Symphony of Science

Carl Sagan was a treasure and an inspiration. Autotune is more of a mixed bag. What happens when they join forces to remind us of the beauty and possibility of our moment in this universe?

Catchy, ain’t it? Get your daily dose of perspective and grace at Symphony of Science. Let John Boswell’s project remind you, as Sagan says, “how lucky we are to live in this time: the first moment in human history when we are in fact visiting other worlds.”

The Voices In Your Head

First, some background. Synesthesia is a surprisingly common condition that causes two different sensory pathways to interact in unusual ways. Synesthetes may perceive letters as having dedicated colors, or numbers as having personalities. Read more here. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran is a neurologist: a doctor, a researcher, and an occasional Radiolab guest. Listen to him explain how he performed the first ever phantom-limb “amputation” here.

John Colapinto, in New Yorker profile of Ramachandran last May, found him speculating about the nature of creativity:

The most common synesthesia is number-color. Ramachandran believed it was not coincidental that the fusiform gyrus, where number shapes are processed in the brain, lies next to the area where colors are processed. He suspected that a cross-wiring in the brain, similar to that in phantom-limb patients, was responsible. Brain scans confirmed his hunch: in synesthetes, there are excess neural connections between the two brain centers. This suggested to Ramachandran that the syndrome arises from a defect in the gene responsible for pruning away the neural fibres that connect the various centers of the brain as it develops early in life. “What do artists, poets, and novelists have in common?” Ramachandran asked me. “The propensity to link seemingly unrelated things. It’s called metaphor. So what I’m arguing is, if the same gene, instead of being expressed only in the fusiform gyrus, is expressed diffusely throughout the brain, you’ve got a greater propensity to link seemingly unrelated brain areas in concepts and ideas. So it’s a very phrenological view of creativity.”

It can feel uncomfortable to examine the biology behind creative talent, which we’ve always treated as kind of magical, or divine. But science addressing questions that philosophers and priests once had a monopoly on is a wonderful thing. Nothing is more fascinating or important to us than our own nature, and beginning to build real, concrete knowledge about it is an enormous blessing. Reading about neurology leaves me awed, excited, and impatient. The brain is so marvellously complicated, as are the questions we ask, that our best efforts fall far short of sating our curiosity.

One of the most magnificent puzzles is consciousness itself: why we’re aware of our own thinking, and how we came to be this way. It’s a favorite subject for people who believe that some mental phenomena exist outside physical, testable reality, those who jeer at evidence-based approaches to these unknowns. But Ramachandran is willing to speculate on consciousness, too. Like his hypothesis about metaphors, these ideas are likely wrong, one of the many errors that “trial and error” requires. Still, it’s provocative stuff:

Mirror neurons play a role, he thinks. “One of the theories we put forward,” he said, as he packed up his bag, “is that the mirror-neuron system is used for modelling someone else’s behavior, putting yourself in another person’s shoes, looking at the world from another person’s point of view. This is called an allocentric view of the world, as opposed to the egocentric view. So I made the suggestion that at some point in evolution this system turned back and allowed you to create an allocentric view of yourself. This, I claim, is the dawn of self-awareness.”

I confess I find this possibility absolutely thrilling, especially compared to vague, untestable stories about “supernatural” mechanisms. But of course it doesn’t matter that it’s an appealing story; we have to figure out ways to challenge it, test it, until we know whether it’s true or false. “What we’re hoping,” Ramachandran says, “is that we can grope our way toward the answer, finding little bits and pieces, little clues, toward understanding what conciousness is. We’ve just scratched the surface of the problem.”

Amid insights on vision, autism, and the brain’s body-image map, one last passage caught my eye. “You know that when people think to themselves you get unconscious movement of the vocal chords?” Ramachandran asks. (It’s fun to try to notice this.) Well.

In the case of schizophrenia, whose sufferers often complain of “hearing voices,” Ramachandran suspected damage of deficit in a sensory mechanism in the vocal chords which, when normal people think, sends a signal to the brain indicating “This is simply a thought; no one is actually saying this.” If this mechanism was damaged, the subconscious movement of the vocal chords could be interpreted as an outside voice speaking in one’s head.

“By the way,” Ramachandran continued, “I have a theory that if you take people with carcinoma of the larynx, and you remove the vocal chords, and they think to themselves, they may actually start hallucinating. A prediction.”

A prediction. That’s where we start. Isn’t it great to be alive now?

It’s The Future: Chatroulette!

In the campy sci-fi classic Logan’s Run, our eponymous hero, in a funk, decides to put himself on the “The Circuit,” a cross between a television and a transporter. From the comfort of your living room, The Circut brings you face to face with a random sucession of fellow surfers looking for anonymous sex.

