Fitness vs. Relatedness

Posted by karlmagnus on September 03, 2006, 09:48 PM | #

I rather think we’re in a race between differential breeding (stupider have more kids, both between races and within race), overpopulation, nuclear proliferation on the one hand and on the other hand genetic engineering to improve the huiman stock, possibly to something that won’t to us be recognisably human. By 2200, we’ll preusmably know which won or is going to win, with 3 possibilities: (i) 15 billion coffee colored savages, with numbers declining as starvation, disease and resource depletion take hold (ii) tiny population of savages scratching out a bare existence on a planet wasted by war (end result of (i) too, but depends whether war stops us before we get to 15 billion) and (iii) 1 billion gentically engineered beings of varying degrees of superiority, possibly of several non-interbreeding species, leading the life of an 18th century squire with their needs catered to by robots.

The intervening years will be rough, though, so I hope for JJR’s sake his offspring have survival skills beyond poetry.

Posted by James Bowery on September 03, 2006, 10:09 PM | #

Transhumanism is largely wishful thinking unless there is some form of artificial intelligence that can help uplift humans.  The reason I say it is largely wishful thinking is that the primary sources of information about are genome are being destroyed through interbreeding.  The correlation structures of genes aren’t just a way to attack Lewontin’s Fallacy or to greater ethnic genetic interest—it is where the really interesting stuff happens in biology and we’re destroying it vastly more rapidly than we’re discovering its properties.

The people responsible for this destruction are psychotic clowns parading around with great pompousity.

Posted by karlmagnus on September 03, 2006, 10:22 PM | #

James, you’re right about the effect but wrong about the timescale.  Genome sequencing is proceeding an order of magnitude faster than genetic material is being detsroyed by interbreeding—we know FAR more than we did 10 years ago, whereas it will take a cenbtury or so for significant markers to be lost—after all, people live 3/4 of this. provided we resist Bushite legisaltion against genetic engineering, we’ll know what to do and be able to do it well within 50 years, when some of us will still be around, and certainly the diversity of the pool won’t have diminished much.

Thank goodness, we live longer than fruit flies!

Posted by AD on September 03, 2006, 10:27 PM | #

If they’re not related strongly to us, why would we care if they’re super fit or retarded monkeys?

There is no such thing as “moral darwinism” in relation to our interests. It may be of interest, like a science fiction film, but we don’t really care if they live or die.

The less something is like us, the less we give a damn.

Posted by karlmagnus on September 03, 2006, 10:59 PM | #

Thgey will be our grandchildren, but with a few improvements built in.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on September 03, 2006, 11:40 PM | #

Transhumanism is largely wishful thinking unless there is some form of artificial intelligence that can help uplift humans.

Theoretically Kurzweil totally changed my mind about AI: it isn’t about understanding human intelligence, but about replicating it.  The former is probably impossible, the latter is infinitely more doable, just a matter of brain mapping and computing power.

Apply economies of scale to that and transhumanism doesn’t seem so far off.

Posted by Desmond Jones on September 04, 2006, 12:20 AM | #

Transhumanism, like Marxism is more liberal folly and sure to run against EGI. It, like liberalism, purports that the reasoning of mankind is superior to evolution and tried and true traditions of the past. It, like miscegenation, has the potential to destroy what thousands of years of evolution has bestowed.

Rushton writes [pdf],

Of all the decisions people make that affect their environment, choosing friends and spouses are among the most important. Genetic Similarity Theory was first applied to assortative mating, which kin-selection theory sensu stricto does not readily explain since individuals seldom mate with ‘kin’. Yet, the
evidence for assortative mating is pervasive in other animals as well as in humans. For humans, both spouses and best friends are most similar on socio-demographic variables such as age, ethnicity and educational level (r50.60), next most on opinions and attitudes (r50.50), then on cognitive ability (r50.40), and least, but still significantly, on personality (r50.20) and
physical traits (r50.20).

Even marrying across ethnic lines ‘proves the rule’. In Hawaii, men and women who married cross-ethnically were more similar in personality than those marrying within their group, suggesting that couples ‘make up’ for ethnic dissimilarity by choosing spouses more similar to themselves in other
respects (Ahern et al. 1981).

