3 ms·

Evolution started without DNA, so that's not quite the right focus.

dredmorbius 7y ago
200k - 2m years of human / protohuman development, vs ~100 years under vaguely modern conditions, is a big difference. Your reply fails to acknowledge it.
- dllthomas 7y ago
  My reply was narrowly addressing a mistake repeated across a couple comments. It was not intended to undermine the argument as a whole. Your comment seems, by implication, to make a similar mistake: it doesn't matter much how long we were in a different situation - what matters is whether we've had enough of a chance to adapt to the new one. It doesn't take (k)X years to "undo" adaptations that took X years to find. And yes, the 100 years you give are clearly not enough generations to do much adapting. Some of the items mentioned in the earlier comment (clothes, fire, shelter) are things humans have had for substantially longer than 100 years. But I don't know enough about the relevant time scales for anything to be clear to me about how much we've probably adapted to having them, which is why I didn't speak to that.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Fair enough: evolution works via both drift selection mechanisms, the latter which may quite suddenly imposed. My view is that the past century or so may be an increased period of both driftband (through geographic contact) remixing, possibly to be followed by a selection process, whether by civilisation collapse, singularity, or other mechanisms. In particular, it seems that the dramatic reductions of, e.g., early childhood mortality, represent the lifting of an immense amount of selection. To what end becomes an interesting quesstion.
  - pas 7y ago
    I think having invented shelter, food, clothes vs reliably having clean clothes and warm shelter and food is a big difference. Similarly how we have the surplus resources to keep people alive and well (and thus productive) with seriously adaptive-maladaptive trait groups, eg. Stephen Hawking and other famous physicists of the 20th century. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...
    - dllthomas 7y ago
      Sure. As I said, my response wasn't intended to undermine the thesis, just to point out some confusion (hopefully in language, possibly in ideas).

200k - 2m years of human / protohuman development, vs ~100 years under vaguely modern conditions, is a big difference. Your reply fails to acknowledge it.

dllthomas 7y ago
My reply was narrowly addressing a mistake repeated across a couple comments. It was not intended to undermine the argument as a whole. Your comment seems, by implication, to make a similar mistake: it doesn't matter much how long we were in a different situation - what matters is whether we've had enough of a chance to adapt to the new one. It doesn't take (k)X years to "undo" adaptations that took X years to find. And yes, the 100 years you give are clearly not enough generations to do much adapting. Some of the items mentioned in the earlier comment (clothes, fire, shelter) are things humans have had for substantially longer than 100 years. But I don't know enough about the relevant time scales for anything to be clear to me about how much we've probably adapted to having them, which is why I didn't speak to that.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Fair enough: evolution works via both drift selection mechanisms, the latter which may quite suddenly imposed. My view is that the past century or so may be an increased period of both driftband (through geographic contact) remixing, possibly to be followed by a selection process, whether by civilisation collapse, singularity, or other mechanisms. In particular, it seems that the dramatic reductions of, e.g., early childhood mortality, represent the lifting of an immense amount of selection. To what end becomes an interesting quesstion.
- pas 7y ago
  I think having invented shelter, food, clothes vs reliably having clean clothes and warm shelter and food is a big difference. Similarly how we have the surplus resources to keep people alive and well (and thus productive) with seriously adaptive-maladaptive trait groups, eg. Stephen Hawking and other famous physicists of the 20th century. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...
  - dllthomas 7y ago
    Sure. As I said, my response wasn't intended to undermine the thesis, just to point out some confusion (hopefully in language, possibly in ideas).