delicious.

If you’re alone this weekend, in lieu of bacon you get a free pass to wallow in self-pity. 30 Rock had a lonely Liz Lemon celebrate with the Lifetime Original, “My Stepson is My Cyberhusband.” All Songs Considered took the opportunity to play breakup songs for a full hour. They missed my favorites, so I’m putting them here (with cheapo YouTube links!). The first is perfect if you’ve been broken up with, and the second is essential if you’re doing the breaking.

Sometimes I Still Feel The Bruise (Trembling Blue Stars)

It Ain’t Me, Babe (Bob Dylan)

Whether you celebrate it or not, don’t miss the only great pop song specific to this odd holiday. “Valentine’s Day” by Andre 3000, the best thing behind “Hey Ya” to come out of OutKast’s overflowing double album, is guaranteed to put a smile on your face whether you’re mooning or moping.

Teratology

I had no idea there was a word for it before today, but there it was in front of me: the abnormal and the deformed, walls of skulls and eight-foot colons and the chair that the original “Siamese” twins had built for them. What I had heard, not inaccurately, billed as a “museum of medical oddities,” and had consequently driven a few hours to find, was the outwardly proper Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. Home of a collection intended to educate medical students on potential traumas, diseases and weirdness back whenever it was put together (shows how closely I was paying attention to the fine print… I’m guessing the 1800s), the dense, small space houses a woman turned to soap, a man whose muscles turned to bone, plaster casts of eyeball tumors, creepy things in formaldehyde, drawings of conjoined twins through time, a giant’s skeleton, and a comparitively mild exhibit on the health of U.S. presidents. In case you were curious, the most unnerving human anatomical possibility is a fully developed eyeball tumor. No contest. Eyeball tumor. Wow.

On the ride home, discussion found it’s way to the fantastic 1932 horror movie “Freaks.” The movie casts circus freaks in starring roles, highlighting their sense of community and the strange and awesome ways they manage or adjust for their abnormality. The thing that stayed with me the most (ok, after “one of us… one of us…”) was the opening title card. In setting the stage, it describes how the diseases and deformities on display in the film are rapidly being cured or corrected by medicine, and therefore the contemporary generation of a lot of freaks (I think pinheads were mentioned specifically) will be the last. These are words from a film released in 1932, so I can only imagine how much further along medical science and technology is today.

It is a fascinating, curious “problem” that society is faced with when it has the knowledge and the means to make abnormal people more normal. There seems to be a lot of hand wringing going on about how medical intervention to change a condition stigmatizes it, suggests that all must aspire to a “normal” ideal, and removes the impetus for tolerance as well as the contact based engine of it. So what justifications do we believe in for limits on the individual’s right to inhabit a body he or she chooses? Consenting adults are allowed a good deal of freedom to modify their biological raw material for personal reasons – tattoos, piercings, hair coloring, and makeup are common, but increasingly profound elective cosmetic surgery is also widespread and gaining in popularity. What societal goals should trump the individual’s control over the shape of his or her own body?

The fantastic thing about this question is that prior to very recent human history it was next to meaningless, because available technology for body modification was either inoffensive, gradual, or nonexistent: humans could adjust diet, clothing and exercise, and make only minor, temporary, and superficial changes beyond that. We can see this in the lives of the “normal,” who were straightforwardly living what they were handed biologically, and in the lives of those men and women who were born at significant remove from the human body’s averages, who were for lack of other options doing the same. Conditions present at birth that led to loss of bodily functioning, pain, and severe social barriers, conditions that narrowed potential employment, impaired the ability to have and raise a family, caused limited mobility or early death, these were dealt with as gracefully as could be managed, because humans had no technologies to offer them control over their own bodies. So we all went our merry ways, inhabiting the bodies genetic and environmental chance handed to us, and in most instances, couldn’t even imagine biological choice possible.

Today, I think it’s clear, both those born under the category of “normal” and those born with recognized variation from that norm, including variations that cause significant impairment, have more avenues open to them than ever before. We learn more about the shockingly extensive degree of choice a wealthy American currently has over his or her biological systems ever day, on voyeuristic television programming that reports exactly what new, completely optional surgery is being performed on those with the money to pay for it. We also hear stories of birth abnormalities being operated on successfully, of diseased being treated or cured, of the survival and in some cases long, productive lives of those who only a few years ago would have been doomed by their lot in the genetic lottery to extremely limited lives, or would not have lived at all. I doubt these stories, the cosmetic and the medical, strike many as two dimensions of the same trend, but it seems to me that the exact same thing is happening in both cases. Whether or not our current medical edifice labels a surgery elective or curative, what we are seeing is humans beginning to flex their new found ability to make transformational personal biological choices.

