Individual citizens are internally plural: they have within
them the full range of behavioral possibilities.
—Zadie Smith
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Let me make it plain You gotta make way for the Homo superior.
—David Bowie, “Oh! You Pretty Things”
A few days ago, cycling along the Mall towards Buckingham Palace, as it happens, I saw a child being admonished by his parents. “Just who do you think you are?” the mother shouted. I cycled on and didn’t hear anymore (given where we were, maybe the next line was “Do you think you’re the blimmin’ Queen?”) but I thought about that “who do you think you are?” in the light of the people I’ve met in this book. Who do I think I am? I think I am part of a species with far greater potential than I realize in my day-to-day life.
When I read and marvel at accounts of remarkable survival or bravery, or admire great works of art, literature, and science as the pinnacles of human achievement, I feel that the people who perform and achieve such feats are otherly. We masses are not superhuman, nor are most of the people we meet. What I’ve belatedly realized is that there is a thread connecting us to them. We can bask in the glory of these others of our species, because we have similar traits, too.
Let’s see. My memory is only average, but I could train it to be better, if I wanted. I very much doubt I could run the Badwater Ultramarathon, but I might be able to make it through a regular marathon, if I put my mind to it. I will never win a science Nobel Prize, but I did once have a paper published in Science.1 I will never sing at the Royal Opera House, but at least now, after practicing, I don’t disgrace myself at karaoke.2 To some extent, at least, there is potential within us all.
We’ve covered a diverse array of traits in our survey. Intelligence and bravery, singing and endurance, resilience and sleep, old age and happiness. But there is a unifying link between them: there are degrees of them, and they are expressed in all of us. They are part of the color palette that makes us human; perhaps they are the prime colors in it.3 Hamlet’s “what a piece of work is man” speech comes to mind, but after praising humanity’s capacity for reason and our infinite faculty, Hamlet sourly dismisses it: “Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither.”4 That’s where we differ: at the end of our survey, I am far from down on humanity—Hamlet is on a downer, and I am on an upper.5
As we’ve seen, superhumans are just at the end of a spectrum of ability. What is controversial is how they got there. For several of the traits we’ve examined, it seems certain that the people I’ve met are the carriers of precious genetic cargo, which have helped them achieve greatness. Intelligence, singing ability, and longevity are the clearest examples. But even with these you need a favorable environment to facilitate their full development. Mozart wasn’t born playing the piano; Magnus Carlsen had to learn the game of chess. With other traits—memory and endurance, for example—you can ratchet yourself up to a high level regardless of your genetic deck.
We’ve seen throughout this book that how well you are able to do something depends on how you are raised, what you eat, and what you experience, how you train and practice, as well as what you are born with. The environment nurtures, interacts with, and modifies your genes. It does not overcome the influence of your genes—it works with them, turning them on and off, boosting some and suppressing others. There is no such thing as “nature versus nurture.” It is never genes or environment; it is always both things, together. The phrase persists in the popular imagination, an ancient meme well past its sell-by date, but it has long been dismissed by geneticists as simply wrong. There’s another quote from Hamlet here that is apt: “For use almost can change the stamp of nature.” The prince is trying to stop his mother from sleeping with his uncle, saying that if she practices not going to Claudius’s bed, her innate need to do so can be reduced. I marvel that Shakespeare put that “almost” there. Training can almost trump innate ability, is my reading of this.6
Complex traits are influenced by thousands of genes. A gene confirmed to have an effect on intelligence, for example, will also play roles in many other traits. Genetic influence is smeared. It’s not surprising, since intelligence and, say, memory, or language ability, or resilience, are just categories we’ve assigned to help describe and understand things about humans. These categories make messy reality manageable; they are not Platonic ideals. The technical name for this smearing effect in genetics is pleiotropy. Genes linked to intelligence will probably also influence memory, language ability, focus, and happiness, and probably longevity and resilience. And vice versa. For example, one study of Vietnam War veterans found a link between intelligence and health, perhaps because low intelligence and poor health share genetic factors,7 and an analysis of three studies of different twins showed that there was a small association between intelligence and lifespan—smarter people live longer—and that this link was genetic.8
This smearing and interrelatedness do not mean that genetics plays less of a part in influencing our athletic ability, or our intelligence, or our likelihood to live to one hundred: there is still a hefty genetic component. Except for a small number of mutations, such as the Mendelian diseases like cystic fibrosis that we saw in Chapter 9, you can’t draw a line from a particular gene to a particular behavior or physiological effect.