He quotes Darwin;

Darwin was unable to resolve the paradox of altruism to his satisfaction because to do so required greater knowledge of how heredity worked than he had available (the word ‘genetics’ was not coined until 1905).

Nonetheless, in The Descent, Darwin (1871) intuited the solution when he wrote, ‘sympathy is directed solely towards members of the same community, 492 J. Philippe Rushton and therefore towards known, and more or less loved members, but not all the individuals of the same species’ (Vol. 1: 163).

Yet, AFAICT, Rushton, Hamilton, Wilson or Dawkins fail to address the final component of Darwin’s exploration of altruism or outgroup sympathy, the belief, of Darwin’s, that altruism as an inherited trait in higher civilizations, will ultimately become incidental, extending to all sentient beings, including men of other nations and races.

Perhaps someone cares to ask him?

.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on September 04, 2006, 12:33 AM | #

Transhumanism, like Marxism is more liberal folly and sure to run against EGI.

That’s like saying medicine or tool-use is sure to run against EGI.

It, like liberalism, purports that the reasoning of mankind is superior to evolution and tried and true traditions of the past.

Mmm, simply put the difference is that liberalism was wrong and transhumanism is right.    Also, it doesn’t purport that human reason is superior to evolution; reason is obviously an outgrowth of evolution, as is all human accomplishment.  IMO using reason (gift of evolution) for all it’s worth is a sound proposal.  Why is mate-choice “good” but transhumanism “bad”?

It, like miscegenation, has the potential to destroy what thousands of years of evolution has bestowed.

So does nuclear power.  Unlike nuclear power, though, transhumanism might also ensure the galaxy-wide propagation of what evolution has bestowed.

Posted by Desmond Jones on September 04, 2006, 01:56 AM | #

Mmm, simply put the difference is that liberalism was wrong and transhumanism is right.

Spoken like a true liberal.

Where’s the evidence that transhumanism will further EGI? All transhumanism purports, is, like Marxism, a false utopia. It is the of mankind’s belief in it’s ability to build a better society through reason that gave us the foolish notion of equality, rights of the individual, abortion on demand, gay marriage and mass immigration.

The purpose of medicine is to cure the diseases of the sick, protect the healthy, and to prolong life, not alter it to produce some post-human Frankenstein.

Mate choice is good because it portends reproductive fitness and genetic continuance. Transhumanism can not relay on genetic similarity. Transhumanism would not be inherited and therefore would place no value on ethny.

Then both nuclear power and miscegenation should be outlawed if that’s the case. However, it appears more likely that the possession of nukes ensures EGI. transhumanism provides no such assurance.

Posted by On Holliday on September 04, 2006, 06:16 AM | #

Been there, done that:
http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/http_majorityrightscom_indexphp_hollidays_first_post/

Also see the recent Alon Ziv thread.

There is confusion here about the meaning of “fitness.”  A bodybuilder/marathon runner who has zero children and few relatives, and who belongs to an ethny in demographic free fall, is not “fit” in the sense discussed here.  A grotesquely obese negress with clogged arteries, high blood pressure, and diabetes, with 15 children, is so fit.

Relatedness is one component of fitness, relative relatedness x number of “relatives” *is* fitness.

Now, whether or not you wish to alter phenotypes - and the underlying genotypes - to achieve some sort of proximate goal, is another question, and if that influences fitness in one way or another, it can be debated.

The Zivs of the world need to acknowledge the *real* meaning of fitness (unless they have an ethnic mental block against being truthful) and explain to us how net fitness is going to be enhanced by their agenda.

I have already discussed this in the Ziv thread.

I also fail to see how other racial groups can improve much upon the white stock; after all, don’t white women have the best naked asses to be thrust into the face of the MR readership?

Perhaps ‘transhumanism’ can enhance the gluteus maximus region, perhaps not.

But:
a) I’m skeptical of the whole thing, we are more likely to revert to the jungle than to become ‘transhumanist’
b) there is a difference between selective modification of certain genes - which is just natural selection accelerated - and widespread genomic changes due to inter-racial admixture.

Don’t equate the two.  Salter stated that changes in specific gene frequencies can be adaptive if they help the entire distinctive genome.

