Two words: internal testicles.
Isaac Asimov, in one of his essays, suggested that women’s ovulation could be made voluntary. No unintended menstruation, no unintended pregnancy, no pregnancy from rape, no need for birth control, no abortion controversy (or a very much reduced one, anyway…)
Second MLS: redesign the lower spine! I’ve got such a back-ache today… Also, the feet need some work. I don’t really want to go as far as having hooves, but maybe feet that are naturally a little more like walking shoes or hiking boots? And get rid of those darn toe-nails. Good for nothing irritants!
Is it meaningful to ask to increase the human race’s overall average intelligence? Would we be better off?
And one somewhat morbid thought: how about a short, sharp cut-off to our mortality. Instead of lingering for decades in pain, suffering from dementia, withering away, I’d kind of prefer to die quickly and suddenly. Once death is imminent, let’s just get it over and done with.
(Even an ice floe would be preferable to some of the nursing homes I have seen…)
Trinopus
I hate to say it but I think that is a social issue, not a biological one
A hard upper limit of how much negative sensation or emotion someone can feel. We need negative stimuli, but we don’t need to be incapacitated by them.
I’d make women more like bonobo females; just as prone to organize into alliances as males. That should solve much or even most of the equality problem.
I’d make fertility most a matter of conscious choice; without a conscious decision to do so, the eggs/sperm aren’t released. The exception would be that I’d make women reflexively (because if it was conscious they could be coerced) unable to release their eggs if they feel like they are being assaulted or oppressed; this makes rape and abuse evolutionarily useless and strongly selected against.
“Earlids”, the means to shut off hearing.
I’d give the nu-humans the ability to regenerate like a salamander. That would be a huge quality of life enhancer. And related to that…
Valves in the blood vessels that when a body part is severed clamp down to prevent blood loss.
We’d grow a new set of teeth every fifteen, twenty years. Long enough a period to not be much of a burden, short enough that most people would always have all their teeth even before modern dentistry.
That would be disastrous for women; the genders are specialized for a reason. Every time they got pregnant, they’d be trying to simultaneously support the muscles and bulk of a male and a pregnancy at the same time. I’d put that change into the “wouldn’t last” category; either the changed humans would die out, or women would rapidly lose the augmented size & strength. If you want to make the genders physically equal just make everyone hermaphrodites or gender-switchers and be done with it.
I’d go further; change our entire appetites to be “smart”. in other words, when we are low on high calorie food we’ll crave high energy fatty foods just like now; but if we have plenty of calories in our diet, we’ll start to prefer less fatty food.
No, as I understand it, it appears to be biological. I’ve read of experiments in life extension on animals where instead of slowly aging and falling apart, the modified animals live a bit longer with little appearance of aging then just drop dead. And I’d go for life extension in general, naturally.
Hmmm. Three large toes and a fourth pointing backward toe would provide both more stable footing and toes that were less fragile.
And speaking of the spine; one idea I came up with long ago was to separate the load bearing and nerve cord functions of the spine. There would be an outer spine that serves only as just another part of the skeleton, and an inner spine that contains the spinal cord; the idea being that if your back was broken you’d be able to heal from it since the part that takes all the load and is therefore prone to break no longer contains the spinal cord.
So males can’t have their strength reduced just a tad? No way to modify human arms to improve leverage? Humans aren’t nearly as strong as chimps. Seems like as long as the strength reduction was linked to some other beneficial trait it should be stable.
How about telepathy? Do the OP’s conditions allow for telepathy? I mean, we don’t know of any biological mechanism for it, so how to gene-code for it? But we could invent some kind of magnetic or electric mechanism, I suppose.
Bullshit.
I specfied violent aggression, as in intent to inflict physical harm.
Furthermore I am not sure of any connection between the drive to excel
and other froms of aggression. I do not think any of the behavioral sciences
have advanced to the point where they can make such a statement, whereas
male-associated violent aggression is part of the ongoing historical and
criminal records.
Aren’t women already just as prone to organize into alliances as men? I didn’t know humans had any big gender differences along that area.
It’s my understanding that humans are less strong than chimps because our muscles and their attachments to the skeleton are optimized for precision and endurance instead of power. We can’t beat a chimp arm wrestling, but we are more dexterous and can run it into the ground. We’ve already made the trade off you are speaking of.
