4 ms·

This isn't a safe bet at all; we're the first arrivals, it would be a shock if we did everything right the first time.

• lanstin 7y ago
  We didn't do anything. Evolution is a relatively efficient searcher but a very bad respector of modern systems design principals. Each chemical pathway has a tendency to be tied to multiple unrelated systems. The genome itself is only for a developmental system/architecture largely consistent across the vertebrates. We could try surpressing say visible agression traits and discover 50% of the folks die in their fifties due to some previously unknown liver metabolism or get super depressed when their kids grow up or get phantom limb pains. If some one gene swap would make people 10% smarter and not kill their groups off faster, odds are we have the better gene. Biology is just a lot more complex than code, or vaccines. I mean i might be wrong maybe increasing "fitness of mind" will be as easy as a smallpox vaccine. But i haven't read any genetic or proteomic stuff that makes me say, oh wow this is simpler than we thought. What i see is people building software to get a grip on the complexity of these systems.
  • Veedrac 7y ago
    We'd only likely see huge consequences like that if we went outside the normal range of human variation. I agree that evolution would find single gene swaps with huge effects, but most of the variation available to us is over hundreds or thousands of genes making incremental effects. This is why I think we're probably first going go be able to effect marginal shifts in the overall distribution of these traits, not large jumps.
    • lanstin 7y ago
      bearing in mind that large jumps have different causes than marginal improvements, I'd agree. And I'm putting my money on the Ship Minds anyways. Biology seems too complex for even top humans. : )