h+ Magazine

Humans have generated and entered a new postgenetic era of evolution. We now have new relationships with natural selection and DNA because we impact both to an unprecedented degree. Barring a catastrophe, this new power, fueled by rapid advances in cultural evolution, is only going to increase.

Cultural evolution is a new power player in evolution, exerting an increasing influence on both natural selection and DNA. As the late physicist Erwin Schrodinger said: “Behaviour and physique merge into one…. You cannot have efficient wings without attempting to fly.” That is, culture can feed back on DNA.

The idea here is to acknowledge this influence, then generate and implement various postgenetic codes (sets of cultural DNA of sorts), to help us strategically prioritize our new, increasingly complex and rapidly changing relationships with natural selection and DNA.

Codes and Networks

Codes serve networks by prescribing various weights to network relationships in an attempt to optimize those relationships. Some relationships are more important in the network than others and therefore, have greater weight in the network. The structural whole of all the various weights in a particular network is called a weight matrix.

That’s what the genetic code did for protein networks. The G-code created a weight matrix for protein relationships and stored them in a portable manner so the matrix could be passed on.

Culture Codes

As culture has complexified over the course of its evolution, humans have consistently added codes to standardize and attach weights to relationship information, accelerating the processing of relationship information.

For example, there’s a social code for relationships in tribe X. You treat the chief this way, the pottery maker that way and the gods in this prescribed manner. You don’t have to figure it out each day (acceleration) because there’s a relationship weight matrix (standardization). You bow lower for the chief, brah.

We’ve added language, writing, moral, religious, religious-moral, monetary, legal and software codes. Along the way, we also added some smaller code sets such as dress, sportsmanship and how-to-hold-your-fork etiquette.

Codes organize and establish weight matrices, generating structure and function among the component relationships within a network and among networks.

As culture complexifies and we enter the postgenetic era in which we’re no longer pawns of DNA, we can develop postgenetic codes to aid us in optimizing the new relationships encountered in the accelerating complexity.

Again, the idea is that postgenetic codes will allow us to consciously attach weights to our relationships and modify them, giving us a greater handle on cultural selection. (Cultural selection is the aggregate selection, the individual and group choices made across numerous subdomains of culture like technology, art, politics, agriculture and tax policy that significantly, and increasingly, impact natural selection and the direction of evolution itself.)

The development of postgenetic codes can help us ease the ongoing movement to world cultural integration. It could also create a fluid weight matrix for our rapidly changing relationships with natural selection and the nearly infinite subsets of selection like ecosystems, climate change and technology development and deployment. In other words, postgenetic codes can help integrate the multiple layers of new content affecting these relationships.

IMPLEMENTATION: A SKETCH

Here’s a simplistic sketch of how postgenetic codes might be implemented.

1) THE ARTICULATION OF CODE.

There could be multiple Wikipedia-like, crowd-sourced websites where people upload their particular (supposed) codes detailing how they navigate reality and how they purportedly optimize their relationships. Governments could place their policy codes with regard to other countries, trade, monetary policy, military spending, climate change, species extinction and so on (Wouldn’t that be nice of them).

I say “supposed” code, because people, as good little DNA-vehicles hoping to exchange genetic material and gather the resources to raise said material, often overstate the codes we operate on. And, can you believe it? Governments lie, too!

Anyway, these codes, from diet, exercise, health, to parenting, finance, romance and sex could be placed on sites.

Individuals could upload and download codes in various categories. They could build their individual postgenetic codes. (And there can be group codes, too. For instance, dentists could have publicly articulated codes for various and new aspects of their profession).

Eventually, there would be selection amongst these various codes; effective codes would get greater use.

2) CODE FEEDBACK

Okay, say Trek Trukker wants to builds his personal postgenetic code. He starts simple with a code that has 24 components.

Some parts of his code are pretty standard stuff. He wants to make more money, eat less, exercise more, be less annoyed/irritated and friendlier in communicating with the people he knows.

To get feedback on one part of his postgenetic code, the tone of his communications, Trek relies on his newest gadget: The BodyMind Master Monitor (one of these gadgets already in existence says it monitors up to 9000 variables, calories burned, sleep quality, etc.)

