Bacterial cells have little organelles in them called mesosomes. According to the Wikipedia article, “Mesosomes may play a role in cell wall formation during cell division and/or chromosome replication and distribution and/or electron transfer systems of respiration. Electron transport chains are found within the mesosome producing 32-34ATP. They act as an anchor to bind and pull apart daughter chromosomes during cell division.” Various subscription-required articles, though some free, go on and on about the possible functions of these small organelles in the bacterial division, respiration, etc. Mesosomes were originally discovered in 1960.

Small problem. Sometime in the mid-70s, scientists realized that mesosomes weren’t even real. They were just artifacts caused by freeze-fractures in the chemical fixation process for electron microscopy. Little intrusions produced where the plasma membrane and cell wall came apart from the stress of the fixation process. So much for that idea.

If you figure that biologists get paid something like $60,000 per year, and it takes a couple months to do research and write a paper, and maybe something like 500 papers were published on mesosomes before they realized that what they were studying was pure bunk, then the biology community as a whole burned through ~$5 million chasing a ghost.

What does this have to do with the subject matter of this site? I often talk about intelligence enhancement and the recursive snowballing effect that I and many others predict would occur soon after its development. If a sufficiently intelligent biologist were on the research team that first discovered “mesosomes” in 1960, they could have discovered these were just artifacts by replacing the water used in the fixation process with an inorganic solvent, and all this confusion would have been saved. Our society has a bias against being too hard on people for these little mistakes, because, at least they tried. People would be pointing fingers non-stop if we always judged past events with the knowledge of hindsight. And we’re only human, right?

The magical difference that increased intelligence produces is getting it right the first time. It’s very tough for us to imagine a slightly-smarter-than-human intelligence that constantly solves difficult problems right off the bat, because we’ve never seen one. If the smartest human we can throw at the problem is just about as good as anyone else, then we project the quality of hardness onto the problem - not onto the abstract recognition that “human intelligence isn’t good enough”. This is the mind projection fallacy. But what we naively label “impossible” might be “easy” even to a mild version of superintelligence, say a human being with an artificially expanded neocortex. We may say, “this problem inherently requires five years of research!”, but a superintelligence walks along, says, “no it doesn’t”, and solves it in five minutes. We’re too quick to label things extremely difficult or impossible, but if we don’t, we lose our self-respect as a species, so many would argue we have to.

It seems like only transhumanists are capable of really stepping outside of that box of Homo sapiens and saying, “what if we were really and truly fundamentally smarter?” If more people could do this, then pursuing intelligence enhancement technology might become a national or even global priority.