Dr. Marcos B. Viermenhouk adds a whole new dimension to the concept of human culture.
__ There is a growing sense that online activity is having a major impact on human society. This comes as little suprise to Dr. Marcos B. Viermenhouk, the head of the Institute for Evolutionary Studies at the University of the Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, who has been studying the developement of the Internet since its earliest days.
Drawing from his work on cellular evolution in multicellular organisms, Dr. Viermenhouk suggests that while human beings have ceased to evolve as individual organisms, collectively we are evolving through increasingly complex social structures into a macro-organism. During a recent trip to the United States, Dr. Viermenhouk agreed to sdiscuss his theory and its ramifications.
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Wired: Describe your theory of macroevolution.
Viermenhouk
: Our cells, those little blocks of protoplasm that comprise us, were once separate beings. Over time, these organisms began to merge. Initially, such creatures were rather basic, but as multicellular organisms grew more complex, their constituent cells grew less capable of providing for themselves. With cellular functions increasingly specialized, the evolution of the cell itself became irrelevant. If cellular evolution did occur, it was only in the context of the larger organism.
How does this relate to human macroevolution?
Observe lower social organisms - bees, for example. A hive of bees is not a collection of individuals but, rather, a simple macro-organism. The beings that comprise this macro-organism are completely dependent on one another - for nutrients, defense, etc. Bees are, however, quite limited: Their ability to transfer information lacks the subtlety necessary to create a truly complex being, and they have reached a point of evolutionary stagnation. Nothing has happened on the insect front since the Jurassic. Bees are pretty stupid little shits. You can only say so much by shaking your ass.
Well, I ...
Don't give me that entomological apologist crap. Bugs haven't done a damn thing since we were on all fours. Useless crawly little bastards.
How does this relate to your theory about the Internet?
In order to develop a complex macro-organism, there must be a way to convey and store detailed information. Can a bee develop a better structure for the hive? Or remember what happened last week? Hah! Its capacity to store and understand data is too limited. It's pathetic. Look into amber that's 40 million years old and what do you find? The same stupid bee that spent four hours banging its head against your window this afternoon. But I digress.
What makes Homo sapiens ideal for evolution into a higher form is our capacity to exchange and store complex information. Once an improvement has been converted into a symbol, it can be relayed or accessed as often as needed. The earliest human societies exchanged essential information - tales of the hunt, knowledge of horticulture - that helped the collective being survive. With the development of writing, the capacity for real storage was added. Written language marks the beginning of our macroevolution.
The Internet provides a big leap forward. As an organism grows more complex, it requires a sophisticated means of transferring data between its constituent entities. The Internet is little more than the nervous system of our human macro-organism.
Isn't your work derivative of other cybertheoreticians? Francis Heylighen, for example, has postulated the technology-driven transformation of humanity into a "super-being" or a "metabeing." Heylighen ...
... walks around all day with a printer port up his ass. I've seen the pictures. He's obsessed with a direct neural interface. His concept of a metabeing, a single unitary organism, hinges on us physically plugging into a "super-brain." He's missing the point. We already have. Cells don't communicate through direct physical connections - they use electrical interfaces. The neural cells in our skulls communicate through an intricate chemical dance. To expect a macro-organism to develop differently from a multicellular organism is foolish.
Now that we monkeys are part of a greater being, the connection we share is through symbol. Human language, with all of its limitations, is sufficiently complex to support the information-transfer needs of an organ- ism never seen before on Earth. You don't need wires up your butt. Just look at the symbols on your screen. Click on that hypertext link. Send that email. Be a good little cell.
And Heylighen's bizarre notion that this metabeing is an improvement - delusion! Individual humans are intriguing, sensual, spiritual creatures. The human macro-organism is more of a fungus. A big, appallingly stupid fungus. It only knows how to eat and grow, and when all of the food is gone, it will die. It has all the charm and wit of something growing in a dark corner of your basement. Adds a whole new dimension to the concept of human culture.
But what of individuality?
Humans are already too specialized to survive outside of their host organism. Pull a nerve cell from the brain and put it on the ground - within minutes it's a tiny gray blob of snot. Pull Bill Gates out of his office and put him in the veldt - in four days he's a bloated corpse in the sun. With the exception of a few madmen and anarchists, most of us can't even feed ourselves anymore - or communicate outside of our specialized fields. Put an anthropologist, a supply-side economist, and a mechanic in the same room. What the hell will they talk about? O. J. Simpson? But enough. It's all in my book. Why write it if you print every last concept in this damn interview?
Dr. Marcos B. Viermenhouk's book, The Internet and Macro-Evolutionary Theory, is not available from Quercus Press - or anywhere else, for that matter.
