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What will Homo Nouveau look like? by Don Simborg
By Guest Contributor Don Simborg
Author of The Fourth Great Transformation, Don Simborg, explains what the next human species will look like and what The Fourth Great Transformation could mean for us all.
When interviewed about my books, often the first question asked is “So what will be the next human species?” I never answer, “Homo nouveau” which is the name I have given to the next human species since it really doesn’t tell anyone anything. What they really want to know is what does this creature look like?
The simple answer is that Homo nouveau will look just like us. Well, what does that mean? Homo sapiens have a lot of different looks. Yes, and so will Homo nouveau. My hypothesis is that the next human species will be the result of an off-target mutation secondary to a popular genetic engineering procedure leading to a post-zygotic reproductive barrier. If you haven’t read either book, this sentence may not have much meaning for you. The basic premise is that many Homo nouveau will come into being over a period of decades or longer because they or their parents all underwent some popular germline genetic engineering procedure. That procedure could be anything and I speculated it would be related to attempts to alter a complex genetic characteristic such as aging or height or something else.
Assuming that procedure is available to anyone in the world, then the collective appearance of all Homo nouveau will have the same variation as Homo sapiens. One will not be able to tell one from the other by appearance, language, culture, or any other characteristic…except one. They will only be able to have viable offspring by breeding with another Homo nouveau. Interbreeding with Homo sapiens will not result in viable pregnancies.
Over time, since Homo nouveau will be a metapopulation with a separately evolving gene pool, they will evolve physical and other characteristics that will diverge from Homo sapiens. That will happen both by classical Darwinian natural selection as well as likely further genetic engineering. There is no way to anticipate exactly what those differences will be. Much of that will be determined randomly. At some unpredictable time in the future, they will look and act differently.
HOW DOES THIS SCENARIO REGARDING THE SPECIATION OF HOMO NOUVEAU FROM HOMO SAPIENS COMPARE TO THE SPECIATION OF HOMO SAPIENS FROM OUR PREDECESSOR?
There are similarities and differences. The similarities reflect the fact that in most speciation events the new species looks the same or similar to the previous species at least in outward appearance. With regard to Homo sapiens, we don’t know for sure exactly which human species was our immediate predecessor. It may have been Homo heidelbergensis or some other closely related human species and it almost surely happened in Africa. It was not some sudden event, however. As Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks point out in their marvelous article, “The Revolution that Wasn’t: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior” (Journal of Human Evolution 39 (2000): 453), the transition to modern humans from our predecessor happen over a period of over 200,000 years. In fact, it probably happened in multiple regions of Africa simultaneously during that period.
Similarly, as Robert Foley said in his book Humans Before Humanity: “As we have seen here, human evolution is no blinding flash and no special creation. Man did not make himself, nor woman herself. Both are the product of countless events in the daily lives of the hominids. There is no magic ingredient in human evolution, and no substitute for knowing the details of what happened – where and when and why. Small, insignificant earthquakes in Africa, or particular demographic trends in Europe, are responsible for what happened in evolution. We should not let the uniqueness of our species dupe us into believing that we are the product of special forces. Cosmologists studying the origins of the universe need to think in terms of a big bang. Evolutionary biologists are better off with a bout of hiccups. If we had been privileged enough to observe the origins of our species and our lineage, we would have been struck by one thing –nothing very much happened.”
Let me emphasize: Had we been observers during the period when archaic humans transitioned to modern humans, it is unlikely we would have noticed it. In that regard, that transition is similar to my projected speciation of Homo nouveau.
The differences to how human speciation occurred in the past, however, are dramatic. First, we are going to directly cause the speciation through genetic engineering. Second, it is going happen much more quickly than over a period of 200,000 years. Finally, we, the predecessor species will be cognizant of what is happening.
If you’d like to find out more information about The Fourth Great Transformation, please see Don’s previous blogs.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DON SIMBORG is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and former faculty member at both the Johns Hopkins and University of California San Francisco schools of medicine. He is the founder of two electronic medical records companies and is a founding member of the American College of Medical Informatics. He served on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academics of Science. He and his wife, Madeleine, have two children and four grandchildren and live in California.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/don-simborg-293678/
Suggested Reading
A new human species will soon come to co-exist with us. This new species, ‘Homo nouveau’, will be created using artificial intelligence and genetic engineering; both important tools which are in their infancy. Not only are the science and technology relatively new, but their implications in the mind of the general public are also only just beginning to enter our collective consciousness. This book expands on the research done for the author’s pervious book, What Comes After Homo Sapiens?
Written by a medical professional and independent consultant to healthcare IT companies, The Fourth Great Transformation explores the questions of what this new species will look like, how we as humans will get along with them, and the potential threats and opportunities that will come along with genetically modified humans.