As many commentators have documented, there is a hugely fuzzy line between correcting biological “mistakes” and offering up the same technology for use in optional improvements. Medicine has learned, for instance, how to significantly extend human height for many, causing people who once would have had no say in the matter to chose to live lives as taller humans (the men and women receiving this treatment to date have to my knowledge all been of below average height). Where should we draw the line between those who are so far out of the mainstream when it comes to height that growing taller is classified a medical procedure, correcting a diagnosable flaw, and those humans who just really wish they were taller? What is the optimal human height range, outside of which you are allowed to resort to growth hormone therapy, and within which you are not? I have little sympathy for such distinctions. It seems unjustifiable to divide human beings from on high into those with different rights when it comes to biological alteration. It seems unjustifiable, actually, to limit acceptable biological alterations to those changes that bring people closer to human averages.

What about the man of average height who wants to be of above average, who dreams of a career in the NBA? What government bureaucrat has the right to deny him, when he’s willing to pay for the procedure and accept the risks? What societal “good” do we preserve by limiting freedom in this area? It would seem to be the same sort of exaltation of human “norms” and averages that disability advocates decry when it comes to treatment of those with divergent bodies. The expansion of choice will no double cause many who today are abnormal to seek normality, and this will no double have repercussions when it comes to societal treatment of those who chose to retain their nontraditional biology. But this is the same choice we will all have: a body which generally conforms to norms and expectations, or a body wildly divergent from them. To deny this choice to those born abnormal seems criminal and discriminatory; to deny this choice to the enormous pool of the medically normal but personally unsatisfied just seems impossible, not to mention unwise and cruel.

It will flow naturally, then, from medicine tackling mental impairment that artificial mental enhancement will become commonplace. Surgery and pharmaceuticals pioneered on those with below average capabilities will, once tested, become available to anyone looking for above average capability. If we’ve learned anything, its that the human appetite for self betterment is insatiable. We won’t stop at curing all known diseases. We’ll begin to view previously “natural” capabilities as woefully unsatisfactory, and this may happen in the blink of an eye, just as contemporary laptop computers outperform the fastest supercomputer in existence twenty years ago. We’ll also discover all the things we’d enjoy doing if only our biology allowed us, and then begin realize them.

So what will the world begin to look like when humans start exercising greater choice in their biology, be it conforming to or confounding anatomical averages? This choice, offered up across the board (if you can pay for it, and accept the risks, sign here) would level the playing field in a truly wonderful and profound way when we consider the maddening unfairness of a pre-1932 world filled with carnival freaks and others who, not by choice but by chance, found themselves far outside of the mainstream of human social and productive life. It’s terribly impolite to say it, but despite how beautiful we find human diversity, the fact that it is imposed by genetic selection causes a lot of suffering and loss of opportunity: only the beautiful can be beautiful, only the strong can be strong, some of us cannot experience biking along a river or watching great cinema or hearing great music, ever, and that’s just tough. The extension of basic human abilities – sight, mobility, hearing, memory – to those who don’t now have access to them would in itself be a glorious achievement. Cochlear implants and modern prosthetic limbs suggest how completely and how soon technology will allow this.

Of course, in other ways, the playing field will be less level than ever before. Our species will experience intensified biological segregation and inequality, which although well entrenched already thanks to substantial differences in diet, health care, personal grooming budgets and the option for cosmetic surgery, is today a pale shadow of what it will become. Billions will continue to struggle for basic nutrients and bodily function while several million will pioneer advanced stages of biological reinvention.

The separation of human bodies into new forms will not simply mirror wealth, however, as people will have wildly divergent goals. For many, optimal health and physical beauty will be something traditional, easily recognized, and familiar, probably a slight enhancement and exaggeration of the typical human form. Many will continue to adjust their music collections, social networks, travel plans and hobbies more avidly and carefully than their bodies, and more boldly; I can’t imagine that true adventurous biology will be a mainstream pursuit, at least not any time soon. But what of our minorities? Already many of us choose physical appearances at odds, in varying degree, with expectations or notions of beauty. Niche athletes in the year 2008, as we witnessed at the Olympics, have freakish and fantastical bodies finely tuned to whatever sport they have chosen, bodies that come in all shapes and sizes but that are unified in their high level of directed, intentional alteration. Many communities create and embody alternative notions of the desirable and the possible, modifying their bodies with scars, piercings, ink, amputations, dye, implants; there’s even that one guy with the ear in his arm. Tomorrow giantism and dwarfism will be chosen, not an accident of birth; gills, sail fins, scales, and wings will be both beacons of irrepressible, brash individualism and centerpieces for close knit communities of transhumans. I look forward to photosynthesizing skin, myself.

