As I pluck ants from my indoor plants, where they’ve taken up refuge from the ongoing drought in search of moisture, I can’t help but wonder what constitutes a body?
Seems like a dumb question with an obvious answer. The borders are clearly drawn for all to see and touch. But a single body is made up of countless discrete living cells, which in turn make up larger and larger systems within the body. The circulatory system is alive by any definition, but we don’t consider it a person. Why? Because if you rip out someone’s heart and blood vessels, they die, and so does the extracted material. A body is something that cannot be divided any more without destroying the person. That’s literally where we get the word “individual,” one who cannot be chopped in half without involving the police.
The idea for this essay was sparked by a passage in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin in the Game, which I have conveniently lost. I don’t want to overstate what Taleb said since I can’t exactly recall, and I’m liable to confuse the idea it sparked with what he intended. Suffice to say, he spoke of ants, and their colonies. There are species of ants that are solitary, but the ones who live in colonies literally cannot survive for long without them, definitely not long enough to pass on surviving genetic material. The separated ant is like a cardiac cell in the heart removed from the British officer in Last of the Mohicans—it lives for a little while, but it ain’t having babies.
That leads to an interesting question. For any given species, what is the smallest unit of life? By that I mean what is the smallest amount of living physical material that needs to exist in order to sustain life, to reproduce, and generate offpsring indefinitely capable of the same?
A single-celled organism’s unit of life would be one cell. It reproduces through mitosis, and the daughter cells can do the same. The ant separated from the colony can certainly live, but if he were the last ant of his species, then the species is a goner. It may or may not even be able to provide adequate food for itself. The ant, being of a smaller order than the colony and lost without it, is more akin to the still-beating heart recently removed than to the human it came from.
At this point I want to take a moment to say that, as in all of these essays, I’m not proposing some literal universal truth. Rather, this is a map. One of many possible, never the territory, and only useful if it provides valuable perspectives for navigating that territory. Disclaimer disclaimed.
That said, no one homo sapiens meets the criteria for a unit of life. While it’s conceivable that one person could provide all of the food, water, shelter, and protection from predators needed to survive to a ripe old age, the minimum number required to reproduce is two—one man and one woman. If the species intends to avoid massive genetic challenges from inbreeding, then it’s quite a few more. Most hunter-gatherer tribes, which are self-sufficient, tend to divide into separate groups once they hit somewhere between 60-150 people. Remember that if limited genetic material results in significant-enough mutations that become standard features, the “species” has not survived, it has evolved into a new species. Presumably, this is the origin of ourselves, and a lot of near-relatives in our anthropological family tree.
The actual number of humans required to constitute a single unit of life would vary wildly depending on both the place and the time. A small group of people with generalized skills sitting on top of a bounty of resources could sustain itself indefinitely. Replace those general skillsets with specialized skillsets and you need a lot more. Take away most of the resources, and the specialists have to expand to other areas or die. This is a fast-moving target.
The borders of the target are also hard to see. If we look at an isolated tribe as a unit of life, the size is at least easy to count. But what happens when that tribe is in contact with others? We need rules for who belongs to one unit, and who to another. As with minds, I’d argue that any component that provides feedback within the system is a part of the system. In this case, the feedbacks are things like goods, services, information, and meaningful interactions that support life and its reproduction. (I will have to clarify things like reproduction and death later, because it’s clear they don’t mean the same thing for one person as one unit of life).
The temptation is to start looking at members of a unit to decide which are necessary and which are inessential. The problem is that depends on arbitrary criteria, and ignores roles that may seem unimportant but provide valuable information. The only way to make any sense of it is if every member that provides feedback is a part of the unit of life, even if they make that unit more cumbersome or cause harm to it. If a new baby is born into the tribe, the unit swells. If a strange man in a strange boat arrives one day with goods to trade, he becomes a part of that unit provided that the trade continues. What’s more, every single person he depends on also becomes a part of that unit of life, even though they’ve never met. They’re exchanging goods and information. If he has a cheap, steady supply of steel arrowheads, for example, the tribe may stop knapping them from stone, and even forget how. And the trader’s people may develop a taste for coffee. Granted, these thinly-coupled societies could easily separate back into two distinct units of life, but until they actually do it, they’re one.
If every pineapple traded, every sweater knitted, and piece of advise exchanged links the exchangers and both of the networks they depend on, what does a unit of life look like for modern man? What we have is something so different in kind and scale from a self-sufficient tribe, from any member of homo sapiens, that it deserves its own species. I’ll call it, to borrow William Catton, Jr.’s term, homo colossus.
