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July 31, 2014 26 mins

Can science give us the wings we've always envied in birds? Can plastic surgery elevate us to a higher human form? In this episode, Robert and Julie discuss Joseph Rosen's posthuman philosophy and ponder what we'd have to do to transform arms into wings. Learn all about it in this classic episode of STBYM.

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
I'm Julie Douglas and this week co host Robert Lamb
is off pursuing the lengthening of his tebo mirrors. At
least that's what I think he's doing. Good luck with that, Robert.

(00:23):
In this Encore presentation of Wind Beneath My Surgical Wings,
we continue the dream of flight as a means to
transcend the limits of our biology. So, without any further ado,
I hope that you enjoy. Okay, So we've discussed in

(00:43):
the past about how we have augmented ourselves before. I
believe there's someone who had an ear grafted onto his
skin um or rather that the tissue was grown for it. Yeah,
that was in our performance art. Yeah, and um, you
know we've had we've talked about people who have taken
out ribs before to have like, you know, twelve inch

(01:05):
waist um. We have certainly manipulated and bottle bodily modified
ourselves to the extent where it's a little bit shocking.
But you get two surgical wings or the idea of it,
and is it that shocking? Yeah, it's it's that is
the question we're gonna talk about in the second half.
First of all, I do want to say just a

(01:26):
quick thing about plastic surgery again. And when I was
growing up and I would hear the term plastic surgery
almost exclusively in reference to people who had new noses
and or new chest augmentations. UM, I kind of had
in my mind that it was plastic, like it was
actual literally plastic, Like, oh, they have a plastic nose.
It's like a humpty hump or something, you know, where

(01:47):
it's just you know, set that right up there in
their face, or that obviously breast implants. I was kind
of like, well, that's kind of like plastic I guess
you see them. I would see them in like Newsweek
magazine and my grandparents had, and so I'm like, oh, well,
that's plastic surgery. It's putting plastic in or on the
body and making things new. You thought there are water
balloons in there? Yeah, I thought there were water balloons.
But but just for a quick primer, plastic and plastic

(02:08):
surgery means plasticity. So essentially what we're talking about is
flesh sculpting, and the idea goes back a long time.
For instance, uh, skin graphs may have taken place as
early as eight hundred BC, which is crazy to think
about that, just the the idea that we were we
were already figuring out ways to sculpt the flesh of
the human body even in eight hundred BC. We have

(02:32):
I mean, humans just can't help but tinker with themselves, right. Yeah,
And and certainly if there's a if there's a medical advantage,
even if you're trying to help somebody, you know, improve
their quality of life, I mean that and or appeal
to their vanity, that's all. That's what you need to
get to learn more about it and to get the
research done to achieve the the already lofty heights the

(02:52):
plastic searchery we have today. Yeah, and of course I
was about to say, you know, the technology is commensurate
with the procedures. So what you have in place is
what is going to determine what happens with your body
or how you decide to manipulate it. So, as we
were discussing or later, Rosen proposed that, yeah, he thinks
you could you could give people winks. Now, what would

(03:14):
this consist of? How would this possibly work? Because when
we're talking about plastic surgery. We're talking about sculpting the body.
So it's most interpretations were not talking about making some
wings and cooking them up in a lab and then
just stitching them on the body. We have to essentially
look to nature and see how nature flies. Right, Well,

(03:36):
we have to look at nature, but we also have
to look at the mind because this is an important
part of the process. Right. Um, we've talked about how
the mind also has its own type of plasticity and
can certainly conform to whatever is going on with the body.
And you've used the wonderful analogy of the horse and
rider before that. It's not, you know, the two things

(03:57):
aren't necessarily separate when you're talking about the mind and body.
It's not the mind is the rider and the body
of the horse, but it's both are one. They were
essentially a centaur instead. Yeah, so you know you're this
brain plasticity. Plasticity gives us the ability to make physical
changes that are then incorporated by the brain. This is
from the Doctor Dedelius article. Rosen explains that when quote,

(04:20):
when we lose a limb, the brain absorbs its map
or rewires it to some other center. Similarly, when we
gain a limb, the brain almost immediately senses it and
goes about hooking it up via neural representation. He said,
if I were to attach a sonographically powered arm to
your body, your brain would map it. If I were
to attach a third thumb, your brain would map this

(04:43):
as well. Our bodies change our brains, and our brains
are infinitely mouldiple. If I were to give you wings,
you would develop literally a winged brain. If I were
to give you an echo location device, you would develop
in part of that brain. I mean there's some truthless
right now totally. I mean it's important to to do
think in terms of brain mapping and and neural adaptation