So why the resistance to the idea of nature? Any number of bestselling books recently (I’m thinking of Grit by Angela Duckworth; Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool; The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle; Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell; Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin; and how’s this for a wishful title: The Genius in All of Us, by David Shenk) emphasize the role of nurture over that of genetics and downplay the role of innate ability.
Partly it’s because how we commonly think about genetics is wrong. The meme sets nature against nurture, and people think that nature is immutable and unmodifiable. It is not. Modifications can occur in any number of the traits we’ve encountered in this book. Genes turn on and off according to the demands put on them, and they are modified by training, diet, and other environmental influences. The study of this kind of modification is called epigenetics.
The unwillingness to accept a genetic influence in what we do could be ideological. No one likes that idea that genes control our destiny. Well, no one is saying that; it’s a straw man argument. Then there’s the taint of history, and the horrors of the eugenics movements in the UK, Scandinavia, Canada, and the US, and of course Germany. Yet that is politics, not science. If modern science tells us that there is a genetic component to high achievement in this or that trait, as we’ve seen in this book, then that’s the way it is. Accept the evidence, and be empowered. For one thing, it will enable people to devote their resources to the right place. For another, once we understand more about the genetic influence on expertise, then more people will be able to accomplish greater things through training. It’s similar to the argument advanced for measuring IQ: by doing so we can better help those who traditionally have been neglected. David Card and Laura Giuliano at the University of California, Irvine, showed how the introduction of IQ screening in a large school district in Florida led to a large increase in the number of black, Hispanic, low-income, and female students into programs for gifted children,9 and Robert Plomin has argued that IQ testing can improve educational attainment for all children.10 Incidentally, imagine if there was no genetic impact on intelligence. If differences in nurture alone determined intelligence, then everyone from deprived backgrounds would be less intelligent than those with advantageous backgrounds.
What does this mean for you as a reader setting out to become an expert in something, or for those of you who are parents or want to be parents, thinking about how to best guide your children? It means not setting unrealistic targets. It means trying different things—be Goldilocks about things—until you find something that suits you. If you find you have a knack for something, keep going. If you realize you’ve not got what it takes to pursue something as a career, stop. Do it because it’s fun, not because you want to become an expert. Remember too that part of our genetic endowment is our drive. This was one of the biggest revelations for me in researching this book, discovering that the propensity to practice in itself has a strong genetic element, as we saw in Chapter 6. I’d never thought about traits such as doggedness or grit having a genetic component. But they do. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t reach the level of the people in this book: very few do.
I remember once asking my mother, a successful writer of books for children and young adults, why she bothered. I think we’d both just read a Philip Pullman novel. She’s sold a lot of books, but by her own admission, she wasn’t going to be a Pullman or a Roald Dahl or a J. K. Rowling. She did it, she said, because she was happy to contribute a small amount. Meeting the superhumans in this book hasn’t made me quake in terror of not being able to achieve what they’ve done; they’ve inspired me to put a little more into what I do. Run, or at least do exercise, for the positive vibes it brings you. Prioritize your sleep as you would your safety crossing the road, or the health of your children—it will make you feel better, think better, and it will pay off in the long term, too. You don’t have to put your mind to something so doggedly that you are able to race a Formula 1 car or sail around the world, but a little thinking about how to live in the moment may improve your life and maybe even your happiness. I hope I won’t ever find myself in a position of such horror as Carmen Tarleton or Alex Lewis, but lesser setbacks affect us all. We are resilient; we are equipped to get through them.