Gene therapy/gene engineering can fall under that, and are consistent with EGI, when done moderately.

Posted by Third root of unity on September 04, 2006, 09:26 AM | #

Hi folks, it may be unrelated to the topic but i would like to ask a question. Since there is a high probability that a male of a human group X will find women of the group X attractive and males of group X familiar, if the males of group X have a high probability of finding women of a group Y unatractive and males of group Y suspicious is this a measure of unrelatedness between groups X and Y? Likewise, if males of group X are attracted by females of group Z is this a natural measure of potential benefits in integrating the two groups? May some of you point me to the thread where you have discussed this subject, please?

Posted by On Holliday on September 04, 2006, 09:56 AM | #

“Hi folks, it may be unrelated to the topic but i would like to ask a question. Since there is a high probability that a male of a human group X will find women of the group X attractive and males of group X familiar, if the males of group X have a high probability of finding women of a group Y unatractive and males of group Y suspicious is this a measure of unrelatedness between groups X and Y?”

No.  Measure of relatedness are genetic, not whether someone finds another person attractive or not.

“Likewise, if males of group X are attracted by females of group Z is this a natural measure of potential benefits in integrating the two groups?”

No.  That is simply personal preference.

“May some of you point me to the thread where you have discussed this subject, please? “

If you wish to look at threads about phenotype, go to the links of J Richards’ posts.

That is unrelated to “relatedness.”

Posted by Third root of unity on September 04, 2006, 10:21 AM | #

“If you wish to look at threads about phenotype, go to the links of J Richards’ posts.”

Many thanks, mr. On Holliday, I will go there.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on September 04, 2006, 12:01 PM | #

On the genetic-engineering aspects of “transhumanism” I’m with Desmond and On Holliday.  Karl’s imagined scenario of a large community of highly genetically-engineered folk populating the world in two centuries is as soundly-based as the images of what life would be like in the 1960s that were presented to 1930s film audiences in those Buster Krabbe Flash Gordon movies where it was imagined that by the ‘60s everyone would be flying around space at will in rocket ships and so on, or the images of what life in the U.S.A. would be like in the year 2001 which were presented to film audiences in 1970 in the movie “2001:  A Space Odyssey.”  As we know, 2001 has long since come and gone and not only are we not living anywhere remotely near the way depicted—which nevertheless was based on predictions of the best futurist consultants Stanley Kubrick could hire—we’re actually living worse in a number of senses.  The fundamental reason genetic engineering is not going to change people’s intelligence, personalities, or races is the human genetic bases for those are going to turn out to be too complex to sort out so as to make the attempted changes work without tons of unintended consequences utterly corrupting the outcomes:  smooth harmonious outcomes where those things are concerned depend on highly complex genetic interactions.  If there are a thousand genes involved in a complex trait you’re trying to “engineer” and a thousand interactions with other genes which must be taken into account for each gene, and it takes ten to a hundred years to identify the gene and each of its potential interactions, it takes a thousand genes times a thousand potential interactions times ten to a hundred years to sort each out, equals ten to a hundred million years per trait you’re trying to “engineer” successfully.  If there are a thousand traits that distinquish a Negro from a white man that’s ten billion to a hundred billion years to perfect the alchemy of changing a Negro and white man into each other.  How did nature produce Negroes and white men in probably less than half-a-million years?( * )  Because nature does way more things at once than we can, hugely accelerating the process—plus, nature knows what it is doing, while we don’t have the slightest clue.  The reason simple genetic engineering tasks such as curing Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy will definitely come to pass (and that relatively soon—within the next hundred years in the case of some of them) is you’re doing something extremely simple:  replacing a few bases in a single gene without needing to understand and take into account any gene interactions since you’re not reshufflling any gene combinations but simply fixing a minuscule broken part of what’s already been vetted for millions of years.