(05:06):
to these features. Because you can talk all day about
sow in bits under your body, but if you if
you can't, if they are not actually a part of you,
if they're not part of that centaur uh that is
the mind body connection, then it's really not a part
of you or your body. So in a sense, whatever
you dream up your brain can hang with. But um,
it comes down to a matter of where really the

(05:27):
rubber meets the road, and in the actual surgical bits
that are put onto it, and in order to really
look at that, you have to look at um a
professor in plastic and reconstructive surgeon, Samuel Poor, who took
on the idea of surgical wings. Yeah, from the Division
of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the University of Wisconsin.
And he actually published an article about this idea, about

(05:50):
the the actual the possible details of transforming uh normal
humans into winged humans. And he did this after Rosen
had made lots of ways with his discussion, So it's
it was a response to Rosen's work where he says, Okay, well,
that's assuming that this is something we want to do,
and and and and actually there's someone out there who

(06:11):
wants it. What would this consist of? How would we
go about it as a thought experiment and as a
plastic surgeon? What can I do? What could I do
to the human body to give that body wings? And
I love this because he really did respond to it,
not just in the philosophical sense, but like, really, what
have the nuts and bolts to make this happen? If
you're going to take this thought experiment one step further?

(06:33):
Because Rosen's ideas are amazing and it's great to sort
of get caught up in them. But a lot of
times he's kind of spitball in though, or at least
I mean, maybe not in his own mind, but in
terms of just how he's commenting to other people. He's
not necessarily laying out a you know, a five step
plan to make it happen. Um, but not outside of

(06:55):
his own mind anyway. Right, Well, he knows all that,
you know, he's he's pretty well informed about all they
different fields that would take to make this happen. But
you're right, he's not going to sit there and say
it's here step one. Yeah. I pretty much have no
doubt that he has it in his mind. Absolutely he
sat down to say, like, how would you actually do this?
But that's why I think it's so interesting that Samuel
pour to this on because it does give you a

(07:16):
sense of what the limitations are and what the possibilities
are as well. Yeah, so in this article he asked, okay, well,
all right, if we're gonna have wings, what what are
the aspects of a bird wing that we would want?
And in this article he does to deal exclusively with
bird wings. Um. I don't know why I didn't think
that much about bat wings. We'll talk about that a

(07:37):
little more. But he's talking about bird wings, so evidently
he as far as art goes, he is into the
idea of of of an angelic figure with the big, lofty,
feathery wings, which is beautiful, I'm telling, into that art
change from from X Men. Yeah, like like like that
character from from X Men or or any of you
know painting you've seen of an angel. But but then,

(07:57):
of course, the other side is we have plenty of
images of fallen angels uh and and their kin creatures
with bat like wings, which some might find hideous. Uh,
some might find kind of appealing. Of the pictures I
had on my wall in high school had anything, uh,
you know, to do with that. But but but certainly
he decides to focus just on wings with feathers. Sure,

(08:21):
and why not, because I mean this is really the
example from nature that we draw from the most. Yeah,
so what does a bird wing have? First of all,
it has those feathers for lift and insulation. It has
a highly derived shoulder and a distinct thorax. Okay, so
what else do we have to take into into account here?
Then we have to we have to look at the
human body. What do we have? Well, we have these arms, right,

(08:45):
and when you look at a bird, what does it?
Does a bird have arms? No, a bird has wings.
So obviously we're getting getting to the point here. We
have to realize if you're going to use plastic surgery
to make what we have into something similar to what
birds have, it's not going to be a matter of
straping wings on on the back and turning us into
six limbed creatures. We're going to remain four limbed creatures,

(09:07):
but we're going to have to transform our arms into wings,
which is something you don't see as often in our
fantastic visions of winged humans. We tend to imagine that
we still get to keep our arms and that we
just have wings springing out of our backs. But the
plastic surgeons of the world are here to say, actually, guys,
if you really want those wings, you're gonna have to

(09:29):
part with the arms. Yeah, and then you're not gonna
be a big, fluffy white feather is just probably gonna
be more like a turkey vulture. Yes, well, well I
say that, but Professor Samuel Poor does say that in
order for us to really get the right structure, we
can't necessarily look at modern birds as the example, Um,
we would be better off to look at something called

(09:50):
the arch o optics and this is a bird that
existed one and fifty million years ago. Yeah, because the
archaeopter X has a very primitive wing structure. It's a
very early model, okay, versus birds. Modern birds would have
a very highly, very highly evolved, very advanced model of
the of the wing. So if you're going to using