Let’s look at the unit of life to which I belong. I’m not capable of mitosis, so I have to include my wife. We rely on the grocery store for food. That means the farmers producing the food are part of our homo colossus. So are the truckers who bring it to market, the processors in the case of food that is refined and packaged, and the stockers, cashiers, and other employees of the store. What’s more, those farmers and truckers rely on heavy equipment, so anyone involved in the mining, refining, manufacture, and maintenance chains of any tool used along the way also plays a vital role in me having supper. Presumably, most of those people are in the same situation as I am, and while we may have a lot of overlap in our dependencies in the case of the local grocery store employees, those long supply chains mean that others involved in the process have different grocery stores, different farmers, sometimes in entirely different countries. And that’s just food. I haven’t even begun to consider the water I drink or the water required to grow the food. Or the producers of my home, or the goods I use, or the people who support me socially, and all of the networks involved in supporting each of them across all of their needs. If I use a road to get to work that was paid for with tax money, I rely on every taxpayer who contributed, and the economies to which their jobs belong.
We can quickly see how this interdependent network, this single unit of life, might include nearly every human being on the planet. That was not always the case.
Early in our evolution, most successful bands of hunter-gatherers probably numbered less than 60, maybe a lot less. Even if they exchanged goods and occasionally interbred with other tribes, most units of life in homo sapiens wouldn’t have exceeded a few hundred. After the initial surge outward from the cradle of humanity, there were lots and lots of these groups who were completely disconnected from other groups of similar sizes. They didn’t know where the others were, what they did, or that they existed. These are the conditions we evolved under. At some point, we learned the trick of civilization—a special set of circumstances that allowed the size of a unit of life to settle down, specialize, and swell. Still, these units were regional, and there were always others in many places across the globe who hadn’t encountered one another. Mighty as the Roman Empire was, no one in Siberia, Polynesia, or Australia had ever heard of it.
Beginning in the 15th century, several European nations established permanent presences in places that were previously cut off. Homo colossus ate, grew, and in the next few centuries stretched his massive limbs across the whole planet until only a handful of bands deep in the South American rain forest still elude him.
If we imagine each person as a cell in a body, and each cell providing feedback to the whole system, the body went from making decisions based on maybe 60 votes to a few billion. Whatever concerns or brilliant ideas you have, they’re more likely to be heard if you personally know everyone else in the group than if you’re one tiny voice drowned in a cacophony that reaches so far, you will never in your life hear the vast majority of the shouters. The world got that big over the last few centuries, compared to ~200,000 years of modern human existence. It became near-complete only in the last few decades. I sometimes wonder if the prevalence of anxiety and depression we see aren’t at least partly related to a sense of sprawling insignificance to the unit of life to which we belong.
Natural selection works by trying out a bunch of different things and seeing what works, not by trying one really brilliant idea. Different members of a species have slightly different genes, and the idea is that at least some of them will be able to adapt to any situation, and repopulate with the winning genes being more fully expressed. There need to be members with suboptimal genes who fail, i.e. die. Species with great genetic diversity have a better chance of survival, because they’re essentially trying out a lot of options. No one can predict the future, but options give you a range in which some members can survive, as opposed to “only if things remain exactly the same.” A single population of genetically similar birds is just counting the days until extinction. Better to have diverse populations on every continent.
In other words, humanity is healthier with isolated units of life that differ from one another. One body with tremendous interdependence is going to have fewer options and be slower to adapt. Megafauna tend to fare poorly when things change (just ask all the megafauna that went extinct as soon as we showed up). Homo colossus is, in terms of the mass of a unit of life, probably the biggest critter to ever sprawl across the earth. The connections are recent enough that there are still differences in populations, but they’re not as great as they seem. What we call diversity is more like variations on a theme, rather than the robust and significant diversity of isolated populations.
When two populations encounter one another, if they’re to interact and coexist, they begin unconsciously negotiating a new set of standards, each influencing the other and being influenced, usually with one side being a more dominant influence. For example, what language do they use? Both? Which one is used more? Some behaviors simply don’t mix, and are discarded, while others are emphasized. When a system incorporates new components, it can either quickly establish a new homeostasis, or shutdown, or go into runaway and break apart.
Take a look at just one example of how once-isolated populations begin to resemble one another. We’re going to look at something simple: clothing. To some degree it’s an expression of personal taste, but it also has to be suitable to survival in a particular environment. There should be quite a bit of difference between geographically dispersed groups with different cultures and different challenges to meet. Here, we can see how the clothing of Inuit, Chinese, Polynesian, and African peoples have all converged toward a very American/Western European standard in just the last hundred years or so.