In two hundred years people will be exactly as they are now and exactly as they were when the events in the Odyssey and the Illiad took place three thousand years ago.  Nothing will have changed fundamentally in people or in human nature.  The appropriate attitude to take in regard to these predictions of sweeping changes in human intelligence, human physiognomy, and human nature to result from genetic engineering is decided skepticism:  “I’ll believe that when I see it, thank you very much, and in the meantime I’m going to think, live, and plan as though it’s complete hogwash—which there’s excellent reason for thinking it is.”   
______

( *  This business about Negroes and white men having been the same as recently as 40K years ago was always intuitively hard to swallow, and even the claim they were the same 70K-100K years ago seemed doubtful to me personally.  Tentative evidence is now emerging that Negroes and white men, i.e., Euros, have been at least somewhat genetically distinct for about 400K years, which seems closer to the truth—according to my instincts it does, at any rate.)

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on September 04, 2006, 03:20 PM | #

Where’s the evidence that transhumanism will further EGI?

Staring you in the face (if you change “will” to “could”).  The possibilities biotech presents for DNA propagation are vast and obvious.

All transhumanism purports, is, like Marxism, a false utopia. It is the of mankind’s belief in it’s ability to build a better society through reason that gave us the foolish notion of equality, rights of the individual, abortion on demand, gay marriage and mass immigration.

I think we’re operating from different definitions of transhumanism.  To me TH is a word for a series of related technologies that will allow transcendance (physical) of much of what we today call human; I don’t see a lot of social utopia there.  The tech, as broad a set of possibilities as it opens, is easier to predict IMO than the social ramifications.

The purpose of medicine is to cure the diseases of the sick, protect the healthy, and to prolong life, not alter it to produce some post-human Frankenstein.

Tell that to cosmetic surgeons and fertility doctors.

Mate choice is good because it portends reproductive fitness and genetic continuance.

Transhumanis could do the same.

Transhumanism can not relay on genetic similarity.

Of course it could.

Transhumanism would not be inherited

Sez who?

and therefore would place no value on ethny.

It is true that TH places no value on ethny, but it is not true that TH is inherently somehow hostile or inimical to it, no more than a hammer is.

Then both nuclear power and miscegenation should be outlawed if that’s the case. However, it appears more likely that the possession of nukes ensures EGI. transhumanism provides no such assurance.

Again, I think we’re working from very different definitions here.  TH, as I understand it, is a loose term for the potential implications of biotech and nanotech on the environment and human biology, which add up to material-reality-as-IT.  One ramification seems to me to be a paradigm shift from Earth as carrying capacity to galaxy as carrying capacity.  Obviously that holds lots of potential good news for fitness.

It is true that TH holds potential good and bad in store, but this is true of any tool.  Given our fundamental interest in personal and group fitness, I think it’s safe to suggest that the good is more likely than the bad.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on September 04, 2006, 03:36 PM | #

On the genetic-engineering aspects of “transhumanism” I’m with Desmond and On Holliday.  Karl’s imagined scenario of a large community of highly genetically-engineered folk populating the world in two centuries is as soundly-based as the images of what life would be like in the 1960s that were presented to 1930s film audiences in those Buster Krabbe Flash Gordon movies where it was imagined that by the ‘60s everyone would be flying around space at will in rocket ships and so on, or the images of what life in the U.S.A. would be like in the year 2001 which were presented to film audiences in 1970 in the movie “2001:  A Space Odyssey.”

I don’t quite see the relevant parallels.

I don’t follow the logic of your time prognostications either.  Even if I did, they simply add up to finite equations and the time involved in solving them is relative to the computing power available to the task. 

Not that they’re necessarily right about their predictions, but the fellows at CRN might have some useful opinions for you on the coming changes in economies of scale (of course, they’d also have a few hair-raising possibilities to raise vis-a-vis the hurdles faced by human society intervening between now and TH ).

Because nature does way more things at once than we can, hugely accelerating the process—

I don’t follow that either.

plus, nature knows what it is doing, while we don’t have the slightest clue.

I see absolutely no logical basis for this assertion.  As far as I can tell it’s the opposite of fact.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on September 04, 2006, 03:38 PM | #

I also don’t see the distinction between nature and man the way some do, or the distinction between reason and nature.  Aren’t man and reason a part of nature (arguably the best parts)?

Posted by On Holliday on September 04, 2006, 03:41 PM | #

Where I disagree with Fred and agree with Svigor is that, yes, TH could be potentially useful and, if used judiciously, fully compatible with EGI.

