4 ms·

Sure, every living creature and really any complex system has these problems: they can’t be perfect. But you also can’t point to anything better.

ceejayoz 6y ago
> But you also can’t point to anything better. I mean, not yet. The days of "let's tweak it so the blood vessels go behind the retina" or "let's add a bit more cartilage to the knees" aren't here yet, but they're probably coming eventually. Evolution doesn't really optimize for the "keep this body running at age 100" scenarios that we find ourselves in lately, and there's a lot of legacy code.
- nwienert 6y ago
  Anyway, I agree there’s ways we can improve, only disagreed with the implication that we’re running on some sort of hacked together or sloppy system. The redundancy of biology is incredible, the opposite of easy to break.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    I mean, it is hacked together and sloppy. Ureters come out near the vagina, causing UTIs. Our intestines are better suited for being on all fours, leading to hernias. We eat and breathe with the same orifice, and some of us choke to death from it. Our eyes have blind spots that lead to our brains filling in details, sometimes inaccurately. Goosebumps are vestigial, men have nipples, human embryos briefly make tails and gill slits, heads are too big for the birth canal, etc. etc. etc. If we had the technology to design a human from the ground up, we'd make a lot of fixes. As with many hacked together and sloppy codebases, it still works, fairly well. That doesn't mean it's not hacked together and sloppy, though.
    - nwienert 6y ago
      Sloppy compared to what? What would you point to as better? Where would you put the urethra, for example? Many of your examples are contrived. Sure they have some failure modes, but they also are succeeding trillions of times a day. I’d bet a lot of money a “human designed human” would not perform better, except for taking ideas from other humans, and only when done in very limited cases.
      - ceejayoz 6y ago
        > Sloppy compared to what? What would you point to as better? Sloppy compared to, say, crocodiles, which largely haven't changed in hundreds of millions of years. We humans aren't well designed for our current use cases, as we changed a whole bunch of our behaviors in the last few hundred thousand years. > Where would you put the urethra, for example? I'd leave that up to a biomedical engineer. Perhaps they'd rig up a system like reptiles and birds have, where the useful water gets reabsorbed and they excrete urea crystals. > Sure they have some failure modes, but they also are succeeding trillions of times a day. Again, this is true for spaghetti code. It is a mistake to think "spaghetti = broken". Spaghetti = hard to understand/maintain.
        nwienert 6y ago
        The diff between the error rate of crocodiles, humans, and spaghetti code is really where it doesn’t stand up. Crocodiles > humans >>>>>>> spaghetti code. End of story, unless your spaghetti code only fails a very small amount, I guess. Not what I assume most people think when they think of it.
        rowanG077 6y ago
        You keep ignoring the point that spaghetti code and error rate are not related by definition. It's been spelled out to you multiple times now.
        nwienert 6y ago
        @rowan Won’t let me respond to you directly, but I haven’t failed to note that. I’ve never seen someone say anything positive about the reliability of spaghetti code.
- orestarod 6y ago
  Evolution is dumb. What dictates evolution is who survives. People wish to live 100 years old and be like 20, but that would be very complex, and eventually, humans exist as a species just fine without it, that is, the DNA keeps existing and replicating without that advantage. If conditions dictated that the humans who are young for 100 years leave more of their DNA than those who do not, then eventually that is the path we would have taken - maybe that is the path we WILL take, if conditions allow. But it's just a selfish wish. It's like saying an ant worker should live decades. Good for itself, maybe, but adds little value to the survival of the species, the job gets done as it is.
  - rowanG077 6y ago
    You are assuming evolution leads to the best adaptation. That's simply not true. It finds a local minimum and that's it. It's evident that a human that stays fertile and young for 100 years leaves more offspring then the current human. But the way to get there might not be continous improvement of fitness and thus evolution will never get there by itself.
    - orestarod 6y ago
      It does not "lead" anywhere. It's a wandering in the wild. Some paths lead to cliffs, some will keep you going for a long time. A vast number of paths will be taken, but in any given time you only see the species - better yet, the individuals - who have not fallen off a cliff. I like the idea of evolution, because "it is what it is". It happens whether you believe it or not. It has no goal, it just happens. And, it's not that evolution "changes" species, it's that whoever survives becomes the definition of what a species is at all, therefore "evolution" is just the observable outcome, the process is natural selection. So, it's pointless to "blame" evolution, to say "it is not good enough". I, you, we don't even know what's "Good enough" and for whom. Even whatever we consider "humanity" is the outcome of our natural selection. Your very wish to live forever, is the outcome of our natural selection. The wish to genetically engineer our species' future members, will only be judged good or bad by its outcome, not by our planning. What you see now is what works, and the proof it works is we are still here. For example, if we end up destroying the world and our species with nuclear weapons, the path of evolution giving us intellect will have proven to be a bad one for this branch of DNA called "human species". I can only say I have a very bad gut feeling about conscious genetic altering of humans, and I trust there are many arguments to find if I analyze it. Perhaps it's only some aspect of my DNA's self preservation not wanting to lose over some made-up DNA.