The problem is that all those male muscles and male bulk consume metabolic resources; a woman who had male strength and bulk would in fact need to be bigger than a man and eat more food since she’d have to have bigger internal organs to support both pregnancy and a male-sized body at the same time. So now you have a human tribe that already had trouble feeding itself saddled with women who need to eat a lot more food - more food than the men, in fact. And for little gain; male strength doesn’t have much to do with why society is patriarchal; big men are bossed around by little men all through history.
That’s why I mentioned making women prone to form alliances, like bonobo females and human men are; that’s what has put men on top throughout history. Not male strength, not male brutality, but because in most gender disputes throughout history until modern times, it’s almost always been a matter of one or a few women against every man in sight. A woman may be able to stand up to a man, but she can’t beat a dozen or a hundred or a thousand - and women virtually never ganged up to fight back (physically or otherwise). I don’t think it’s a coincidence that after thousands of years of being second class citizens or worse, it was after the rise of organizations for the rights of women that they suddenly started making progress.
Well we kind of already do have telepathy via waves through the air, and in it’s more advanced form, email.
However:
Oh, they do. It’s easy to miss it in our society because we are a society full of women in formal organizations like political pressure groups and bureaucracies; women can learn to organize just fine. But just look at informal alliances, like street gangs or an “old boys network” - how often do you see a female street gang? Humans you see when it comes to forming alliances resemble the lowland chimpanzee; males organize themselves into alliances, females just socialize. And like lowland chimps, females are subordinate and often abused. While in bonobos females are just as prone to form alliances as males; and females are no more prone than males to being abused, because if a male tries she probably has friends to help her deal with him.
My post is my cite, but I don’t think it would’ve reduce the actual number of pregnancies significantly. Women got pregnant several times and the best aontraceptives were pregnancy and nursing. A non-pregnant, nonnursing woman would get pregnant quickly.
I know, but still, supporting a larger and older population would’ve been a birgger problem, methinks.
The point I’m making is strength isn’t the end all of “fitness”, as you clearly understand.
Right which is why I propose making men less strong, and to prevent unequal strength from reoccurring I’d code it in such a way that the genes for some nice trait depend in part on the genes for the strength limiting trait. I’m sure nature could figure out a way around this eventually, but 8000 BC was well into the agricultural age. Technology would be pretty close (at least in evolutionary time scales) to making human physical strength fairly irrelevant.
Now I like this thinking too. Bonobos from what I understand evolved they way did because they live in a more food rich environment. The males couldn’t hog all the good food so the females didn’t have to spend all that extra time scrounging around for scraps and got better organized.
We kind of see this problem in human society. In times past it was traditional the guy ate first and the women and children got what was left. Poorly nourished people don’t have the energy to fight for their rights as much. In order to do what you want you’re either going to have to reorganize the nucleonic family into gender separated groups, or change the strength ratios so women can physically take their fair share and fight back in the family unit. Otherwise women will be spending a good chunk of history trying to get by on scraps, and unable to spend the energy for organizing.
Well, what nice trait? As I see it, it would have to be a pretty major advantage or all that would accomplish is to render humans less capable; it wouldn’t make society more equal, it would just cripple men. And cripple humanity in general for most of its existence; many things would be difficult or impossible to accomplish without male strength. Would we even develop advanced technology if there weren’t people strong enough to be efficient blacksmiths? We’re already a pretty weak species.
The theory I’ve heard is that female lowland chimps had to spread out on their gathering expeditions because all the best spots were hogged by gorillas; they spend most of their time alone, so there’s no opportunity to form alliances. Bonobos don’t have competition from gorillas, so the females can stay together and gather at the best food sources.
Well, no. Women as the vegetable & fruit gatherers and food preparers could eat whenever they liked. And in fact in hunter/gatherer cultures, the very best meat from the men’s hunts generally ends up used as gifts to women. Male big game hunting in such cultures is mostly about male dominance games and impressing women; if all you want is to maximize the amount of meat you get small game hunting is more efficient (except for whaling). And you generally have men sit down and eat big meals because men like to eat large meals at long intervals; women are more prone to snacking, and are just plain smaller.
It probably had a lot more to do with the lack of an organizational instinct, and being constantly burdened with pregnancy and nursing and so on. Pre-modern women were under a far higher biological burden thanks to them needing to keep up with the higher death rate, especially infant morality. A woman who is pregnant just a few times in her life is in a much better competitive position than one who it pregnant 15 times or more.