Where I am skeptical about TH is if it is likely or is any solution to our problems.

The likely future of “humanity” can probably be summarized by that episode where Negro boxer Mike Tyson bit off part of the ear of a fellow Negro boxer, his opponent.

That, and not TH, is the future: mindless colored savagery in previously white nations, Africa and Latin America the same, East Asia intact but conformist and stuck at whatever level of technology existed at the time of the death of the West, and some of our semitic friends scurrying around trying to make money off of it.  Whether or not the colored lands will be at least partially disciplined by triumphant Islam is another question or, will Zionist America destroy the Islamists before America itself is destroyed?  Who knows.

TH will not save the white race.  Quite the opposite - only the continued existence of whites will make TH possible.

In the last analysis, whatever you think of TH, the race must be saved.

One can imagine that a white IT worker who would have contributed to TH has just seen his job outsourced to India, a white scientist who could have contributed to TH has just been mugged and killed by coloreds somewhere in America, and a possible white genius who could have invented a new technology will never live, having been aborted by his parents who “can’t afford a child”, while paying through the nose to support colored reproduction.

That’s the future, for you.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on September 04, 2006, 04:02 PM | #

On Holliday provides the best arguments against TH, folks.  I’m not as pessimistic, but I do recognize that we’re in a race to achieve TH before we destroy ourselves, and that whites are best capable of TH (though I’d argue with him about yellows - I think the conceptual path has been laid out to the extent that eventually they could do it; in fact, when I read CRN’s blog and imagine who might be in the best position to make the sort of large-scale investments needed for nanofactories, I suspect Japan and China might prove to fit the bill better than Europe or America).

We need to prepare for both (and other) eventualities.

Posted by On Holliday on September 04, 2006, 04:09 PM | #

Well, the yellows could do it - *maybe.*  But if they lose the impetus of competition with whitey, which would occur with the death of the west, the Chinese are likely to go back to eating dogs (or human fetuses, or whatever it is they eat) and the Japanese will obsess over their schoolgirl fetishes and bizarre cartoons (in which no one looks Japanese) and the whole thing will probably go nowhere.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on September 04, 2006, 04:33 PM | #

I think you’re selling them short.  As I suggested above, I think large-scale projects play to yellow strengths.  Certainly they are second fiddle in terms of innovation (empirically speaking).

The x-factor I always have in mind with yellows (particularly the Chinese, not so much the Japanese) is corruption.  AFAICT, corruption has always been a huge problem for the Chinese, relatively speaking, and it might prove crippling in the long run.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on September 04, 2006, 04:35 PM | #

You do make an interesting point about whitey as yellow impetus.  It’s not an unreasonable speculation.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on September 04, 2006, 06:09 PM | #

Here’s Vernor Vinge’s The Technological Singularity:
http://www.transtopia.org/vinge.html

The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work—the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct “what if’s” in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals.

[emphasis added]

Posted by James Bowery on September 04, 2006, 09:19 PM | #

Genome sequencing is proceeding an order of magnitude faster than genetic material is being detsroyed by interbreeding

I’m not concerned about preserving the raw DNA data.  Clearly that’s going to be preserved more or less.  I’m concerned about interpreting its meaning.  We need living specimines exhibiting the phenotypes of such structures to understand them.  Moreover the human ecologies within which they express are important.  Much information has already been lost and more is being lost all the time.

Posted by Desmond Jones on September 04, 2006, 10:49 PM | #

We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct “what if’s” in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection.

Classic liberal arrogance; the assumption, with no means available to test it, that human reasoning is superior to thousands of years of evolution, is folly.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on September 05, 2006, 12:41 AM | #

“Classic liberal arrogance; the assumption, with no means available to test it, that human reasoning is superior to thousands of years of evolution, is folly.”  (—Desmond)

