Re: from jms: research help
- From: Josh Hill <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:20:34 -0400
On Thu, 26 Jun 2008 07:41:44 -0700 (PDT), Doug Freyburger
<dfreybur@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Josh Hill <userepl...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Doug Freyburger <dfrey...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Josh Hill <userepl...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I agree that bioengineering is likely to swamp Darwinian processes.
Uhm, that's not how the words work. If bioengineering changes
the demographics of the populations of future generations then
bioengineering IS a Darwinian process. But your point is noted -
Not quite sure why you say that.
Main Entry: Dar·win·i·an
Pronunciation: \där-'wi-ne-?n\
Function: adjective
Date: 1860
1 : of or relating to Charles Darwin, his theories especially of
evolution, or his followers
2 : of, relating to, or being a competitive environment or situation
in which only the fittest persons or organizations prosper
I was using Sense 2.
Thing is evolution isn't about a single organism living or
dying no matter how successfull while alive. It's about
genetic change generation to generation. Have no
offspring and you weren't fit as far as evolutional counts.
In that sense genetic engineering can be viewed as the
ultimate in Darwinian evolution - We get to not only decide
if a child is born based on genetic tests but we get to
influence traits in the next generation. It stops being about
the success of the individual in any social sense which it
never meant and gets even more explicitly about generation
to generation.
If some person is cruel whatever and has 6 children that
person is fit in the Darwinian meaning. If another person
is a billionaire and Nobel lauretate without children that
person is unfit in the Darwinian meaning. Now add in
genetic engineering available to more and more of the
population eventually to virtually everyone. Say goodbye
to every listed problem gene - Thus lowering genetic
diversity. Say hello to an unknown number of new traits -
Thus increasing genetic diversity. Evolutionary fitness
becomes a matter of choice and humans habe always
wanted their children to be better. A genetic engineering
that wipes out genes declared problematic and that
introduces genes that are new is far more Darwinian in
it's own meaning of fitness than using "natural" selection
to randomly kill people before they have kids and randomly
let certain people have more kids.
This it seems to me is a matter of definition. I would still stick to
the definition of evolution through /natural/ selection. As I think I
mentioned, Darwin concerned himself with the effects of artificial
selection as well, and it can be argued that artificial selection is
ultimately a Darwinian process in that those doing the selecting are
themselves natural phenomena. This could even be extended to genetic
engineering that create new genes. However, both artificial selection
and genetic engineering rely to some extent on intelligence, that is,
on modeled predictions of likely evolutionary outcome. In that sense,
they're substantively different than evolution though natural
selection.
We haven't for example used formal selective breeding
programs since the fall of Nazi Germany, as opposed to the selective
breeding that men and women engage in all the time, without quite
knowing what they're doing.
It will get VERY interesting when people get to pick certain
designer options in their offspring. The subconscious
desires that now drive pair mating will be overridden by
conscious decisions (with subtle subconscious motivations).
Though I wonder how different they'll be. I mean, children will want
their kids to be beautiful, well proportioned, smart . . . pretty much
what we look for in mates right now. The main difference may be --
I've thought about this on and off -- the reduction in diversity.
Because it seems to me that we've evolved not just to breed for
desired traits, but to preserve the outlying ones so that we don't
lose diversity. The general idea is that we increase the percentage of
the population that has genes deemed desirable, reduce but maintain
genes seen as less desirable, and perhaps tend to eliminate genes that
are out and out awful. This concept seems to me a bit subtle for the
typical H. sapiens and a bit selfless for the typical parent.
Remember how evolution is defined - Genetic change from
generation to generation. Anyone who has studied biology
has known from the gate that evolution has coninued all
along. It's not the scientists who are starting to come
around to that view; they've known all along. It's the general
population that's gradually coming to realize that humanity is
a work in progess not an end product
Perhaps my lack of knowledge is keeping me from properly identifying
the trend to which I'm trying to refer. I know for example that
there's been a certain amount of tension between those who emphasize
gradualism and those who emphasize punctuated equilibrium.