The Master, using current technologies (with many more to come), gives Trek daily readouts on the emotional content of his voice tone and on the meaning of the body language he’s faced all day. At night, Trek takes the Master’s feedback and syncs it with his computer.

The computer takes the data from the Master and, using various algorithms, compares it to Trek’s 24-component postgenetic code to give him a daily grade.

For example, Trek has a voice-tone code, a goal of sorts. He seeks to have his voice tone only carry irritation in 5% of his daily communication. Trek had a tough Tuesday, 14% of his utterances had irritation in them. (He got in an argument with his teenage son because Sonny asked Santa for a meth lab and a vasectomy).

The Master Monitor can also be programmed to give Trek real time feedback, like text messaging his phone when his voice tone reaches a particular pitch.

COMMUNITY MONITORING

Trek can also, anonymously or under his real name, post his code and/or his daily or weekly feedback results on a community website. Members there have set group goals, working together to try to achieve quantifiable milestones of kindness, friendlier driving, rates of volunteering or being engaged in community projects and local government policy meetings.

Trek is not alone in his battles; he has access to group support.

Of course, this kind of group participation can go to the state, national or international level in myriad group categories.

Postgenetic codes offer real-time feedback on the gap between who we think we are and who we really are. It also provides real input/feedback on how we might close these gaps with ourselves, our neighbors, our nation, our nation-state interactions, our ecosystem, our cultural mores and our exponentially accelerating technology.

Postgenetic Codes Accelerate Selection

It works something like this:

Complex systems have 3 primary components:

1. Variation

2. Interaction

3. Selection

The postgenetic code feedback loop increases both the quality and quantity of information found in Variation and Interaction, and also increases the speed at which variations get interaction feedback. Presto: this accelerates selection.

Since we, the still unenlightened, no longer have the omniscient, omnipresent big-sky-guy, we can have a technological angel that gives us feedback when our long devilish (selfish) DNA acts up and we want to cheat on our groundwater, oceans, atmosphere, diets, taxes or spouse.

In the big, overly grandiose picture, we could see postgenetic codes superseding the laborious and often backward legal, economic and environmental codes of nation states. Why? Because postgenetic codes are international, subject to real-time feedback and thereby accelerate cultural selection.

The formation of postgenetic codes that transcend nation-state boundaries could help create a world cultural-selection democracy of sorts and hopefully add a cultural homeostasis element. (You young ins, please work this out. Thanks.)

Now remember, this is a brief and superficial sketch of how postgenetic codes might be implemented.

Say Trek Trukker is also flirting with diabetes because of a poor diet. The Master Monitor gives him real time feedback on every morsel of food he ingests. Trek also uploads his daily diet victories and defeats to a group website of people fighting diabetes.

This group, possibly with the help of government, insurance companies, health groups, conservation groups or some amalgamation of all four, has developed software that generates an approximation of the global consequences of sugary food intake in a few categories: health costs, pesticide use, obesity, depression and energy use to transport several sugary products.

So not only does Trek get feedback on his personal health, he and his group get estimated numbers on a few of the consequences of their good and bad food days and their impact on selection, cultural and natural.

It’s a given that on some days the Trekster will feel like taking his Master Monitor and smashing it against the wall, stomping on it and then burying his face in a big chocolate cake. (I’m with ya, Trek!)

Again, this is an idea. How, and if, it will manifest, I don’t know.

And please note, what I think I learned in Mark Buchanan’s fine and important work, “Ubiquity,” is that non-equilbrium systems periodically reach a “critical-state universality.”

This is a state of relationships where the dominoes are set for a big roll. This happens in geologic systems, where a shifting fault line causes a big earthquake because it triggers the rumbling of a large web of many other connecting faults that were tension- holding, poised to move.

“Critical-state universality” happens in political systems, too. One guy sets himself on fire in Tunisia and a whole region ignites. It’s still burning.

The qualifying note is that we only have so much control.

What’s a DNA-vehicle to do?

Try to get some code in place?