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It's always a generational problem for progress in anything isn't it? When people are entrenched in certain ways it's nigh impossible to change anything, especi

It's always a generational problem for progress in anything isn't it? When people are entrenched in certain ways it's nigh impossible to change anything, especially when there's no gain for them personally. Real changes happen only when the current incumbents gradually die off. This is probably one of the main reasons mortality was evolutionarily selected for: easier adaptation to changing environments. It's become glaringly apparent in the last century with progress vastly outpacing generational swaps. Old geezers in charge, trying to control a world they don't fundamentally understand anymore.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
> This is probably one of the main reasons mortality was evolutionarily selected for: easier adaptation to changing environments. I don't think mortality was selected for - but rather, that it's longevity that never was. The default state of any organism - or any temporarily self-sustaining / self-perpetuating chemical reaction or temporarily-stable dynamical system - is that something will eventually kick it out of the stable region, and the reaction breaks down, the system muffles itself or shakes itself apart, the organism decays and dies. The way the evolutionary process works, natural selection will strongly promote organisms that survive to the point of reproduction. Past that point, the influence weakens significantly. It's more work that affects reproduction weakly, if at all. Humans are one of those few special cases, where it's strongly beneficial to keep the older individuals around, due to the positive impact of accumulated experience and thinking on survival rates of the group. I think in our case natural selection would actually favor longevity, or at least extending the part of the lifespan where we are capable of thinking clearly. Alas, from evolution's point of view, the entire history of humanity - from first tales and invention of writing, all the way to spaceflight and the Internet and GPT-4 - happened faster than in a blink of an eye. We're iterating and improving couple orders of magnitude faster than natural selection - we've decoupled ourselves from natural evolution, and we're stuck with the shitty hardware we have, that's optimized for barely above reproductive age. IMO, the right answer isn't to throw up our hands and say "oh, science/politics advances one funeral at a time" or "evolution clearly thought longevity sucks" - but rather recognizing that we're on our own with this, evolution doesn't matter to us, and maybe we should come up with a better solution.

TeMPOraL 4y ago

> This is probably one of the main reasons mortality was evolutionarily selected for: easier adaptation to changing environments. I don't think mortality was selected for - but rather, that it's longevity that never was. The default state of any organism - or any temporarily self-sustaining / self-perpetuating chemical reaction or temporarily-stable dynamical system - is that something will eventually kick it out of the stable region, and the reaction breaks down, the system muffles itself or shakes itself apart, the organism decays and dies. The way the evolutionary process works, natural selection will strongly promote organisms that survive to the point of reproduction. Past that point, the influence weakens significantly. It's more work that affects reproduction weakly, if at all. Humans are one of those few special cases, where it's strongly beneficial to keep the older individuals around, due to the positive impact of accumulated experience and thinking on survival rates of the group. I think in our case natural selection would actually favor longevity, or at least extending the part of the lifespan where we are capable of thinking clearly. Alas, from evolution's point of view, the entire history of humanity - from first tales and invention of writing, all the way to spaceflight and the Internet and GPT-4 - happened faster than in a blink of an eye. We're iterating and improving couple orders of magnitude faster than natural selection - we've decoupled ourselves from natural evolution, and we're stuck with the shitty hardware we have, that's optimized for barely above reproductive age. IMO, the right answer isn't to throw up our hands and say "oh, science/politics advances one funeral at a time" or "evolution clearly thought longevity sucks" - but rather recognizing that we're on our own with this, evolution doesn't matter to us, and maybe we should come up with a better solution.