Chatroulette, the latest crazy thing to do on the internet, bears more than a passing resemblance to Logan’s machine. The site connects you to a series of video chats with randomized strangers, and you flip to a new partner with a cold “next,” just like in the film, but the similarities don’t end there. As described by Sam Anderson, in an arresting piece in New York Magazine, Chatroulette channels some of the same nihilistic boredom, sexual longing, and bracing loneliness as the fictional Circuit. It is also fueled by the same hope, however desperate and unlikely, that we can find real connections in impersonal, virtual spaces.

The stories he tells are funny, creepy, touching, and strange. If you’re tempted to interact with Chatroulette’s users, already 20,000 strong, be forewarned: “one out of every ten chatters is a naked masturbating man,” Anderson writes, and your lack of control (beyond that ever present “next”) leads to several flavors of unpleasantness. Still, he says, the effect is powerful, and the site not easily written off. Some interactions are quite affecting. And then there’s the possible evolution of this idea:

I found myself fantasizing about a curated version of ChatRoulette—powered maybe by Google’s massive server farms—that would allow users to set all kinds of filters: age, interest, language, location. One afternoon I might choose to be thrown randomly into a pool of English-speaking thirtysomething non-masturbators who like to read poetry. Another night I might want to talk to Jets fans. Another night I might want to just strip away all the filters and see what happens. The site could even keep stats, like YouTube, so you could see the most popular chatters in any given demographic. I could get very happily addicted to a site like that.

If you want to check out the messy, unfiltered reality, give it a try. Full disclosure: I loved this article but have no desire to wade in, not in this form. But who knows where this idea will take us? I can imagine a real demand for randomized social contact, with significant implications, if in the future people feel boxed in to a narrow demographic. Nothing like a roulette to shake up group-think and other social stasis.

Logan certainly learned how disruptive it can be. When The Circuit pops Jessica 6 (the lovely Jenny Agutter) into his life, she refuses sex and instead leads him to an adventure involving love, the Library of Congress, and a homicidal robot named Box. It upends his whole world, and ends up freeing the human race. So, you know, anything could happen.

Not Alone Anymore

When we find out we might be alone in thinking something, we tend to remember the sensation. Surprise, followed quickly by worry, or curiosity, or pride, can overshadow the actual topic of conversation. I remember one moment like this. I had just described to a friend how those unofficial, packed dirt trails that you find curling through every park are fascinating to me.

You see why, right? These trails are created by many people over many months if not years. The finished product looks intentional: there are clean lines between the path and the grass around it, the route confidently heads towards the place most people want to go, and it’s well maintained, routinely reinforced, sometimes in contrast to neglect, very close by, visible in some less popular park features. This is a collaboration, but the collaborators rarely see each other, generally don’t know each other, and never actually communicate about their shared project. It is an accident and unintended consequence of thousands of actions that this path gets made.

What struck me is how path makers are separated not by space but in time. When I walk down one of these paths I imagine all the people I’m following, and all those who will follow me. We influence each other, affect the steps others choose. Unseen, unknowingly, we transmit information across time, coordinating our efforts to produce an inviting little walkway. Membership in this secret, silent club tickles me. No one is aware of having joined or what their contribution was. Our members cannot be gathered by any imaginable technique or technology, because time moves only in the one direction, and the world soon forgets who made the first footfalls and where that person was headed. And without aiming to, we’ve created an informal institution, a monument to decentralized decision making. Dear reader, I give you: the well defined yet unsanctioned path, a whimsical and determined thing, fixture of parklands everywhere.

My unprepared attempt to communicate this and my wonder at it to a friend was halting, but after getting it out I saw immediately that my fascination wasn’t shared. Other people just don’t think like this, I realized, surprised. I was torn between feeling proud of how my clearly insightful observation separated me from the unwashed masses and being disappointed, like when a joke isn’t laughed at, or the personal anecdote you expected to be recognized as embodying something universal, isn’t. It was disappointing to find that the busy, complicated world I lived in was a lonely place. It’s not just paths in parks. I’m often paralyzed by visions of the countless roles we play, the endless connections and interactions between us, the infinite consequences of our smallest actions. I’m not infrequently dumbstruck with awe at the products of our undirected and unplanned efforts, overcome in public places with mute delight. I stare at the city around me like a caveman.

Although I never seriously believed that I was the only person with an active imagination and a ferocious curiosity about the world around me, I did feel separated from fellow awestruck path watchers by my inability to put my wonder into words, and therefore lonely. A path maker might feel the same way were one to become aware of his or her diffuse coworkers and wish to speak with them, if only to share introductions over a beer and pass around congratulations on a job well done. But while there’s no hope of traveling though time (except the usual way), there should be a way to overcome my less fundamental isolation. There must be others in the world with a passion for self organization and its power. Now just how do I meet one?

