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> But nature barely even tried. Humans can do better than that. ~3.8 billion years of evolution "barely even tried"? There's hubris and then there's _hubris_.

> But nature barely even tried. Humans can do better than that. ~3.8 billion years of evolution "barely even tried"? There's hubris and then there's _hubris_. But to repeat myself: I am not saying we shouldn't try. I'm saying we should expect no free lunch, and that the concept of tradeoffs for every alteration is a much healthier mental framework to work off of because _so far_ that's been the one consistent truth in all of biology.

ACCount37 1y ago
And tell me - for those "~3.8 billion years of evolution", what was the optimization target? What was natural selection selecting for, exactly? Longevity? Happiness? Quality of life? Hahahahaha hahaha hahah ha no. There is no "fairness" in biology, and natural selection isn't your friend. It's aligned with your interests sometimes - but if evolution could make humans reproduce much more effectively by making them live half as long and ten times as miserable? It would. There's just one primary metric that evolution cares about, and it totally would throw your well-being under the bus for it. Evolution doesn't care much about whether humans live long and happy lives. Only humans themselves care about that. There are a lot of optimizations possible there, and humans have to be the ones to find them.
sothatsit 1y ago
If you think evolution was optimising for longevity, then you really haven't thought it through. For 3.8 billion years, organisms just needed to survive long enough to reproduce. Cancer, heart disease, and other age-related diseases only became significant killers in the last few hundred years. That's nowhere near enough time for evolution to address them. And even then, age-related diseases don't directly influence people's chance of reproducing and passing on their genes. Conversely, evolution has had millions of years to work on fighting infectious diseases, which have been bigger killers for most of our history.
- simianparrot 1y ago
  And evolution eventually led to mammals with complex brain plasticity and an almost _unreasonably_ long and fragile childhood that allowed in-generation transmission of lessons and knowledge bypassing the traditional, heavily trial and error -based approach of just gene transmission and instinctual knowledge. I think evolution did a damn fine job. And yes there's surely more we don't know than we know or understand, which might change the future just as much as bacteriology has, but let's also be humble and learn from what came before. Both things are possible.

ACCount37 1y ago

And tell me - for those "~3.8 billion years of evolution", what was the optimization target? What was natural selection selecting for, exactly? Longevity? Happiness? Quality of life? Hahahahaha hahaha hahah ha no. There is no "fairness" in biology, and natural selection isn't your friend. It's aligned with your interests sometimes - but if evolution could make humans reproduce much more effectively by making them live half as long and ten times as miserable? It would. There's just one primary metric that evolution cares about, and it totally would throw your well-being under the bus for it. Evolution doesn't care much about whether humans live long and happy lives. Only humans themselves care about that. There are a lot of optimizations possible there, and humans have to be the ones to find them.

sothatsit 1y ago

If you think evolution was optimising for longevity, then you really haven't thought it through. For 3.8 billion years, organisms just needed to survive long enough to reproduce. Cancer, heart disease, and other age-related diseases only became significant killers in the last few hundred years. That's nowhere near enough time for evolution to address them. And even then, age-related diseases don't directly influence people's chance of reproducing and passing on their genes. Conversely, evolution has had millions of years to work on fighting infectious diseases, which have been bigger killers for most of our history.

simianparrot 1y ago
And evolution eventually led to mammals with complex brain plasticity and an almost _unreasonably_ long and fragile childhood that allowed in-generation transmission of lessons and knowledge bypassing the traditional, heavily trial and error -based approach of just gene transmission and instinctual knowledge. I think evolution did a damn fine job. And yes there's surely more we don't know than we know or understand, which might change the future just as much as bacteriology has, but let's also be humble and learn from what came before. Both things are possible.