Wind Beneath My Surgical Wings, Part 2

I hope that you enjoy. Okay, So we've discussed in 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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? 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 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 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

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, 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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, that concludes our musings on trans humanism by way of

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