I want the biological ability to blow shit up with my mind.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) not possible. Well, I suppose something could be worked out with explosive excrement and organic radio transceivers…
Just how far can we go? I’m all for the ideas of fewer nerves in the teeth, and altering our feet to have a toe pointing backward, but those are little things.
How about the default fertility option is OFF? Make it so that a person who wishes to have viable sperm or ova has to work at it. Let’s have a plant that has to be cared for for a minimum of two years, by a man and a woman. Each one has to somehow tend to it daily, and handle the plant, which will imprint on those two people. At the end of two years, if it’s been taken care of properly, the plant will bear fruits, which both prospective parents eat. This will induce fertility in those two people, and ONLY those two people. If two people really want to have a child together, I think that a two year commitment is a good test. The fruit won’t work on anyone else. This would drastically reduce the number of people who become parents through ignorance. It would also reduce paternity fraud, and men claiming that women tricked them into having sex in order to get pregnant. If you have to make an effort to tend something for a couple of years, there’s no way that you can claim it’s an accident. And people who can’t make and follow through on that commitment probably shouldn’t be parents.
I’d like to be able to breathe water, as well as air. I don’t know how practical that is.
Also, stupidity should HURT. I don’t know how that would work, but it’s something that we desperately need (see: Birthers and Truthers, among others).
It would be interesting to have us be neuter most of the time, but go into heat about a quarter of the time, as in LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness. Note that the people of Winter have a fifty/fifty chance of becoming either sex when they go into heat/kemmer. I don’t think that most of us would want to give up sex for three weeks, even if we go at it like bunnies for the fourth week.
Why do we ingest things that will hurt us, and claim it feels good? Why do we engage in dangerously stupid behavior, because of the rush? Should we get rid of this mechanism?
Some of these improvements are solving problems that didn’t exist until very modern times. I doubt they would be likely to have any impact on genetic fitness until last couple of hundred years or so, and even then many would be of dubious utility.
Caries incidence was vastly lower in paleolithic than in neolithic times. While our dentition probably could use some tweaking — like Der Trihs suggests, a new set of adult teeth every 20 years or so would be spiffy — the real problem is that we eat a lot more carbohydrates, and most of it in forms that greatly promote bacterial growth. This just really wasn’t a problem until very recently in our species’ history.
I don’t have a cite for it, but my orthodontist told me that most traditional cultures have slightly larger and stronger jaws, and he’d be out of a job completely if we all ate more like an ancestral diet due to more chewing on tough foods. He also said that teeth tend to grow straighter under heavy use. This was while fitting me for a post-braces mouth guard/growth stimulator that would have expanded my jaw enough for all the wisdom teeth I had coming in. Basically, I was supposed to bite down on it for a couple of hours every day. I didn’t use it regularly and so have some slight crowding and crookedness, otherwise I would have had enough room for even the wisdom teeth.
Our appetites for food were perfectly suited to our environment for 99.9% of our history. While it would be nice to think you could tweak the system to provide proper feedback with modern foods, it’s arguable that modern foods threw our normal feedback mechanisms into imbalance. In other words, changing our appetite feedback mechanisms is a cure in search of a problem.
We’re still in the very early days of establishing a full model of all the mechanisms (leptin, for instance, wasn’t discovered until 1994) but restricting your diet to those foods that were available in the ancestral human diet, even without intentional caloric restriction, has shown improvements in health indicators and appetite regulation in the few specific studies that have been done so far, and there’s a ton of indirect research into ancestral diets and hunter-gatherer diets that strongly indicate that many diseases we consider normal are byproducts of civilization. Considering how complicated the systems are, I doubt we could do much better by design without unintended consequences.
Overall fertility was much lower for most of our history, and menstruation was much less common than in modern societies. Longer nursing periods (judging by modern hunter-gatherers, around 3 years) provided prophylactic effects, and both high activity rates and periodic caloric restriction can suppress menstrual cycles and fertility rates. First menstruation in modern societies is very early compared to traditional ones too.
Conscious control of fertility would be very cool, but exceedingly unlikely to be of much benefit to our species. If you’re going to tweak things that much, unilateral control of fertility still lying with the female kind of rubs me the wrong way, so to make things fair, both the male and the female having to agree on when mating is for making a baby and when it’s just for fun sounds a lot more equitable. Keep in mind that by doing that you’re going to greatly decrease overall fertility, so any external factors that could cause a population bottleneck might just wipe out even our hardier engineered humans.