Anorexia in runway models, bulimia in figure skaters, and steriod abuse in professional athletes and entertainers all point to the extremes that some of us will go to in inventing new ideals for ourselves. Don’t kid yourself. Many of our fellow humans, in the coming generation, will craft and inhabit bodies that to our standards are downright grotesque. Some men will seek to imitate their favorite superhero; I can’t imagine not one person will attempt a giant green “Hulk” body. There will likely be women who continue to reduce their width and extend their height, in a feedback loop with their peers, to comic (and likely tragic) extremes. The consequences of limitless body modification on gender expression and sexual function are truly awesome to contemplate; speculation on what forms that will take would require another book-length discussion.

There will be inventions, hybridization, ornamentation, innovations artistic and functional (flying will undoubtedly be a rewarding and exhillarating experience), and whole categories of designed, biological change that are impossible to forsee. From cottage industy to recognized university degree, cosmetic body design will grow rapidly and transform millions of lives. The abberations, the choices a few will make that most or all other humans will look upon with disapproval and disgust, should be allowed, and even celebrated. They will represent the triumph of the mind over the dictates of biology, and represent a huge expansion in human freedom. There have always been giants, bearded ladies, human torsos, living skeletons; there have always been abnormal bodies, some (if we’re honest) unbearably grotesque. The crucial difference is that in the past, the people who had to live in and with those bodies had no choice in the matter. When everyone can be as average as they want to be, those who chose abnormality will not only profit themselves from living out their dreams, but will reward the rest of their species with continued, and expanding, human diversity. Diversity will be as beautiful and desireable as it has always been, only this time around, it will be created through human choices and not genetic whims.

A few other notes from today. Downtown Philadelphia is terribly clean and quiet, and stunningly dull: enormous windowless walls, hospitals and banks, a few beautiful old buildings and all too many terrifically ugly new ones. Waffle House is… beyond. It’s worth a six hour drive thinly disguised as a field trip to a museum of medical oddities just to sit in that butter-yellow box and gorge on waffles, hash browns, and bacon. What a world.

Better Living Through Biology

Back in April, William Saletan reported that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has thrown its hat in the ring for the development of non-animal meat products, putting together sort of an X Prize for the world of vat grown tissue. The internal politics of this group are fascinating in their own right, and Saletan focuses on these, observing that, like the interested parties in the abortion debate, “Pragmatists thought they could broaden the movement’s appeal by changing its language and arguments. Purists worried that these changes would narrow the movement’s agenda. Both sides were right. This is an important lesson in politics: Message, constituency, and agenda are related. The broader your message, the broader your constituency, and the narrower your agenda. You have to choose your trade-offs.”

So true, and so rarely admitted by ideologues. I am happy to sit on the sidelines as P.E.T.A. fights among itself. My brief contact with ideological “movement” types left me with little doubt that I wanted nothing to do with such hot air. On the other hand, meat without animals! Think of the possibilities! I did, anyway. Some of them. What follows is something I wrote, ranting to a friend and probably making an ass of myself in the process, after I read about this back in April. This post is tagged as “wild speculation” for a reason, but despite the excitable tone, there’s gotta be something true here: the future will be wilder than any of us can imagine.

I’d be shocked if it took more energy to make meat outside of an animal than in it. If that’s currently the case we obviously need to hold off on this as a mass market technology until the opposite becomes true. It would happen eventually, though; without the huge waste that is the industrialized production of heads, livers, hooves, stomachs and skin, and the expenditure of calories over the lifetime of meat animals, and the waste produced by these animals, all of which is just disposed of, our meat will one day require a tiny fraction of the grain, the land, and the electricity that it does today.