(10:12):
the plastic surgery techniques that we have today, if you
were going to transform our arms into wings, you really
want to fit with go after something a lot simpler,
because that's going to be something that we can actually
achieve potentially arguably as opposed to really advanced structure. It's
kind of like if you're adding onto your house, right,
you have to take into account the existing architecture, the

(10:34):
existing structure, What is going to work structurally as a
part of the new house, What is going to work
stylistically as part of the new house. And uh, you
know it's just not always in the cards to take
say a medieval castle and then build a highly modern
structure on top of it. I mean, it's just you
have to take into account the original form. So our
arms are great arms but they're really crappy wings, like

(10:57):
the crappiest wing possible because they don't do anything, you know,
So to to actually change them into wings, were essentially
having to backtrack on evolution and go think back to
how wings really begin to evolve and take form in organisms,
which makes sense, right, because you do, as you say,
have to go back to the more primitive version if

(11:18):
you're trying to make this, you know, from soup to
nuts on a human being. It's a little bit ironic though,
that you'd have to go back a hundred and fifty
million years in order to get some sort of futuristic
um structure for human wings because the archaeopteryx it had
it was it was feathered, it was flying, but it

(11:39):
had a far less complex wrist and shoulder, which is
key because this is what really places it within surgical
reach for us. Okay, so in this article, Poor lays
out some possible steps to transform the arm into a wing.
He talks about forming a distal row of carpal bones
and marta carpals in our existing arm in to a

(12:00):
carpo metacarpuss, which is essentially a buffalo wing. Delicious, yeah, uh,
And a single fuse bone between the wrist and knuckle.
So if you look if you look at at a
picture of a human arm, and you see a picture
of the of the wing of a of a bird
or or in this case a flying dinosaur, then you
see that. All right, we have the humorous the upper

(12:23):
bone and the arm, both of that. But then when
you're looking at at the lower portion of the arms,
the lower bones, that's where you're talking about needing to
fuse things together. Because do you ever see a bird
using like a smartphone or typing on a keyboard? No,
they don't need the digits, right, and the wrist knuckles
alving one piece makes sense to write because they're not

(12:44):
sort of waving their hands back and forth. Um. You'd
also have to fuse the small finger, the ring finger
in the index finger, although your thumb would remain free. Yes,
that's good news. Yeah, so some video games are still possible.
The hand and elbow would have to be fixed to
prevent a too broad a range of movement. But but
there's not any need for bone bony fixation in the elbow.

(13:07):
You need movement. Um, so you make use of existing
muscle and skin there. You redirect the bicep intendent of insertion.
You use a tissue expansion techniques to cover all of
this because you need skin over right, and then for
non functional cosmetic wings, this is this is a really
good stopping point, right because this is what you need

(13:31):
in order just to support them around town. Right. Yeah,
And we're not even talking about the possibility of of
sticking feathers in these things. That would be a whole
separate thing to worry about, because what are you going
to try and grow feathers? A You're gonna try to
manipulate the body to produce feathers. Um, that's a whole
kettle efficient and of itself. But just to transform your
fleshy arms into fleshy bat wings, you could parade around

(13:55):
talent in Yeah, this is where you would you would stop.
And we know we can grow tissue, right, so in
to actually grow the skin, that's not a problem, right. Um.
You know, of course we're talking about pretty advanced technologies here,
so I don't really see you just going into your
local clinic and getting your your wings all done up.
But again, in this idea of twenty to fifty years out,

(14:18):
let's say you can't get these wings, um, constructed for you,
and you really want to take flight, well, then you
need to flap them. You need to flap those wings
in order to even try to fly. And if you
want to do that, you're gonna need high velocity rotation
in the shoulder. So you're gonna need some pretty extensive
shoulder reconstruction to make that possible. And of course you

(14:39):
are going to need feathers. Now, this is particularly problematic
because feathers are so specific to this species of subspecies.
It's um something that has evolved for you know, billions
of years, and it's not an easy thing to just say, oh, here,
let's stick some turkey feathers and you'll be fine. Yeah,
feathers are are very complex and really amazing um adaptation

(15:03):
of flying organisms. Now, some critics of Poor's article, and
I don't want to say critics, let's just say people
having a lively discussion with him about this. They point out,
we'll bats don't have feathers, so why should we feel
limited to on on this whole feather argument? Why would
that be a sticking point? Yeah, and we can talk
more about bats, but for sure, this would this is
a good model to go after. I think it's not

(15:24):
just birds, because I really actually feel like abouts have
more potential in this arena, and it would be so
cool to wrap yourself up in bat wings and hang
outside down. Yeah, all right, we're gonna take a quick
break and when we come back, more about cervical wings.
All right, and we're back, so I can I'm kind

(15:44):
of already imagining, uh, like, super rich individuals in the
future surrounding themselves with beautiful men and women that they
have they have had surgically adapted into winged creatures, so
they're just kind of like they're not flying, but they're
just walking around their party like, well, they couldn't really
hold a tray of drinks. I don't know what they're doing.
I guess they're just walking around looking pretty and bird like.

