How to Think About the Future (Part 3): Uphill Futures in a Downhill World | Frankly 145

Okay, so here's the biology.

Um, in the 1950s, a developmental biologist named Conrad Waddington was trying to understand how a single cell, a fertilized egg, becomes eventually an entire organism.

Every cell in your body carries the same DNA.

They start from the same place on the map, um, if you will.

But a heart cell and a liver cell and a brain neuron end up as completely different things.

How does a cell that starts with all the possibilities open to it end up committed to one specific pathway? Waddington imagined all this as a landscape.

Picture a ball sitting at the top of a series of rolling hills and valleys.

That ball is a stem cell, and it has the potential to become many different things.

As it develops, it rolls, and it rolls downhill and enters a valley, and in that valley there's a fork, and the cell enters one branch after that fork, and then that branch forks again.

At each fork, some of what was previously possible to that cell closes off, and by the time it reaches the bottom of a particular valley, it is now committed to being, for instance, a heart cell.

It will never again be a stem cell, nor will it become any other type of cell, at least not without extraordinary intervention.

The valleys there are not all the same depth or size.

Some are deep and have very steep walls, and once a cell enters, it stays because the constraints to leave are quite strong.

Some valleys are quite shallow.

A small perturbation or some chemical signal or a mutation might push the cell out and into a neighboring valley.

And the ridges between those valleys also vary in height.

Some transitions between cell states are relatively easy.

Others would require enormous energy or very specific conditions that rarely occur naturally.

I think this way of looking at a situation with valleys and ridges and mountains is useful because, you guessed it, I think it maps directly onto human civilizational futures.