I want to accede to something here, but I can't quite find what the "it" is here to accede to.
In the spirit of Cordwainer-Smith's "objects", there is something *like* humanity which is adapting (ok, call it evolving) rapidly, especially if you extend "phenotype" to include our co-evolved relations (microbiome, cohort of domesticated animals, our persistent social, cultural, political, economic and technological artifacts, etc.) which I do not intend to quibble with. I don't think our eyesight is getting measureably worse because we started wearing glasses a few hundred years ago. I do think that higher and lower production of melanin is an evolved trait in isolated populations of humans who lived closer/further from the equator, and similarly for the genes for proteins that are implicated in insulin production/sensitivity. And I think that happened over hundreds of generations. Is this something you are disagreeing with? It seems more likely that you are disagreeing with the *import* or relevance of these things? Are you "just" criticizing the conventional way of talking about genotype/phenotype evolution or are you coining/invoking something useful to replace/supercede it? On 4/26/21 4:04 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote: > It's sentences like "outstrips the phenotype/genotype evolution" that confuse > me. I can twist my mind into restricting *generators* to mean sub-strands of > DNA and the machinery that manipulates it. And I can twist my mind into > restricting "phenotype" to be those traits that *seem* to be more governed by > DNA and development than not. But it's that twisting that, in my ignorance, > seems flawed. > > If we can't even crisply identify the nongenetic contributors of something > like type 1 diabetes, how are we supposed to believe that the *generators* > are well- and/or completely- described by substrands of DNA? > > And if we can't estimate how *coherent* our generators are, then how can we > assert that that stuff moves so much slower than the other stuff? We can't > even clearly state what the other stuff is, much less that it moves faster or > slower. E.g. if a "nongenetic" factor in diabetes 1 is exposure to viruses, > then we have to figure in the (fast) evolution of viruses. Sure, they're > "snapshotted" during gestation (even 9 months is a long time in viral > evolution). And that human lives for half a century after that snapshot. But > then their younger sibling may be exposed, during their gestation (say a year > later) to a very different snapshot of evolved virii. > > And that's not even the most rate-confounding case given microbiomes and > such. I'm just really really curious what gives y'all such confidence that > DNA evolution is so separate from higher (or lower) forms and why you think > you understand the rate differences. Maybe I'm simply too ignorant to get it? > > On 4/26/21 2:25 PM, Steve Smith wrote: >> I accept (embrace) that the larger human enterprise that includes our >> myriad social/political/economic/technological systems is the element >> that is "evolving" and that practices such as Engineering "evolve" in >> that context. >> >> I believe that the rate of evolution in the social/political and NOW >> technological aspects of 'being human' outstrips the phenotype/genotype >> evolution by orders of magnitude... many of the things that select >> humans for "reproduction success" have been inverted (e.g. "Development >> is the most effective contraceptive") from our pre-industrial selves. >> >> Trans/Post humanism is already in it's nascent phase if I understand >> your binding of the term. We may look back at our archives in 2030 and >> laugh at how naive/arrogant we were here. - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