The ability to tweak the end product in direct as opposed to indirect ways is one of the most attractive features of this method of food production. I know we get a superior end product from grass feeding and certain other cow-rearing methods than from certain other cow-rearing methods, but these are blunt and poorly understood tools in affecting the meat we consume. After study and trial and error, I can’t imagine we wouldn’t be able to positively affect the lipid profile, protein content, and other variables. There’s a huge amount we don’t know about precisely how nutrition, or I should say food, in general, interacts with and achieves human health, but I find within myself a nearly boundless faith that in time all things will become known to us. (Whenever this belief starts to feel silly and embarrassing, I remind myself of our record thus far, review the past 100,000 years or so in my head. Never fails to make the impossible seem guaranteed.) When we do have goals – more holistic targets than vitamin content, perhaps, or even something completely unknown to us today – as long as we’re aiming for something measurable, we’ll be able to experiment towards mass production of meat that meets those goals.

Let’s set aside practical, human-survival-on-a-crowded-planet type thinking, because these benefits are easy to predict, and if survival for survival’s sake is the goal and pleasure and diversity of experience are of no import, meat eating of both the animal and the non-animal kind is worthless. Let’s set aside the most immediate, straightforward results that adopting extra-animal meat production wholesale would have on humans (the price of meat would drop, making it available to billions for the first time, and the price of high quality meat would drop to a greater degree, improving the health and increasing the happiness of meat eaters everywhere). And let’s set aside the sea change in the amount of captivity and suffering that sentient organisms on this planet would experience.

Humans behave in very predictable ways when set free on a new task: whenever there is the time, the wealth, and the technological ability, they will tinker and play and dream up things more wonderful than a field’s pioneers ever expected. With the advent of extra-animal meat, there will be adjustments in every conceivable facet of human life. There will be counter-measures, backlashes, nostalgia. I just learned that country music became popular just at the moment the United States ceased to be a majority rural nation – when nostalgia and longing for a lost, simpler time became a majority experience among a newly minted nation of urbanites. This has implications for the practice of animal husbandry: the lore, the honor, the pride and the cache accompanying the production of animal meat for human consumption may explode. There will also be disdain and dismissal akin to the use of rotary phones, curiosity akin to the use of eight-track tapes, and accusations of barbarism akin to… well, the use of capital punishment in all those other industrialized nations that have long since ended it.

When making meat in the kitchen becomes an entire culinary discipline, like making bread or making pastries, when chefs have control over not just sourcing their meat but shaping it, when home kits allow for huge variation in taste, nutrients, texture, color, and every other meaningful variable, when meat ceases to be something we eat because it exists in the world around us in predetermined form and becomes something we make exactly the way we want it to be, however we want it to be, how many trillions of gastronomical experiences and combinations will we realize, almost overnight? Who will get rich formulating and marketing the flavor of the week? How much better will cheap meat-based food taste!? How many hours of human ingenuity and industry will be spent blissfully, by the few with a taste for it, adjusting time, temperature, microbes, ingredients? What trade magazines will crop up? What writing careers will be made reporting on the variety, recent innovations, new combinations? What corporations will sponsor the annual world championship meat making competitions? How many new restaurants will appear, claiming to have founded a new kind of cooking, a new kind of eating? Who will cheapen and exploit this ability? What ad men and women (and machines) will come up with soulless jinges to hawk the latest no-calorie all-vitamin great-tasting answer to all our problems? What artisans will quietly cultivate and enjoy this, like potters? What daredevils with warp and radicalize and obsess over this, like base jumpers? What artists will declare this a new canvass, what performance artists will use it as a prop, what small town will brand itself with some story related to this? (Home of CocaBeef!)

What plant traits with get combined with this malleable tissue, yielding what unimaginable and wondrous and disgusting and divine and dangerous materials years and years from now? What teenagers will distinguish themselves from mainstream society by the kind of homemade meat they consume? What young professionals with declare certain strains of meat indicators of taste and sophistication and other meat-fashions crude and inelegant? What entrepreneur will cook up some impossibly tricky or rare combination of ingredients and sell it to the super-rich with an insane markup? How will local pride and xenophobia color these new kinds of foodstuffs? What will we associate, culturally, with the different ways of getting meat? Who among us will insist on animal rearing and slaughter in the production of their meat? Where? When? What stories will they tell themselves about this insistence on the old ways? What stories will they tell themselves about the people who eat the modern kind? What wonderful or rotten childhood associations will we bind to memories of the meat we made or consumed while growing up? How many currently unimaginable careers with this create: in research and development, the inevitable government oversight, production, management, marketing, engineering, design? How many long and well-loved careers with this destroy? How many towns, how many hundreds of thousands of meat-producing acres of the world’s surface will this reshape, both culturally and physically? What will we do with the land we currently use to raise corn to feed to cows? What will we do with the land we currently house slaughterhouses on? How soon can our children tour a carefully preserved slaughterhouse on a school trip to marvel at the barbarity of their ancestors? What will the children of those who work in slaughterhouses think of their parent’s profession? What mischievous curiosity will inspire the slaughter and cooking of a real animal, every once in a while, just to see how it tastes? What will that killing feel like, what will it mean? What will our relationship with animals be in the future? How many pigs, cows, and chickens will this planet sustain in the year 2100? One million? Four thousand? Will pigs become common household pets, bred and engineered for loyalty and intelligence? Will we morally judge the death involved in other animals’ nutrient acquisition, and begin to insist that those close to us (our pets, perhaps, or chimpanzees) have nothing to do with such behavior? How will we morally signify the distinction between tissue formerly incorporated into organisms with central nervous systems and tissue never associated with a central nervous system?

