Freeday 14 April 2000

Pic of the day: Mutants everywhere ... or perhaps not. Or perhaps not like that.

(The first entry in this series, Evolutionism, appeared last Friday.)

The events in Germany and the second world war brought a dramatic setback for the eugenics movement. In the years between the world wars, most any civilized nation had some program for improving their populace. Most common was forced "sterilization", removing the capacity to have children, for the mentally retarded or chronically insane. But also other handicapped people and dubious ethnic groups were given the same treatment, for the good of the people as a whole.

If you happen to find a textbook from before the war (one which has escaped the fire), you may find elaborate theories about the racial strengths and weaknesses of various nationalities and even local variants within a country. For instance here in Norway, we had the long-skulls vs the round-skulls, these were regarded as separate races by some. It would have been funny if not for the tragedies that rode the same train.

Some said that Darwin did the ground work, Nietzsche drew the conclusions and Hitler carried them out. Whatever the truth of this, it became very politically uncorrect to mention the existence of genetic differences between people at all. That's not to say that everything suddenly changed. In some countries, there were still separate schools for black and white children, for instance. But this was more like a tradition - few if any dared to speak up with the old stories from before the war of how some humans were more evolved than other. It seems that particular line of thought ended in a bunker in Berlin in 1945.

And in August 1945, something new was born into the collective mind of humanity. On a beautiful summer morning in Japan, mankind's childhood ended in a flash of light brighter than the sun.

The energy of the atom, until recently barely inside the province of science fiction, was now in the hands of man. It spread rapidly - first the knowledge of making bombs, then later the knowledge of making electric power with the same force. The sheer amount of power was dazzling, and it seemed that humankind had made a leap forward. Now that this power source was available, we could do anything! Perhaps even travel to the moon ...

But after the test explosions, and the two war-time explosion in Japan, there came a new worry. Already people knew that the terrible power of the atom could kill a whole city in one blast, and that those who survived would die a painful death from radiation. But it soon became clear that the radioactive dust which spread with the wind, had another ability too. It caused mutations. Animal and human babies were born with deformities - more often than usual - and scientists said that probably most of the mutations were latent and would only show up in later generations.

But according to modern Darwinism, mutation was the very engine of evolution. Mutations supplied the variation which natural selection could work with. It was millions of years of slow mutations which had changed us from amoeba to human. (Actually there is nothing to indicate that the ancestral line of multi-celled animals were ever amoeba, but I refer to public understanding.) Now suddenly the rate of mutation seemed to be speeding up dramatically, thanks to this side effect of nuclear power. And some of the changes were pretty dramatic: Babies born without eyes or fingers, stuff like that. (Actually these were quite rare, but they did capture the imagination.) Now if there was a slew of harmful mutations, then there should also be a smaller flurry of beneficial mutations, right? And some of them should be as dramatic as the missing fingers or toes. Evolution overclocked.

Science fiction started to pick up this thread, but it was Marvel Comics that put the new mutant concept into the brain of a new generation. At first it was just another quasi-scientific excuse for making superheroes. But it grew, as if organically. More mutants started to crop up. Good mutants, bad mutants, strong mutants and weak mutants. And they turned up in competing comics too, under various names such as metahumans, harbingers, and gen-actives. Whatever their name, they were the next breed of human: Homo Superior, set to replace Homo Sapiens as we had replaced the Neanderthals. (Incidentally, nobody knows just how we replaced the Neanderthals, and anyway they were not our ancestors. Details, details.)

In reality, of course, people are not going to start flying just by thinking of it, or shoot energy rays from their eyes or fingers. But unless we just happened to be perfect already, there should be some room for improvement. So where is it? The astounding increase in intelligence, of ca 10 IQ points per generation, is commonly attributed to better education, a more stimulating and demanding environment, better nutrition and vitamins in the food. The steadily improving world records in various sports are attributed to new training techniques and functional foods, if not outright hormone treatments. Certainly not mutations.

And yet, if there is any substance in Neo-Darwinism, the positive mutations should be out there now. While it is not quite right that most of all humans in history are alive now, the numbers easily equal thousands of years in our past, when the human race totalled less than a million beings. Throw in not just radioactive rays, but dubious chemicals and intense fields of electricity and magnetism ... the frequency of mutations really should be higher.

Not that this is going to matter for long. Because at the dawn of the 21st century, mankind has borrowed God's toolbox again. We now have the equipment to map, and then reprogram, the entire genetic code. Rather than rely on random mutations, we may be able to rewrite genes to order.

(The next and last entry in this series, "Brave New World", is supposed to cover the future, or rather our image of it.)