The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [171]
“The people of your era undoubtedly had their own ideas as to when the natural conservatism of adulthood began to set in. Historical research suggests that some of you would have set the prime of life at forty, others at twenty-one — but if you had been able to study the development of the brain in more detail and with more care, you would have seen that the robotizing effects of adulthood began to set in much earlier, at puberty. Freedom from robotization requires that the development of a posthuman body be arrested much earlier than the people of your era supposed.
“It is true that the other posthuman species have achieved remarkable success in preserving and exploiting those juvenile aspects which remain to a partly matured brain. They have made the most of the mental flexibility left to them, but our assessment of the current situation is that everyone born in the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth centuries is now on the very threshold of robotization, desperately employing the last vestiges of their potential flexibility to maintain the illusion that they are capable of further personal evolution. Their bodies are probably capable of thousands of years of further existence, but their minds will settle into fixed routines long before they reach the limits of their bodily existence.
“We cannot claim that our own brains will remain malleable forever, and we recognize that there is a complementary danger to personality in what people of the twenty-first century called the Miller Effect, but we do have good grounds for asserting that we can sustain much greater mental flexibility for far longer than any of our sibling species. Although it is a less important issue, we also have good grounds for believing that our bodies are also more robust, capable of a greater longevity than those possessed by our sibling species.”
“Because they’re sexless?” Zimmerman put in.
“The supersession of sexual limitation is perhaps the most important aspect of the assisted evolution,” Davida told him, “but it’s by no means the only one. Let me illustrate.”
Until then she had not used the windowscreen at all, but now she began to summon anatomical images, some photographic and some diagrammatic, to back up her argument. There were a great many of them, and her discourse frequently became too technical for me to follow, but she pressed on at a relentless pace, presumably because she was working under pressure, to an arbitrary deadline.
Adam Zimmerman must have had just as much difficulty in following the technical details as I had, even though he’d equipped himself with a good technical education by the standards of his own era, but he made no complaint and he probably got the gist of it.
That gist, so far as I could tell, was that although natural selection had been an anatomical designer of unquestionable genius, it had suffered greatly from the effects of the old adage that necessity is the mother of improvisation. Faced with the problems of making mammals, then primates, then humans, work on a generation-by-generation basis, it had kept on and on adding quick fixes to designs that might have been better sent back to the drawing board for an entirely new start. Natural selection had never had the luxury of going back to the drawing board and starting over — not, at least, since the last big asteroid strike and the basalt flow that laid down the Deccan Traps had administered the coup de grace to the already-decadent empire of the dinosaurs.
I shall skip over the details of Davida’s objections to the bran tub that was the human abdomen and the various bits of kit that made up the digestive and excretory system, on the grounds that it was essentially boring. Similarly, I see no point in recording her objections to the architecture of the spinal column or the circulatory system, let alone the detailed biochemistry of Gaea’s metabolic cycles and the endocrine signaling system. It was her thoughts on the subject of sex that struck me most forcibly, and which must have had a similar impact