I can’t think of any kind of workable mechanism for it besides: seasonal fertility, which is a MAJOR source of conflict in species that have it, so not that desirable considering how violent we are already; something like adding a catalyst gender, which means that one individual either has no genetic input, or functions as a “bit-check” on the DNA code, which may have a very negative impact in low-mutation conditions by restricting diversity; or making everyone hermaphroditic and only practicing reproductive sex when both parters agree to impregnate one of them. No matter what you do, those seemingly simple biological changes are going to have such an enormous impact on what is one of the single strongest universal drives of human cultures that the resulting species probably wouldn’t be recognizably human in behavior.
Cancer appears to be largely a product of modern lifestyles. Diet has a major impact on cancer rates (almost absent among hunter-gatherers) as do fertility patterns (longer nursing, fewer menses have prophylactic effects; again reproductive tissue cancers are virtually absent in traditional cultures.)
Backaches and foot problems are also a product of modern life. Sitting in chairs and shoes are the main culprits, along with abnormally low levels of activity compared to our ancestral norm. More total activity, more squatting or sitting on the floor, and walking and running barefoot as much as possible help alleviate most of these orthopedic problems.
You’ve got to keep in mind that everything, EVERYTHING is a trade-off. For instance, I, as a human male, think having internal testicles would be an awesome idea, but they’re external probably to make it easier to regulate temperature. Changing that one thing would necessitate other cascading changes. Regeneration would be great too, but you’d have to find some way of regulating cell division so that you didn’t inadvertently cause cancer.
If we’re talking about magic science that just solves all the problems of support systems and regulations without any major redesigns in other systems, then my wish list overlaps a bit with Der Trihs and a couple of other people so far.
[ul]
[li]Tougher or more useful finger and toenails, and better anchoring. I’ve had too many torn, broken, and smashed fingernails and toenails in my lifetime. Even toughened with hard use, fingernails don’t develop into decent claws, and are still very breakable. Would have to have no impact on dexterity. Absence would negatively impact dexterity, which is why I’m not arguing for removal. Try picking up a coin or pulling out a hair with fingernails clipped very short and you’ll see what I mean.[/li][li]Regeneration and improved healing. Especially something that better regulates bone reformation. Partial crippling due to broken bones happens even with modern surgical intervention. I ought to know, my wrists were pinned back together several years ago and while I have very close to full recovery, I do still have some slight problems due to the breakage. Without surgery I would have been permanently crippled.[/li][li]An improved immune system. Overlooked by everyone so far, infectious diseases and parasites are responsible for the majority of mortality and morbidity, far beyond anything else except for cancer and heart disease (which as I’ve shown are due largely to lifestyle and diet, and limited almost entirely to industrial societies). Even with all the research we’ve done, infectious diseases are still an enormous problem and we’ve got very little we can do about them.[/li][li]Improved eye design. Retina more akin to cephalopods to avoid blind spot and visual artifacts. More infra-red sensitivity for better night vision. Probably multiple lenses for better acuity in different conditions. Possibly a nictitating membrane for cornea protection.[/li][/ul]
Honestly, given biological constraints, even over such a short term as 8,000 years I don’t see most of these changes as either useful or of being preserved well. I’d bet it’s more likely that we develop nanomedicine that can do replacements of certain tissues and systems in situ in the near future than that we figure out how to code the stuff properly with DNA without causing problems in the long run, and making it inheritable over a time scale of thousands of years without seriously unintended consequences. I mean, most people think the appendix is useless, but by eliminating it, you might kill off some humans just because they can’t recover quickly from a bout of diarrhea.
That’s why my fertility plant requires BOTH wannabe parents to care for it, and touch it every day. A woman can tend the plant diligently, but if she doesn’t have a man who is also tending the same plant, then the plant won’t produce fruit that allows for viable sperm and ova. BOTH parents should have to consider pregnancies carefully. This doesn’t mean that lesbians and gays can’t be biological parents, it just means that they have to find someone of the opposite gender to agree to make a baby with them. And people who want to adopt also have to find prospective bio parents, as well.
I’d enjoy having claws. Fingernails and toenails don’t really seem to serve any purpose, other than affording a surface to decorate. Women who cultivate very long fingernails generally do learn to pick up coins without using the nails, and I can pluck out hairs without using my fingernails. If the hair is short, I’ll need tweezers.