jlc

Yes, we will miss out on the random progress of evolution. But if you apply human ingenuity to creating better genetic arrays then we can go faster and produce more useful changes than random mutational events supply.

I figure there will be a three step process:
1. People will exclude detrimental genes: sickle cell; coagulopathies, breast cancer...
2. People will adopt existing positive traits, such as replacing sickle cell trait with Duffy negative. During this phase we may also reactivate some of the archaic genes that we still have but which have lost functionality - for example, we have the gene that allows us to regrow amputated limbs already in our genome...we just do not have the way to turn that gene on.
3. We will innovate genes, perhaps making a body that will not loose bone density in space. During this phase we may insert genes from other species (if we had the tendon attachment points of chimps, we would be a lot stronger without any additional muscles).

It will be an interesting future.

Jan

I am sooo glad you asked. I did not want to weigh down my prior email with additional info unless/until someone expressed interest.

Here is an excellent write-up on it:
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/ev...

Jan

Our leaf-eating ancestors probably thought that of their strange children who kept killing and eating animals. I think that whether or not we are evolving or devolving right now is moot: We will be able to control what genes our offspring have and most of the detrimental alleles will be discarded.

Jan

Dig in and comment. There are not a lot of places where you can express a firm opinion on grammar!

Jan

Yes there is an implication of finality in the simple past vs the present perfect. 'The buying of books' is an ongoing process and as much as I am enjoying When Writing Met Art I may indeed buy more of Denise Schmandt-Besserat's books in the future. (I also have some friends who I think would enjoy them.)

I am coming down with 'what is going around' and I stayed up later than I had intended last night reading WWMA. Fascinating info and illos - wallow, wallow.

Jan

There are many distinct populations - distinct culturally, linguistically and genetically: Basque, Sami, pygmy (to name just a few). What you are saying is essentially, "Because there are mongrels there cannot be purebred dogs." Because there is Mary's Igloo does not mean that there are not populations with distinct traits. We can call these populations 'races' if we wish.

Jan

I don't agree, but that is OK too.

Certainly labels have meaning, but there is usually content in a labeled set that is subject to more than one classification. Breaking the content out into a finer granularity can reveal information.

Jan

I was not able to find any more info on "number" being "name bearer" - I found "num" (to sort or count) as its PIE origin. Interesting about the loan of 'seven'...one wonders what the pre-Semitic PIE word for seven was...

I have bought When Writing Met Art. I am looking forward to reading it.

Jan

Logically, because some of the races are bogus does not mean that they all are.

Jan

Thank you for continuing to disagree with me on this point, and for providing the above links to your comments on Ridley's books/articles. (I will reread your commentary again later, when I can muse on it a bit more.) You have brought into focus a philosophical issue that I have been toying with in my own mind.

It is clear to me now that I do not put much weight in labels and that saying 'so-and-so' is a '[label]' is not meaningful to me. So I do not care if Ridley's ideas are offshoots of Hayek; all I care about is if Ridley is correct about a cascade of inventions resulting from a technological threshold. It does not even matter to me much if I 'like' the conclusion (I am emotionally fond of the heroic inventor). All that matters to me is if he accurately portrays an aspect of reality - and I think he does. I have looked up shared Nobel prizes and simultaneous inventions and I think that, while the heroic inventor exists, there is definitely a tech-threshold to take into account with respect to most inventions.

I am in favor of an inventor having ownership of his invention, but I am not in favor of that ownership being unilateral if it excludes someone who independently developed the same thing at about the same time. (This language is very vague, I realize - what is 'about the same time', for example.) This situation actually exists in countries other than the US.

Jan

There is evidence that the rate of the fixation of mutations in the human population (ie rate of genetic change) has markedly increased since the Neolithic. In a larger population, more favorable mutations will be available to out compete the marginal mutations and become a part of the population.

A good example of this is anti-malarial mutations, most of which are (a) old and (b) not too good (lots of bad side effects). Hemoglobin S (sickle cell) and C (thalasemia) work by the half-serving (if you are half Hgb S and half normal Hgb, you are in good shape). If you have all-normal Hgb, then you die of malaria; if you have all-HgbS then you die of anemia. Duffy negative people, on the other hand, have no genetic downside...they are just immune to malaria (except maybe P vivax). So the Hemoglobin variants are being selected for-and-against simultaneously, but the Duffy variant is just being selected 'for'. If you lived in a small village in Greece, and all you had genetically available was the HgbC, then that would be better than nothing, but if you live in a large city, your best genetic choice is Duffy.

I disagree with Wm on the matter of race, though. I think that there are races, but that the answer for many people is, "My race is 'blur'." There are still many races on Earth, and just because Barack Obama is mixed race does not mean that the typical Sami or pygmy is. What we lack is the intellectual integrity to separate genuine races from non-races.

Jan

I did not know that - good to note that apparently the base instinct in our human language module is 'personalized counting uniqueness' as opposed to 'abstract counting'.

I happened to be rereading a book last night on Proto-IndoEuropean linguistics and migrattions (and genetics - yum!) and the first few chapters used the PIE word for 'hundred' as an example of regressing a set of modern words to a proposed PIE root."k'mtom". As an aside, the book mentioned that PIE and its daughter languages all had words for 10, 100, 1000, etc, and so evidently used base 10 for counting.

I did not know Denise Schmandt-Besserat, but now have looked her up. Do you have When Writing Met Art? Would you recommend it?

Interesting conversation. Thank you.

Jan

I disagree: I find his articles like a breath of fresh reason in the appalling news and editorials of our day.

Jan

Very interesting posts (read both). I am not sure on the derivation of minos (need to look that up since my prior info on it leads in another direction, but it is not unlikely that one meaning is a spinoff of the other).

I appreciate your pointing out Stevinus to me.