For me, this is enough, but I know that many people won’t accept non-superhuman status. It’s one of the reasons why those books I mentioned sell well, and why there is such intense genetic research going into areas such as intelligence, musical ability, and longevity. Even sleeping. Remember the DEC2 gene we saw in Chapter 10? People with a particular version of the gene can get by with fewer hours of sleep than the rest of us, and some scientists are quite open in saying that people will be genetically enhanced in the future.11 The Harvard geneticist George Church talks about genetic variants that he says could potentially be edited into the human genome.12
The rise of gene-editing techniques such as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) has generated huge excitement13 (and anxiety). Research groups in China14 and the US15 have already tried (with mixed success) to use the technique to modify human embryos. Even when the logistics have been worked out, and its safety demonstrated, the pleiotropic nature of our genes points to how hard it’s going to be to engineer significant changes into humanity. Intelligence, longevity, musicality, and personality are far more genetically complex than we once thought. That said, people will try. Genetic engineering has resulted in intelligence and lifespan boosts in animals. Rats have been made smarter by modifying a single gene, NR2B, which improved their learning and memory skills.16 This gene seems to allow neurons to communicate with each other for longer. In the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, tweaks to two genetic pathways linked to aging resulted in a fivefold increase in lifespan.17
Here’s a question. Modern humans evolved some 200,000 years ago. Are we more human now because some members of our species have done great things? No—because just as there is a thread connecting us contemporary people to the superhumans in this book, so is there a thread going back to prehistoric people. But look at us. We’re taller, healthier, smarter; we live longer, we achieve more. It’s not that we’re more human, it’s that we’ve achieved more of our potential. How much more is there?
There’s a lot more. Here’s just a glimpse.
In 2016 and 2017 there were unprecedented breakthroughs in the understanding of the ancient game of Go. What had happened was an artificial intelligence (AI) called AlphaGo competed against the world’s top human players, and crushed them. It played moves that had never been seen before in the game’s three-thousand-year history. But the best humans in the world upped their game. Lee Sedol of South Korea, and Ke Jie of China, changed and improved the way they play because of what the AI had shown them. “After my match against AlphaGo, I fundamentally reconsidered the game, and now I can see that this reflection has helped me greatly,” said Jie. “Although I lost, I discovered that the possibilities of Go are immense and that the game has continued to progress.”18 Jie then went on a twenty-two-game winning streak.
Demis Hassabis is cofounder of Google DeepMind, the London-based lab that developed AlphaGo, and its even more impressive successor, AlphaZero.19 He says the response of Jie and Sedol shows what AI can do for humanity. We fear that AI will take our jobs, but this is misplaced. AI shows us who we can be. “Human ingenuity augmented by AI will unlock our true potential,” Hassabis says.
I can imagine how AI could augment and improve several of the traits we’ve covered in this book. Intelligence and creativity, certainly. Also memory, language, and focus. I’m sure breakthroughs in medical science aided by AI will influence our longevity and resilience, too. Will this mean we become post-human? Will it widen the chasm between the haves and the have-nots?
Even without AI, the people I’ve met over the course of writing this book have left me excited about the potential of the human species. There’s a lot left in us. This is something else that’s been driving me to write this book.
Anders Sandberg, based at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, is, among other things, interested in measuring the future potential of humanity. We face nonnegligible existential threats. There’s climate change, synthetic biology, nuclear war, and (ironically, since I’ve just extolled its virtues) artificial intelligence. One way of measuring the risk we face is to calculate what philosophers call the “size of the future,” in other words the number of potential future lives that are possible. Sandberg has done this, and the numbers are beyond astronomical. Current existential threats to humanity risk between 800 billion and 3.92 × 10100 future human lives.20 We should get our act together, he says, for the sake of these future lives, and for the sake of our potential.
In this book we’ve explored examples of the best of us. We started by looking at the ways we achieve more than chimpanzees, and the traits in this book—our culture, our humanity—go a long way to explaining that. The other thing, of course, that we do at a higher level than chimps is cooperate. This quality is needed more than ever. I have marveled at the richness of the human species and thrilled at our possibilities. We must harness these traits, the current extremes of human potential—and use them to solve the problems facing our species.