(16:05):
We'll see, and why not keep your own arms and
then just do a separate wing structure too. Yeah, well
that would just this, That would be even that would
be higher hanging fruit. All right, Well, let's get back
to the flight issue, because it's not just the feathers
and the ability to to actually figure out in your
dermos how to grow the feathers that you need, or

(16:26):
to genetically game your body into doing it. Um, it's
also the wing loading ratio. We would need really really
large wings to support say a hundred and seventy pound body. Yeah,
and I mean look at the size of of flying
animals in the size of their wings. Look at the albatross.
Albatross is a pretty large creature and h and kind

(16:47):
of a clumsy bird as well. You know it. Flight
is not the most graceful thing for this this creature.
So it's win but it wings have to be pretty big.
And so you know, when you're looking at the at
the wing ratio in an organism, and you're looking at
the possibility of creating wings on a human from that
human's existing flesh, sculpting their existing body into this Because again,

(17:08):
you have a blump of clay, and you're gonna sculpt
that lump of clay into a vase. That vase better
have equivalent mass to that lump of clay. That's just
the basic limits of of what you're working with. So
if you're going to try and build wings big enough
for the human for a human to fly, there's not
enough material to go around. I don't care how much
like butt flesh and extra bones have You're not going

(17:30):
to build proper fliable wings. Now poor did say that
four hundred sony pound body you would need about twenty
ft of wingspan, which you know, then becomes sort of impractical,
especially if you're taking mass transit can imagine trying to
get on mortar with those I mean, I guess you
could get like donor flesh, that would be about the
only way you could really start looking at that. Then
you're having to like scrap you could get, you know,

(17:52):
flesh from a corpse, I guess, and and use that
in the process. I mean, you know, it's not impossible,
but it's like something to think about you that you
just you can't completely just reshape the existing form into
the flying form. There are a lot of other considerations
to make. The blog Human Enhancement and Biopolitics takes on
some of these issues, and in that blog they're talking

(18:12):
about the larger problem, which is muscle, because birds, bats,
and pterosaurs have really large peck muscles, and they're so
large that they actually take up about thirty of their
body mass. So that would mean that humans would then
have to grow these bionic peck muscles that somehow where

(18:33):
you know, maybe nano materials were used somehow lighter than
actual muscles in order to really power yourself. Um. So
again that's an issue of actually trying to take flight
because we were pretty undeveloped, underdeveloped in our chest areas
because obviously we don't fly and we don't need those
those muscles. Yeah, I mean you get into a situation

(18:53):
where the classic idea of just sort of the the
art idea of angels with them and backs, that kind
of thing. It's it's just more complicated than that. You
can't just you can't just add something of another species
to this animal and it to and expected to be
a steamless transition. There are a lot of complex questions
to come with that. Well, if you're gonna have those

(19:14):
wings again, you're gonna need the pex to power of
where are you gonna put those um because if you're
if you're doing the model where the wings are on
the back, then where the muscles in the wings. I
mean it's it's sort of like in that article that
we are discussed in the Center episode where you had
a German surgeon who is looking at the at the
Center as a mythological creature and saying how would that
actually work? And when you get down into the the

(19:36):
theoretic bo theoretical biology of that. They are all these
different complications you wouldn't even possibly think of. Of course,
the thing I remember was where do you put the
penis front of back? I mean, you know, in some
ways it's the same thing with wings, are there's no penis,
but you have some of the same engineering problems. Um.
Of course Poor did say that in microgravity zero gravity, um,

(19:56):
it could be helpful to have wings, which is which
brings us back to the where of principle and the
idea that should can and can we adapt the human
body to make it better suited to life on say
a long space flight to somewhere, uh, to life in orbit,
to life on another world, uh if it. If it
one ended up making the argument that yes, small wings

(20:17):
would be highly effective and navigating this environment, then maybe
that's something we have to consider well. And again go
back to bats, right, because as we've discussed before in
our podcasts or episodes about bats, they are governed their
their wing structure by a rogue finger gene. So if
you look at the structure of a bat wing, it's