ceejayoz 6y ago

> But you also can’t point to anything better. I mean, not yet. The days of "let's tweak it so the blood vessels go behind the retina" or "let's add a bit more cartilage to the knees" aren't here yet, but they're probably coming eventually. Evolution doesn't really optimize for the "keep this body running at age 100" scenarios that we find ourselves in lately, and there's a lot of legacy code.

nwienert 6y ago
Anyway, I agree there’s ways we can improve, only disagreed with the implication that we’re running on some sort of hacked together or sloppy system. The redundancy of biology is incredible, the opposite of easy to break.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  I mean, it is hacked together and sloppy. Ureters come out near the vagina, causing UTIs. Our intestines are better suited for being on all fours, leading to hernias. We eat and breathe with the same orifice, and some of us choke to death from it. Our eyes have blind spots that lead to our brains filling in details, sometimes inaccurately. Goosebumps are vestigial, men have nipples, human embryos briefly make tails and gill slits, heads are too big for the birth canal, etc. etc. etc. If we had the technology to design a human from the ground up, we'd make a lot of fixes. As with many hacked together and sloppy codebases, it still works, fairly well. That doesn't mean it's not hacked together and sloppy, though.
  - nwienert 6y ago
    Sloppy compared to what? What would you point to as better? Where would you put the urethra, for example? Many of your examples are contrived. Sure they have some failure modes, but they also are succeeding trillions of times a day. I’d bet a lot of money a “human designed human” would not perform better, except for taking ideas from other humans, and only when done in very limited cases.
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      > Sloppy compared to what? What would you point to as better? Sloppy compared to, say, crocodiles, which largely haven't changed in hundreds of millions of years. We humans aren't well designed for our current use cases, as we changed a whole bunch of our behaviors in the last few hundred thousand years. > Where would you put the urethra, for example? I'd leave that up to a biomedical engineer. Perhaps they'd rig up a system like reptiles and birds have, where the useful water gets reabsorbed and they excrete urea crystals. > Sure they have some failure modes, but they also are succeeding trillions of times a day. Again, this is true for spaghetti code. It is a mistake to think "spaghetti = broken". Spaghetti = hard to understand/maintain.
      - nwienert 6y ago
        The diff between the error rate of crocodiles, humans, and spaghetti code is really where it doesn’t stand up. Crocodiles > humans >>>>>>> spaghetti code. End of story, unless your spaghetti code only fails a very small amount, I guess. Not what I assume most people think when they think of it.
        rowanG077 6y ago
        You keep ignoring the point that spaghetti code and error rate are not related by definition. It's been spelled out to you multiple times now.
        nwienert 6y ago
        @rowan Won’t let me respond to you directly, but I haven’t failed to note that. I’ve never seen someone say anything positive about the reliability of spaghetti code.
orestarod 6y ago
Evolution is dumb. What dictates evolution is who survives. People wish to live 100 years old and be like 20, but that would be very complex, and eventually, humans exist as a species just fine without it, that is, the DNA keeps existing and replicating without that advantage. If conditions dictated that the humans who are young for 100 years leave more of their DNA than those who do not, then eventually that is the path we would have taken - maybe that is the path we WILL take, if conditions allow. But it's just a selfish wish. It's like saying an ant worker should live decades. Good for itself, maybe, but adds little value to the survival of the species, the job gets done as it is.
- rowanG077 6y ago
  You are assuming evolution leads to the best adaptation. That's simply not true. It finds a local minimum and that's it. It's evident that a human that stays fertile and young for 100 years leaves more offspring then the current human. But the way to get there might not be continous improvement of fitness and thus evolution will never get there by itself.
  - orestarod 6y ago
    It does not "lead" anywhere. It's a wandering in the wild. Some paths lead to cliffs, some will keep you going for a long time. A vast number of paths will be taken, but in any given time you only see the species - better yet, the individuals - who have not fallen off a cliff. I like the idea of evolution, because "it is what it is". It happens whether you believe it or not. It has no goal, it just happens. And, it's not that evolution "changes" species, it's that whoever survives becomes the definition of what a species is at all, therefore "evolution" is just the observable outcome, the process is natural selection. So, it's pointless to "blame" evolution, to say "it is not good enough". I, you, we don't even know what's "Good enough" and for whom. Even whatever we consider "humanity" is the outcome of our natural selection. Your very wish to live forever, is the outcome of our natural selection. The wish to genetically engineer our species' future members, will only be judged good or bad by its outcome, not by our planning. What you see now is what works, and the proof it works is we are still here. For example, if we end up destroying the world and our species with nuclear weapons, the path of evolution giving us intellect will have proven to be a bad one for this branch of DNA called "human species". I can only say I have a very bad gut feeling about conscious genetic altering of humans, and I trust there are many arguments to find if I analyze it. Perhaps it's only some aspect of my DNA's self preservation not wanting to lose over some made-up DNA.