Prof. Vinge’s statement (highlit in Svy’s comment) shows he doesn’t realize the biological complexity of people (or other higher oganisms) or the huge number of characteristics, gross and subtle, which evolution must “take simultaneously into account” every step of the process.  Directing or controlling the evolutionary process is not only beyond our power, it’s unimaginably beyond it:  our most advanced computers are no more capable of that degree of complexity where evolution is concerned than they are where long-range weather prediction is concerned.  Prof. Vinge writes in a way similar to communists who want to fix prices in accord with notions of social justice:  this always fails because, as Hayek taught, committees of bureaucrats aren’t able to integrate the innumerable bits of informational input which the free marketplace alone not only integrates but integrates automatically, instantaneously at every instant unceasingly, and always unerringly.  Where’s the computer program that can take over the job of determinig prices from the marketplace?  Doesn’t exist.  Sticking a gene into a chromosome then seeing what the result is isn’t evolution any more than putting a chip in a block of marble with a hammer is making a sculpture by Michelangelo.  This math professor and sci-fi author sounds like he’s writing for pulp science-fiction comics in this piece.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on September 05, 2006, 12:54 AM | #

Erratum:

The third sentence in my comment before last should read,

As we know, 2001 has long since come and gone and not only are we not living anywhere remotely near the way depicted—which nevertheless was based on predictions of the best futurist consultants Stanley Kubrick could hire—we’re actually living worse, in a number of senses, than we were in 1970.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on September 05, 2006, 01:41 PM | #

Classic liberal arrogance; the assumption, with no means available to test it, that human reasoning is superior to thousands of years of evolution, is folly.

Ideology-as-science.  More to the point there is no such assumption; there are good guesses.  Human reason clearly is superior to evolution (in the false sense that the two are distinct in the way you’re suggesting) in many ways.

Sticking a gene into a chromosome then seeing what the result is isn’t evolution

No, that’s mutation.    Evolution is the ones that turn out well.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on September 05, 2006, 02:13 PM | #

Site ate my post, let’s try that again.

Desmond, human civilization seems to fit your criteria for arrogant liberal folly; where do you draw the line?  Man has obviously domesticated himself; do you simply object to him doing so consciously?

Posted by Desmond Jones on September 05, 2006, 04:43 PM | #

The problem is Svyatoslav, is that the civilization of man occurred, not by conducting mental computation but as Darwin outlines, by advancing and perfecting through natural selection.

“If they fail to be thus modified, they will cease to exist. “

Evolution is “a process in which something passes by degrees to a different stage (especially a more advanced or mature stage);” it is a gradual process buffered by trial and error over enormous lengths of time. Failure is punished by extinction.

How can such a process ever be replicated by man’s reason? Despite all the ‘what ifs’ there will be failure. How does reason deal with the ones that ‘don’t’ turn out well? And will the mutants go without a fight?

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on September 05, 2006, 09:16 PM | #

The problem is Svyatoslav, is that the civilization of man occurred, not by conducting mental computation but as Darwin outlines, by advancing and perfecting through natural selection.

You’re constructing a false dichotomy; if by reason man advances and perfects through natural selection…

Evolution is “a process in which something passes by degrees to a different stage (especially a more advanced or mature stage);” it is a gradual process buffered by trial and error over enormous lengths of time. Failure is punished by extinction.

That’s circular - evolution must occur over enormous lengths of time because it has usually occurred over enormous lengths of time.  It’s also an anthropomorphization because evolution isn’t even aware, much less aware of time, much less a respecter of it.

How can such a process ever be replicated by man’s reason?

How can what is essentially a random process governed by a few simple rules ever be replicated by reason?  To ask is to answer.

Despite all the ‘what ifs’ there will be failure. How does reason deal with the ones that ‘don’t’ turn out well? And will the mutants go without a fight?

Sort of forgot my reason for posting this comment, which you’ve sequed to nicely: natural selection will always be in effect.  It’s an immutable law AFAICT -  people just get confused over fitness.

As far as keeping ourselves happy with the results, there’s a lot to be said.  A good start would be computer modeling where we simulate everything before actualizing it.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on September 05, 2006, 09:18 PM | #

Should’ve been more explicit: how is evolution via reason not evolution?

Organism evolves reason, uses reason to accelerate evolution; it seems very sensible to me.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on September 05, 2006, 09:19 PM | #

I mean isn’t that what reason largely is, in an evolutionary sense - a revision/error-checking mechanism?

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on September 05, 2006, 09:22 PM | #

largely

partly