I will add that the earliest measuring systems (Sumerian/Akkadian) had a different method of measuring each type of thing. I include this list (from Wikipedia) for your diversion:


Sexagesimal System S used to count slaves, animals, fish, wooden objects, stone objects, containers.
Sexagesimal System S' used to count dead animals, certain types of beer
Bi-Sexagesimal System B used to count cereal, bread, fish, milk products
Bi-Sexagesimal System B used to count rations
GAN2 System G used to count field measurement
ŠE system Š used to count barley by volume
ŠE system Š' used to count malt by volume
ŠE system Š" used to count wheat by volume
ŠE System Š used to count barley groats
EN System E used to count weight
U4 System U used to count calendrics
DUGb System Db used to count milk by volume
DUGc System Db used to count beer by volume

Jan

The mental metaphor I use is of one of those maps with cutout sections that expand, and then a cutout section of that expanding even further. Newtons Laws are not incorrect, but now they are a cutout-within-a-cutout in relation to quantum mechanics and relativity. They are still correct - but now our 'perceptions' (which, as you point out ewv) are really perceptions of measurements) have them in a broader context.

Jan

I was hoping that you would find some synergistic hooks in Ridley's work, since the idea that 'survival of the fittest' in biology is only a small subset of a broader physical principle of massive innovation and subsequent depletion, with just the most fit elements surviving, seemed to be something that would be consonant with what you are saying.

I was thinking about this a bit last night (one of those imaginary conversations) and realized that, in addition to genetics, my real world experience with business, with management within a business, and with my knowledge of how the immune system works all fits this model of 'many innovations' -> 'few surviving elements'.

I agree with your last statement, though I would probably phrase it in the opposite sequence.

Jan

All of what we know in science is based upon our ability to perceive the universe. Happily, our perceptions are not limited to those in the human sensory toolbox - as our scientific tools improve, we change our concept of the physical reality around us.

Jan

I could not follow your link, but I looked up Stevinus and found him interesting. Base-10 math is a lot older than Stevinus, though. The Egyptians used it (if you do not mind occasionally using pictures of toads for numbers) http://discoveringegypt.com/egyptian-.... What we think of as base 10 place-value system was used by Hindu mathematicians in about the 4th C AD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E.... The Bablyonians counted base-12 and many other lands retained some of their traditions, as we do with the degrees in a circle and hours of the day - both of which are base 12. That does not mean that we do not use a decimal system for other calculations, though.

Jan

Good article, db. I would like to contribute a few comments on some of your points, so that you may consider questions that could come up as part of a presentation.

1. Dobrien is correct about the Easter Island example, and since this has been in the news recently, this may no longer want to be the example you wish to use.
2. Much was made (when I was a child) about the 'man does not evolve because he changes his environment' assertion. To the best of my knowledge, this is incorrect. The small genetic scope of the current human population is entirely due to the bottleneck we went through about 20-40K years ago - humans are currently mutating at the same or higher rate than other species (higher because of population density - whole discussion in itself).
3. Matt Ridley is among those who feel that biological evolution is just a 'case' in the general 'evolution of things' and that a pattern of innovation-and-subsequent-reduction is the rule rather than the exception in the physical world. This is a fascinating idea which other bright people have developed and which is very worth mentioning. 'Natural selection' also takes place amongst inventions/innovations, for example.
4. Other species, such as beavers, also change their environment to increase the available niches for their species. This is not unique to humans; humans are just very good at it.
5. Agriculture and dairy products could both be argued to have 'escaped the Malthusian trap' because they significantly increase the number of humans per unit area - for a time. What really does the trick, though, is to decrease the death rate of children and babies. When this happens, the birth rate spontaneously dives and humans are no longer out-reproducing their environment. (Singapore has a below-replacement birth rate; they are offering tax incentives for couples to have two or more children because their birth rate is so low.) So theoretically our species could have lowered the birth rate at the Secondary Animal Products point and still been at a Neolithic level of development. It was because we did not have the medical knowledge (the tech is really pretty basic) to do so that kept the birth rate high and forced us to innovate.

I very much liked your points about the (non) volition of plants, the fixed/marginal cost of a brain, and the non-sustainability of sustainability. Very nicely done.

Thank you for presenting this article to us.

Jan

Yet a number of popular books have not followed that path: Quarter Share series, Liaden series, and The Martian. These were all published online and word spread as to how good they were.

Jan

The ancient Chinese succeeding in suppressing large ships on exploratory missions, the printing press, and gunpowder (except in fireworks). If they had not done this, we might be all speaking Chinese.

Suppression of important discoveries has long-reaching consequences. I like the idea of 'all the crackpots' being able to publish whatever they want because some small percent of them may have a breakthrough.

Jan

Yes. I had to have that explained to me - I did not know what 'white sauce' was.

Jan

Yes. I had to have that explained to me - I did not know what 'white sauce' was.

Jan

And they are careful to say, "Not one of those little brown Junebugs like y'all have out in California, I mean the big glossy blue Junebugs we have out here!"

Jan, hoping for rain that is like a cow...etc.

The additional comment that I would make to that excellent and insightful article is that many technologies have passed through a big business phase and are now in (or approaching) a disseminated phase.

It used to be that you could not publish a book unless you convinced a publisher to do so; then - as publishing got less expensive - people could pay to have their book published. Now, you can self-publish on the internet for free.

Power still primarily goes through big business electrical lines and sewage is piped miles to be processed, but solar power and self-processing house-sized systems are making high tech sufficiency more plausible.

3D printers are the next step. They will eventually allow the production of goods, clothes, and probably even some food locally. You will have to be supplied with the basic materials cartridges for the 3D printer, but you will be able to print a toaster...and you will never wear 'your favorite shirt' out, because you can just print up another copy of it.

Jan