(20:38):
really just a modified a million arm and it's got
these Why you should call them fingers. They don't actually
call them fingers, but if you think about their wings
as sort of these fingers like the spokes of an umbrella,
that's how they get the structure. So why not tinker
with our own genetics to game our you know, jeans

(20:59):
in the arm bud that begin to produce that this
sort of hand that we have and have it spread
out and you can take flight much easier because, as
we know, with bats, they get their their lift by
basically free falling from an upside down position and then
catching the wind with their wings. Yeah. Not every flying creature, obviously,

(21:21):
is a humming bird capable of just amazing quick spirited flight.
You know, they can go from zero to a to
a hundred, can take off vertically without any any problems.
I mean some of these larger animals they have to
fall off of something to achieve flight. Yeah. Plus it
would be kind of cool to take flight that way,
I think, just free fall upside down. Um. Of course, now,
Poor in his his paper did say, look, this is

(21:44):
just sort of not well, he didn't say, hey, look
this is just an idea, but he did conclude by saying,
despite advances in surgical techniques that could theoretically lead to
the ability to construct wings from arms. It is evident
that humans should remain human, staying on the ground, wandering
and studying the intricacies of flight, while letting birds be
birds and angels be angels. He had me to the

(22:07):
and and let angels be angels. That then he was
just really crossed. Now, I obviously Rosen would strongly disagree
with this man's He would probably see Um see Poor
as as someone with a limited um limited vision for humanity,
whereas Poor is certainly staying more on the cautious realism
side of things. Well, Poor also doesn't really address genetic

(22:30):
tinkering as well. He's just sort of saying, what would
we do right now with the materials that we have? UM,
So some of the some of his discussion is limited
by that. But there is this idea that is in
the article doctor did alias Um and it is an
idea put forth by Mary Douglas. She wrote in her
anthropological study Purity and Danger that human beings have a

(22:53):
natural aversion to crossing categories and that when we do,
we transgressor and when we do transgress it we see
it as deeply dirty. So that there's idea, this idea
of like, well, if this is not human, it's separate
from us, there's a danger in it. Yeah, which I
think it comes back to the wing thing or even
the center thing. It's one thing to have, like, oh,

(23:13):
the top is a is a topless lady? In the
bottom is a fish? Like that? Doesn't this maybe okay,
at least to a certain extent, because there's this firm line.
There's a distinction between the part that is animal and
the part that is human. And when you get into
you know, we've talked before about monsters. The idea of
any kind of a monster is that it embodies an idea,
especially any kind of monster, that there's half human half beast.

(23:35):
It's ultimately about the competing higher and lower natures of
our being, the part of us that thinks that we're
above and being an animal, and the part of us
that it is inevitably an animal. And we but we
like seeing that division, even in our monstrous imagined creations.
But when there is crossover, more crossover than we anticipated,
that's where they getting that polluted area. When you get
into models of a center that has a penis in

(23:57):
the front, uh and or in the back. When you
get into examples of oh, this person has wings, but
it also means they have to have grotesque pectoral muscles
to power it. Then the line become smudged and uh,
and we begin to go a little a little. I
was thinking about this in the context of bio gerontology
and and our bearded friend Aubrey de Gray and in

(24:19):
his quest to tinker with people at a cellular level
in order to have them live upwards to five years
a thousand years old. And I was thinking, well, how
does that, How does all of this sort of jibe
with post humanism, because surely that will be the thing
to do when you reach two hundred years old, Like

(24:40):
you just get bored and you say, why don't I
go ahead and get those surgical wings I've always wanted.
You know what if what does that world look like? Um?
You know, do we have this possibility of of you know,
very elderly people zooming around with their new wings with
sort of angel faces faces to match when you just

(25:02):
ultimately you're you know, talking about completely just casting aside
any expectations about what a human is or should be
in a physical level. And then to draw from Rosen's
idea of plastic surgery. It also means that there are
no constraints of the soul who you are. Hey, guys,

(25:25):
that concludes our musings on trans humanism by way of
bird and bat wings. If you want more of this
kind of futurist fair as well as other offerings, you
can find it on stuff to Blow Your Mind dot
com and mind stuff Show on YouTube. You can also
join us around the social media fire on Twitter, Tumbler,
and Facebook. So here's my question to you, guys. Do

(25:47):
you have a topic you feel really strongly about, one
that you like us to cover and uh and to
really delve into. Let us know at below the mind
at house to words dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit houstuff works dot com

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