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Chapter 1
The Broken Mirror
Abstract
In the age of cultural blindness related to overspecialisation and information overload, we accumulate reasons to focus on boundaries between perspectives. For example, the concept of āphysiological birth preparationā, which is outside the dominant perspectives, hardly attracts any attention. We use it to refer to a short period that is not yet established labour, and during which fast physiological changes are taking place. It is easy to emphasise the importance of the topic and to phrase urgent questions at a time when labour induction, pre-labour caesarean section, and many aspects of modern lifestyle are frequent and powerful interferences. This example is the point of departure of a book that should not be classified as medical. One of our objectives is to emphasise that childbirth and specifically human diseases are obligatory topics to explore the nature of Homo. We use interdisciplinary perspectives to raise questions about the future of our species and the limits of human adaptability. We constantly refer to āHomoā, because pure Sapiens do not exist: we are all hybrids.
Since the turn of the millennium, the amount of knowledge we all have at our disposal has reached an unexpected order of magnitude. Today, by associating a small number of keywords, everybody has access to countless established facts regarding highly precise topics. This is also the time when the word āspecialistā is usually associated with a positive connotation.
Can āInformation Bombardmentā Make Us Blind?
At such a turning point in the history of mankind, it is worth recalling that half a millennium ago there were still scholars who were supposed to have acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge. One of the prototypes of such scholars was Pico della Mirandola, from Florence, famous for his 900 theses on a variety of subjects. According to Pascal, he knew āde omni re scibiliā (about every knowable thing). In such a context and until recently, āeruditionā was associated with a positive connotation.
The time has come to express warnings about the negative effects of āinformation bombardmentā. At the very end of the 20th century, I had already described emerging effects of information technology by using the analogy of the broken mirror.1 It is as if, until recently, we could study human nature through a mirror that was not well polished. The image was fuzzy, details indistinct. But it was still possible to see the unpolished mirror in its entirety. The same mirror suddenly became brilliantly polished, but it is as though it is broken into thousands of pieces. Experts who know so much about a tiny piece of the fragmented mirror are unable to see the way it links with the other pieces that make up the whole.
The Marine Chimpanzee
As an example of a cultural blindness related to overspecialisation, Iāll mention the current collective difficulty to consider Homo a primate adapted to coastal areas. For each of the countless particularities of our own genus Homo in the framework of mammal species, even the most mysterious, specialised scientists can offer multiple plausible interpretations in terms of evolutionary advantages and adaptation to different environments. Meanwhile, there is no interest in a possible unifying theoretical framework.2 However, we have at our disposal such a unifying framework, based on a simple rule: when a trait is mysterious, and apparently specific to humans, we must look at what we have in common with mammals adapted to the sea.
Here are examples of such human traits:
ā¢The huge development of the brain: mammals adapted to the sea generally have higher āencephalisation quotientā than their cousins on land.
ā¢An enzymatic system that is not very effective at making a molecule of fatty acid (āDHAā) which is essential to feed the brain. This molecule is abundant and preformed in the sea food chain.
ā¢Iodine is the most common nutritional deficiency among humans, except among those who have access to the sea food chain.
ā¢Nakedness and a layer of fat under the skin are traits shared with sea mammals.
ā¢The skin of human newborn babies is covered with vernix caseosa (literally cheesy varnish)ā¦like the skin of newborn seals.
ā¢Human mothers do not eat the placentaā¦a common point with sea mammals.
ā¢The sense of smell of human beings is mysteriously weak. It is the same among whales. When they separated from hoofed mammals about 60 million years ago and migrated to water, their sense of smell nearly disappeared.3
ā¢Body temperature control through the loss of sweat is not a costly mechanism if we think of the human being as a primate adapted to environments where water and minerals are available without restriction.
ā¢A low larynx, which gives us the ability to breathe through our nose or our mouth, is an anatomical particularity shared with sea lions and dugongs.
ā¢A prominent nose is a feature shared with the proboscis, a primate who lives in coastal wetlands and is an excellent distance swimmer.
ā¢The human vagina, like that of sea mammals, is long and oblique, and is protected by a hymen.
ā¢The human apolipoprotein E gene has more similarities with the one of sea mammals than with the one of land mammals (including common chimpanzees and bonobos).4 Apolipoprotein E is the principal cholesterol carrier in the brain.
ā¢One of the most common abnormalities (or particularities) among humans is a webbing between the second and the third toe. When a congenital abnormality is an addition, it usually means that the feature was there for a reason during the evolutionary process.
ā¢A narrowing of the thoracic aorta (ācoarctation of the aortaā) is common among humans and seals.
