Evolutionary Pressures on Minds and Bodies
posted by Frank Pasquale
Corpus 2.0, a recent design project on potential human bodily evolution, has been spreading around the web. One model with a shoulder bump finds it much easier to keep her handbag steady. Other forms of “progress” include a “ridge in the nose developed for wearing glasses, ears moulded to accommodate earphones, a thumb with an extra joint for sending SMS messages more efficiently and a foot adapted to create the same posture as wearing high heels.” This work struck me as a less critical version of the “future farms” and other body modifications both proposed and ridiculed at the “Design and the Elastic Mind” show at MOMA earlier this year.
While many find these particular modifications to bodily form grotesque, opposition to unfortunate evolutionary pressures on attitudes and mental habits strikes me as much less developed. That’s one reason I cautioned against runaway “cognitive enhancements” in an article last year. The founder of Better Living Through Chemistry predicts that we should be happy to choose “average hedonic set point[s] of our children. . . . [so that] allelic combinations . . . .that leave their bearers predisposed to unpleasant states of consciousness . . . will be weeded out of the gene pool. . . [leading to] some form of paradise-engineering.” Following Walker Percy, I think such people are actually quite useful to a world too prone to “irrational exuberance”–even if introversion is maladaptive for the introvert himself.
October 27, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Posted in: Bioethics, Law and Inequality, Technology, Weird
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Responses (2)
palaver - October 28, 2008 at 1:33 am
I guess we should just be grateful this didn’t first become in the early 20c, when monocles, newsboy caps, knickerbockers, and green eye shades were all the rage (on the eye shades, see John Knox’s memoir of clerking for Justice McReynolds). who knows what odd bumps and ridges we might be sporting so as to make sure that everyone could more easily manage these (ageless) sartorial splendours.
Brett Bellmore - October 28, 2008 at 7:39 am
This sort of thing always cracks me up, mainly for how short-sighted it is; Eyeglass manufacturers are going the way of the buggy whip industry due to Lasik, and somebody suggests we might improve the human body with a standard mount point for eye glasses?
How about modifying gut bacteria to turn lard into Omega 3 fatty acids, while cranking out the full spectrum of vitamins, so we can stay healthy on a diet of Fritos and fried pork rinds?
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