You can’t have both diversity and inclusion for long. Diversity requires isolation, inclusion requires negotiating a new homeostasis. Where I live in California, I’ve noticed that upper-middle class white people have a funny habit of looking around a restaurant or a workplace full of other upper-middle class white people, and complaining in hushed tones about the lack of diversity. I think what they mean is that they’d like to see more people of different skin tones in fashionably eclectic outfits. It’s hard to imagine a positive reaction to actual diverse behaviors that are standard in their own areas: a southern black mother taking a switch to her rowdy son in Whole Foods; Inuit hunters butchering a whale at the Santa Barbara pier; Afghani tribesmen trying to stable their goats for the night in a trendy restaurant; or a nomadic Bedouin tribe making camp at the farmer’s market. People with different skin and clothing would be welcome as long as they conformed to local Californian practices and behaviors. In other words, what most Americans think of as diversity is really just interior decorating.
Even though some populations are most definitely connected to the main body in terms of giving and receiving in the feedback cycle of Homo colossus, it’s clear that the process of homogenizing takes quite a while when we’re dealing with so many cells, and many groups seem to have only thin connections of convenience rather than deep dependencies. It might be helpful to think of these as weakly-coupled limbs. Groups that are smaller, recently self-sufficient, more generalized in skills, and positioned well on top of resources, would fare better if they were separated from the main body, and maybe even go back to being a distinct unit of life. Groups that are large, well-assimilated, specialized, and dependent upon others for resources would have a rougher time.
What would a separation be, anyway? Reproduction, in the sense that a cell divides into more cells? Death? These terms don’t mean the same thing in a unit of life as they do in a person. When a person reproduces, they contribute half of the genetic material, stand back, and watch a new life come into the world. In a unit of life like H. colossus, that same process is more akin to the way old cells in a body generate new cells then die off. When H. sapiens were burgeoning groups of 150 people and decided to split into a pair of smaller groups and go their separate ways, that would have been an example of reproduction as the species-level, and it looks a lot like mitosis (except it’s not a genetically precise copy). Now that the massive interconnected body spans the globe, were it to break apart, the resource networks required to maintain the planet’s population would be insufficient for a lot of newly-isolated groups. The new “bodies” would need both to continue splintering and drastically reducing in size to a sustainable level. So I’m not sure if H. colossus could reproduce at all without reverting to a previous state, which is to say, it would technically go extinct.
Imagine you die, and your head, arms, legs, fingers, toes, and torso all separate, maybe a few times over, shrink to reasonable sizes, and grow into little people of their own. That’s what “death” would look like for H. colossus. In the past, if a unit of life of H. sapiens died, it meant there weren’t enough people left to sustain the group, so each member either died or was taken in by another group. The reason I differentiate the two processes by calling them different species is that the size of the systems are so unfathomably different that the way it takes in and processes information, and the time involved, bears no resemblance. It’s not what we spent hundreds of thousands of years evolving to do, and if H. colossus wants it to work, it’s got one chance to get it right.
The evolutionary advantages to being H. colossus are that its size allows for impressive internal specialization, the ability to exploit more niches and more marginal niches, and redistribute those resources over vast distances. The downside is that leads to a rapid swelling in size. Like the yeast in the fermenter, space is finite, and as it grows, there’s less food and more waste.
Seems like a glaring fragility. On the personal level, it’s clear that being more self-sufficient reduces personal risk, but short of being a hermit family who provides everything for itself and has no contact with the outside world, there’s no way to truly decouple. Practically, what can we do to increase resilience?
Clearly, it’s better to be part of a smaller limb with fewer critical joints to the main body. That way, your feedback is more significant. Most of the important resources we depend on should come from within the limb, i.e. the local geographical area. For example, I depend heavily on coffee, which comes from South America, maybe Africa if I’m feeling fancy. If those long international supply lines ever had something go wrong, I’d quickly be unable to afford it. Switching to tea wouldn’t help, since it’s coming from just as far. If I were smart, I’d quit coffee altogether. If.
The fewer resources you need, the more sources, and the shorter the supply lines, the better off you are. Blood flow is much more likely to be disrupted between your heart and your pinky toe than between your heart and your left shoulder. Pinky toes don’t get to choose where they live, but we do. I could move to a place that produces most of the things I need locally. The more skills I have, the fewer people I critically depend on, and the more people who find me valuable. It’s always better to be a net producer than a net consumer, and debt should be considered a poisonous waste product (yeast call it “beer”). Some jobs are extremely mobile. You can go to any city, town, or holler and find people willing to deal for your skills, and they’ll need you whether it’s an economic boom or a Great Depression. Others require very specific locations and very specific economic conditions to produce the demand for your services.
The Homo colossus metaphor has quite a bit of mileage, but my favorite part is that it redefines the word “individual.” Some people may think it’s depressing to consider yourself less than a single unit of life. I think it’s nice to remember that I depend on quite a lot from quite a few. If nothing else, the lesson here is don’t be a jackass, stay humble.