Podcasts. When it comes to emergent order, I recommend reading The Price of Everything by Russ Roberts, who I first heard as the host of the essential EconTalk and who also writes a great blog, Cafe Hayek. For more, and please trust me on this, it is never a bad idea to read Hayek himself. Discovering that there exists an entire academic discipline devoted to exploring the mechanisms, mediums, properties and consequences of our species’ constant creative interaction has been one of my life’s greatest pleasures. It turns out that not only am I not at all uniquely brilliant, but the men and women who have been thinking, writing, researching and debating about exchange, incentives, and externalities for centuries have so much to teach me that my learning will safely last my lifetime.

To complete this happy ending, I need to develop the ability to communicate my curiosity. A lifelong project to be sure, but one I want to start today. Writing, this past week, has engaged me terrifically, been welcome work of the kind my life recently has been sadly lacking. It’s hard, and for now, feels rewarding. My busy imagination is already telling me that if I really keep at it, by the time I’m sixty-four I might actually publish something valuable. I’m really looking forward to that.

Reading about writing, I ran across this lovely passage in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird:

I remember reading C.S. Lewis for the first time, Surprised by Joy, and how, looking inside himself, he found “a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds.” I felt elated and absolved. I had thought that the people one admired, the kind, smart people of the world, were not like that on the inside, were different from me…

The moments we discover we’re not alone, like the moments when we first fear that we are, get glued in our memories by adrenaline, and then stuck where we’re sure to see them, like favorite pictures on our wall. Remember this. We forget, of course. Like all important lessons in life, we have to learn it again and again. Fear of being the only one like you in the universe is, famously, universal.

Share your stories about the conversation where you discovered that you’re on your own. It’s a familiar beat: talking to a friend, the easy assumption that you’re on the same page is suddenly questioned. This tends to happen most frequently when the topic being discussed is certain superstitions, the status of a relationship, or Israel. The moment tends to be memorable. I can recall a half dozen conversations I’ve had that fit this description.

Alternately, share your stories about the time you suddenly no longer felt alone. Although it has taken me a thousand words to get around to it, the story I had in mind when I started this post falls into this category. Today I was listening to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe and they were discussing several recent articles in mainstream sources that are big wins for skepticism and evidence that an important campaign in Britain is having an impact. The mood was high. Then Rebecca said this, about the podcast’s audience:

There are 60,000 of you our there right now. I know that right now, like, you’re listening to this and it’s just you, riding the subway, but there are actually 60,000 of you…

The story of how I came to find the SGU, and organized skepticism, and how it felt and what it meant to me is another post entirely, if not a dozen. It’s quite something, discovering how powerful it is to name yourself, to share passions and fears, and to belong. It would be a large, heavy, dreadfully earnest story. Hearing Rebecca’s words this afternoon was different: the moment was delightful, simple, and deliciously specific.

I’ve often imagined that there are others who, like me, ride the subway with earbuds in not to drown out the crowd or zone out to music, but to learn about scientific breakthroughs, technological achievements, the latest paranormal claims, quackery, what is fact and what is, in fact, fiction. Looking around as I ride, however, it never seems like I’m sharing a subway car with one of them. Instead as I listen I feel like there’s an unfortunate chasm between me and my fellow riders, growing wider with every moment I absorb information which I seriously doubt they have, as I sure wouldn’t were I not standing there with the rogues in my ear. Our common ground is thin and our disagreements untowardly deep, my imaginary fellow passengers and I. It’s not a good feeling. Most people separate themselves from the city around them by simply ignoring it, distracting themselves, or through small harmless acts of rudeness, but here I am actually shoving a planet-sized ideological wedge between myself and all those around me. What a sad, bitter old man I will become!

In a species as numerous as ours, a club consisting of sixty thousand is not in the business of setting cultural norms or writing policy. But put sixty thousand people in a room and you’ve got yourself quite a party. A big thank you to Rebecca for a truly neat moment, when I allowed myself to imagine my friends and allies, in hundreds of different subway cars in dozens of cities across the world. I smiled, then, picturing us, we who are excited about the future, we who love and cherish “the Universe as it really is.” At once, we all hear “right now you’re listening to this and it’s just you, but” and look up, all thinking the same thing.

I know podcasts are not listened to simultaneously. I know my habit of inventing visuals to stand in for the intangible things I’m awed by can get more than a little silly. I’ve been known to picture the myriad cell phone conversations going on around me as long strings arcing through the air, attached at the other end to far away towns and other continents, wrapping around the world a dense, tangled ball of string. And ask me sometime about the make believe Kingsbridge Tofu Club. Still. Explaining what’s going on in my head makes me feel elated and absolved, and even if this never reaches the right person, I’m confident someone out there thinks the way I do.