And like so many answers in science like nature versus
nuture the answer is ending up at a place with both.
So true.
But the
general idea to which I'm referring here wasn't that human evolution
had ceased entirely, but that it hadn't been significant in recent
years, e.g. since events like the introduction of agriculture.
Evolution works on a time scale closer to 5 million years
than 5 generations. Thus 20,000 years or less of evolution
can't be called significant. In 20,000 years humans can not
have gone from hunter-gatherers eating widely varied foods
to grain eaters. This has implications like understanding
why the USDA food pyramid that suggests a diet based
on mostly grain has to be nonsense.
That's the conventional explanation, but it doesn't seem to be true.
Which is what I've been trying to say in my clumsy and inexpert way:
the latest evidence says that our species has changed fairly radically
in a very short time. I mentioned for example the starch digesting
gene which has multiplied in cultures with a long history of
agriculture, e.g, among the Han Chinese. The reasons for that are
presumably that a) the way of life of those who were in agricultural
societies changed radically and rapidly b) because the ability to
utilize food was involved, the selection pressure was extremely strong
c) the gene was apparently already there, and so likely to be
duplicated through transcription errors.
I agree about the food pyramid, BTW, but not completely. Because we've
been evolving rapidly, it seems that different groups have widely
differing nutritional needs. The aforementioned Chinese, for example,
do wonderfully on a diet that's mostly white rice. At the opposite
extreme, some people whose proximate ancestors were hunter gatherers
do just terribly on a rich diet. I suspect that most of us are
somewhere in between. For example, if I start eating paleolithically,
I shed pounds like there's no tomorrow, which is great, except that I
reach the point where I can't keep weight on!
How
that would have coexisted with known shifts like the development of
adult lactose tolerance in cultures that domesticated cattle or strong
selection pressure like epidemics I don't know.
It points to what "significiant" has to mean. No speciation
just diversity. And since overly uniform species are
specialists who go extinct when their niche vanishes, I
want humans to be generalists. As such this diversity is
good to me.
Moving into SF it would involve specific adaptations - zero
gravity, various gravities on assorted planets, who knows
what else.
I've long had a novel somewhere in my head and half a short story
somewhere in my computer that toy with some of these conflicts and
concerns . . .
Nope. It was just at the roll-over point. Start with making
ships that has sails as an improvement over kayaks or
canoes or rafts. So we have an inflection point that starts
an exponential phase that started several millenia ago.
Have gradual improvement like Roman road systems
then get to a point where railroads and steam ships can
make changes that are visible within a single human
lifetime. This peaks with aircraft putting nearly the entire
planet within the travel of most individuals in a week and
all individuals within a couple of years. Going to the Moon
was a bit of noise in that general trend.
But once travel became easy enough that a person can
travel the world, the rest of the gain is what percentage
of the population can travel the world how fast. And so
the exponential growth phase saw another inflection
point and the roll-off towards a new plateau began.
Seems to me that economy matters as well, and, increasingly,
environment and resources.
I don't know about the details of the need. Space travel is
gradually exitting the rare government effort like Spain
funding an expedition across the Atlantic to see if they
come back and entering the growing market. Some
exponential growth is going to happen in the next few
centuries. Or maybe it's already started and the curve is
still far more noise than signal.
The question is what. Lots of people have been racking their brains
trying to figure out how to get past the chicken and egg scenario, but
so far, only satellites have proven profitable. One possibility is
that space tourism will be the key. If you can increase volume to the
point at which space travel becomes economical, new possibilities
start to open up and you have a Cambrian explosion -- mining,
colonization, energy production, what have you.
But you're right, that may not be the
case, hell, given our usual lack of wisdom, I wouldn't be surprised if
it wasn't. OTOH, it could be just the sort of pressure we need to
begin the conquest of space . . .
Larry Niven's Tales of Known Space.
Funny, I hadn't remember that.
--
Josh
"My name is not Strangelove. I don't know about Strangelove. I'm not
interested in Strangelove. What else can I say? . . . Look, say it
three times more, and I throw you out of this office."
--Edward Teller
.
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