The Women in Blue Ch. 06
A Little History Lesson
As soon as Connor left the room, Irene Shapiro dried her tears and went to find Polly Patrick. She went over her results. The process of summarizing them for Polly made her doubt her own work. It sounded crazy when she reviewed what Connor had done. Too good to be true. Polly asked several key questions, essentially proposing some more difficult and granular tests that would erase any doubt. Polly called in Admiral Parker and in his typical fashion, he asked two very frank and definitive questions, like military people often did. If the capability were there, you had to assume that it would eventually be used, even if it arose much sooner than they had ever dreamed. You just wanted to make sure you were ready for it, or at least as ready as you could be. Irene began to develop some new testing instruments that might answer their questions.
Connor went back to his room and almost passed out on his bed. He was not sure why. All he had been doing was sitting in a chair watching pictures flashing by on a screen, but suddenly he was totally exhausted. His body went limp, and he did not even remember having any dreams. He was awakened by a pressing message from his bladder, and immediately felt better as he voided. But then he became alarmed. His urine stream was much darker and denser than usual, felt hotter, and smelled much stronger than usual. Had he developed kidney disease overnight? He was so concerned that he dropped by to see Barbara, the nurse, and told her what had just happened. She took his temperature (slightly elevated), blood pressure (slightly low) and a quick blood sample and demanded that he drink one liter of Gatorade and one of bottled water and come back to leave a urine sample in 30 minutes. He wolfed down breakfast, left the sample, and then went back to see Dr. Shapiro at the appointed time.
Irene Shapiro was up all night building the best possible testing ensemble. At 10:30 she put Connor through the three-hour battery of new tests she had cobbled together overnight, to test her almost frightening hypothesis about him and confirm her previous results. It seemed clear that he was "the one" the Admiral had told them to watch for 30 years ago. But they had not expected someone like him to be born for 2 or 3 more generations. Were they ready? Clearly not. Could they still make it work? Maybe. Perhaps they had no choice.
By the time Connor sat down to a very late lunch with Polly and Admiral Parker, he realized he was already tired and hungry from the morning testing. Why did looking at pictures and answering questions about them wear him out so? The Parkers were both looking at him funny, like they had something to tell him but were not sure how to broach the subject. That was their problem. He was ravenously hungry and thirsty, so he would happily eat and drink while they decided what to say. He was just beginning to feel full when the Polly began to speak.
"First, Connor, to put your mind as ease, Barbara just told me your test results a few minutes ago, and you have not developed any disease. In fact, they are indicative of how good your overall health is and fast you recover from strenuous exercise."
Connor was confused. "What exercise? I was sitting in a chair looking at pictures."
"Well, thinking can be hard exercise too, Connor. The brain burns energy at different rates depending on what it is doing at the time. We are starting to recognize that the human brain can do things computers cannot, and in ways we never noticed before. We have recently discovered multiple ionic transport systems for IPSPs, EPSPs, and action potentials that do not involve sodium ions. And it's not just about processing numbers and sequences. It can also do many things at the same time, and maybe even in different places at the same time, and some of our theoretical people say it can do the same thing in all possible ways and then wait to see which outcome it wants to instantiate as reality. And that would burn a lot of energy! We think that is what happened to you. According to Barbara's numbers, you burned as much energy doing those tests as you would have sprinting for 5 hours!"
Polly fixed him with a gaze. "Connor, I know you have made a cursory study of American and World history in your schooling so far, but we want to talk to you about another historic theme, and some conclusions that have not been reached anywhere else but here, as far as we know. And that is the history of sexual behavior and how it has changed over time."
"As humans evolved civilization changed, too. These days civilization changes at a much faster rate than the genome, and that difference is likely to accelerate until we eventually escape the original biological form. Sexual behavior will be obsolete at that point, and most folks then will not even know to miss it!"
"But it will probably be thousands of years before we must worry about that. What we can see clearly now is that sexual behavior alone cannot be allowed to define marriage and family formation, at least for all families. Our recent cultural problems are witness to that. We still need the nuclear family, and will until the singularity, and likely after, but the way families form and endure must change."
Admiral Parker began to speak in his own blunt way. "Animals did genetic selection by survival -- top dog killed off his competitors and got to fuck all the females and reproduce, so his genes increased in frequency in the population. But that was not growing the total population effectively because the losers died and produced no offspring. So, humans as a species could not dominate the other animals and rule the world and expand to explore the universe. But cooperation and hunting in groups produced much better results, growing the population rapidly, and humans were highly successful survivors."
"Prehistoric men didn't kill off each other as frequently, but often mated randomly, many times per day, and each female might couple with several males in a day, and genetic selection was by which sperm could swim the best and fertilize the female's egg. This let the total population grow, while still increasing genetic variety, and selecting for vigor.
"To oversimplify and perpetuate a stereotype, a stone age man formed a family by hitting a woman over the head and getting her pregnant. They then defended and supported each other and their children until the offspring could repeat the cycle. Which woman ended up with which man was combination of geographic distance, random chance, pheromones, physical prowess, and only occasionally physical attraction and what modern romance novels call "chemistry". Most people had a tough enough struggle just to survive and did not have the resources or time to be choosy nor romantic. But being in a family unit, even one we today would consider dysfunctional, greatly increased their chances of survival. Agriculture made cooperation even more likely to increase survival."