ā¢Growth of bone (exostosis) in the ear canal is particular to humans who are frequent swimmers, and also whales and seals.5
ā¢Menopause, and prolonged life after reproduction, is a feature shared by humans, killer whales and short-finned pilot whales.
If we add recent spectacular advances in population genetics, and what we are learning about fluctuations of sea levels and also about archaic humans as navigators, it appears difficult to avoid considering a radically new vision of man.
Adaptation to āInformation Bombardmentā
In such a context, adaptation to information overload has become a priority. We urgently need to learn how several ways to channel human curiosity and hunger for information may be combined.
One way is to develop the art of detecting and selecting valuable and potentially useful information: we need to modernise the ancient art of āfinding a needle in a haystackā. The obligatory first step would be to transcend the current classifications of available data. Many pieces of knowledge remain useless as long as they are not easily found through the usual channels and remain isolated. This is why one of my objectives has been to gather, in a computerised database, the results of studies that are unrelated according to the current classifications.
Since the 1980s, through the Primal Health Research Database (āprimalhealthresearch.comā), we bring together epidemiological studies that explore correlations between the āprimal periodā and what happens later on in life in terms of health and personality traits. The primal period goes from conception until the first birthday. We need to screen a great diversity of scientific and medical journals to occasionally detect one publication that belongs to this framework.
Here is an example of a published piece of information that has remained nearly undetected, in spite of its great scientific value and probable practical implications. According to a Swedish study, the longer the time a boy has spent in the womb, the smaller the risks are of developing a prostate cancer in old age.6 This study has a great scientific value. The authors looked at an enormous cohort of men born between 1889 and 1941 in Stockholm. Eight hundred and thirty four cases of prostate cancer were identified from the cohort between 1958 and 1994, with 1880 controls included in the study. The reasons why this study has remained ignored are obvious in the current phase of the history of information technology. First, it was published in a serious but highly specialised scientific journal that is not read by health practitioners. Furthermore, even if the published article had reached practitioners, it is highly probable, for obvious reasons, that most readers would not have gone beyond the title: experts in prostate cancer are not interested in foetal life, while obstetricians and midwives are not conditioned to think long term and are not interested in the risks for a newborn boy to develop a prostate cancer one day.
This is why it is urgent to develop new ways to classify scientific data in order to facilitate the detection of established knowledge with practical implications. In the exemplary case of the links between duration of foetal life and risk of prostate cancer, it would be worth considering the practical implications.
In such a context, an objective of this book is to focus on one obligatory way to minimise the current high degree of blindness related to āinformation bombardmentā. In the age of overspecialisation, we must train ourselves to focus on the continuity between phases of life that are usually looked at in isolation. This will lead us, as a point of departure, to analyse the concept of āphysiological birth preparationā. It is easy to emphasise the importance of the topic and to phrase urgent questions at a time when this phase of human life is frequently eliminated or shortened through labour induction or pre-labour caesarean section.
To achieve our goal, weāll first recall how important aspects of the birth process among humans may be understood today. Then it will be easy to realise that there are in late pregnancy maternal physiological modifications that prepare the crucial event.
After presenting āphysiological birth preparationā as a prototype of the phases of transition that need to be looked at in depth, weāll find opportunities to enlarge the topic and to present the emerging art of creating links between tiny pieces of the fragmented mirror.
Since the concept of preparation is akin to the concept of anticipation, weāll be constantly turned towards the future and weāll offer reasons to urgently enlarge the frameworks of futurology and evolutionary thinkingā¦without prophesying.
Focusing on āthe future of Homoā is symbolic of a new way of thinking. More common questions, such as: āHas the human game begun to play itself out?ā are related to human activities.7 When wondering: āWhat kind of Homo can play itself out?ā, we suggest that we should first consider probable transformations of our species.
The reason why we do not associate the word Homo with the word sapiens needs to be clarified. Three centuries ago, when Carl Linnaeus formalised the modern way of naming living organisms, he did not bother to define Homo. He had no reason to think that the genus homo would ever have additional members. The only species belonging to the Genus Homo was called āsapiensā. This is why, even today, the term Homo has not been properly defined. It may be used with an enlarged sense, referring to all the hominids that separated from the other members of the chimpanzee family (the genus Pan) about six million years ago. It may be used as a synonym of āhomininā, including all apes more closely related to humans than chimpanzees. It may also be used with a restricted sense, referring to modern human beings.
Throughout this book, when using the word Homo, we are referring to āgreat apesā, characterised by a huge brain, more precisely those with an adult brain volume that has reached another order of magnitude compared with all other hominins. This framework includes modern humans and other variants of the known or not yet known ābig-brained homininsā such as Neanderthal and Denisovan. Today it is becoming difficult to separate these variants of the ābig-brained...