What do I not know enough to wonder about? What should I be asking?

In my opinion the logic of extra-animal meat is inescapable, will inevitably will come to dominate the market for human meat consumption and will transform gastronomy. If technology is not ready to provide this to the next generation of humans (which would surprise me a great deal), it nevertheless will find its way there, and our food system will someday be free of the astronomical material and energy waste and moral unpleasantness that goes hand in hand with the consumption of parts of formerly living animals. It is not a question of it but of how, when, where, and with what unforeseen consequences, remembering that unforeseen consequences can be both positive and negative. Our coming century will be shaped more by biologists (and once we’re sufficiently advanced, by environmental scientists, meteorologists, and all those who study the large, complex systems that have heretofore been closed to our understanding and influence) than by physicists or chemists or even traditional materials engineers; pretty much anything we could hope to do with inorganic machines I predict can be done better with organic machines. And I think the change in meat production, as revolutionary as it will be environmentally and culturally and economically and politically and morally, will the the very least of our adventures.

To infinity, and beyond!

Here ends my April email. To all this, I would add one further wild speculation, touched on when I wondered about our relationship with animals in the future. Freed of the need to artificially separate ourselves from the rest of sentient life in service of our continued ability to consume it in comfort, how will we frame the rights, the potential, the beauty and wonder of the other most intelligent of earth’s animals? I think that uplift, a theoretical scientific possibility inspired by science fiction, is closer than most would guess. Enlarging known membership of the culture club from one to two or three would be profoundly disruptive, exciting, dangerous, and awesome (truly awesome). Once an intelligent species crosses the boundary into culture, develops intelligence to the degree that it can transmit information from generation to generation through non-biological means (writing, artifacts, instruction), whole worlds open up, and no one can predict what insights non-human intelligence would offer the world of knowledge. Also unknown: how our seemingly boundless capacity for violence and desire to be masters of all we survey will play itself out on this stage. We currently enslave over 27 million human beings (both the largest number and the smallest percentage of slaves in human history, thanks to population growth). What will it look like, the ability to create sentient creatures with sub-human or specialized intelligence? What will the long-term effects on our self-concept and our culture be? What reverence, hatred, or inferiority complex will these species develop towards us? What political or economic relationship will our fellow intelligent species have with us, with each other? As the breathless narrator of the “Beneath The Planet Of The Apes” trailer puts it, “can a planet long endure, half human… and half ape?”

Surely these technological and ethical choices lie open before us regardless of our preference for extra-animal or animal meat. My glass-half-full hope is that by the time we’re actually interacting with uplifted chimps and dolphins, unrelated technologies will have rendered robotic assistance cheaper and easier than intelligent biological assistance, and unrelated social and economic developments will have forcefully and finally rendered the arrangements that permit enslavement in the world today a thing of the past. An end to animal consumption and a flowering of peaceful, cooperative, technologically enhanced human potential cannot help but advance our collective moral perfection to boot; the barbarism we see in previous generation’s social arrangements, values, slavery, and entertainment will be echoed in our descendants’ view of our food production, relative material deprivation, zoos, and costly warfare. We’ve already begun re-negotiating our relationship with apes, in appealing directions. Can you say retirement homes for chimpanzees? Here’s hoping I’m around to see great parts of this possibility come to fruition.

William Saletan is a wonderful guide to the increasingly complex questions about human biology we are facing: his columns on abortion, polygamy, homosexuality, bestiality, body modification, sex practices and norms, reproduction, and the politics, ethics, and technological innovations that color these topics are delightful and thought provoking. Read his blog here and mainline his contributions to Slate here.