Science is a great path making project, the greatest decentralized collaborative effort there will ever be, with partnerships spanning the globe and reaching across time, accumulating results step by step that shape our emerging understanding of reality. It is the undertaking of the human race, discovery, and no one is truly alone who understands that they belong to this great and curious species. I will never be a scientist, but I long to contribute something to the discussion, if only to stand to the side and remind people how beautiful it all is. I will talk science over dinner and over drinks, inviting more people to share in our collective accomplishments, reminding everyone, you need not be alone, and look at what we can do when we work together.

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.

I’d Rather Live It

Thoughts on returning to Rockland after Ace Rizzle, Ace Rickety-Rock, rocked McCarren:

One. Contra sets always end with waltzes. I want to end my DJ set with a waltz. Why not? I want to remix “The Lover’s Waltz,” concoct a hip hop beat in three/four, put some Aphex Twin twitches behind the second and third beats. That way, after the fantastic, orgasmic, earth shaking climax (meaning, I’ll probably get lazy and throw on Daft Punk), everyone will partner up and wind down.

Two. Contra vs. Daft Punk. Social dancing, complete with instructions, vs. that glorious and awkward individual performance dancing. When you hear Daft Punk, everyone stop where you are and rock out, alone. When you hear the Clayfoot Strutters, do-si-do with your partner back into a twirl, re-form those lines, and await further instructions. Throw that shit together – eight bars French house, eight bars American line dancing. Then mix it up, get Girl Talk on the crowd’s collective ass, and just laugh when they don’t know what to do. Make sure everyone has a good time.

Three. Uh, recorded contra is hella disappointing. At least, preliminary investigations (lasting all of a minute and a half) were hella disappointing. But maybe we use this to our advantage. We get real live contra musicians, and real live hip hop musicians (call up the drum and bass guys from Tribe Called Quest – what are they doing these days?), a real live caller, a real live M.C., and put a DJ in charge of the whole evening. Hipsters look like fools learning to contra but admit they love it, forget trying to impress people and actually enjoy themselves. Old folks get down with they bad self when the Big Pimpin’ beat shows up underneath some lovely Appalachian harmonies, grind all night with someone they barely know, get drunk and pair up. The world is forced to recognize me for the genius I am. I impress the coolest people on the planet. Diplo DJs my wedding, The Go! Team plays at my son’s sixth birthday party, The Talking Heads re-unite just to play “This Must Be The Place” at my 25th anniversary party, and I die a happy, happy man.

Four. I wish I had a party to promote, just so when I’m at these things, these sprawling festival type things where ten, maybe fifteen people in the crowd have the balls and the moves to actually dance when no one else does, and they’re scattered throughout the place, and they start and stop and never quite sync up, I could approach these people – just them, not the friends that stand around smiling at them or the significant others that mooch off their awesomeness, just them – and invite them. I wish I had a club, a scene, an empire, so that I could have an agent at each musical event in the tristate area every night, and they would approach just those three, or those five, or that one individual who knows how to have an uninhibited good time, and say, hey, you, I don’t like your boyfriend. Your friends don’t dance and if they don’t dance well, they’re no friends of mine. We have a party for you. Come meet David, great guy, if you marry him you get Diplo at your wedding so, I mean, come on. Suriously.

Five. “America’s Most Blunted” is going on that mix of music to get high to. Why didn’t I think of that before.

Six. A dream is something you want to do but still haven’t pursued. You can dream a little dream or you can live a little dream. I’d rather live it, ’cause dreamers always chase but never get it. Work it harder, make it better, our work is never over. I will get trained as a yoga teacher and gather all the tools and knowledge I can about production and DJing. I will ask strangers to dance salsa and I will get good. Contra vs. Daft Punk. The future, now. A Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. A Joyful Noise. I will tell our story, our asymptotically approaching God, and someone, one person, will get it, will get me, and we will be excited together, about our children daydreaming on the shores of Mars, our grandchildren making love in the outer solar system, our great-grandchildren and their love, their gratitude, their forgiveness. I will dance with this person. Our love will create new life.

Seven. Here I am, dreaming again. I’m much more practiced in that department. We’ll work on that. I’d rather live it. I should put that on my wall.

Eight. I can’t believe it has been a full two years – two years! – since I wrote this. So. Every song is a comeback. Every moment’s a little bit later. The great thing? The glass half full thing? I fucking wrote that. I fucking wrote that. That was me, baby.

Nine. Still is.