RE: The End Of Human Evolution - The Case For Digital DNA
I expect that in the long run, after we have made many mistakes, this will be useful. First we're going to base our assessment of how DNA and epigenetics works on our woefully incomplete information, and then apply it to some offspring, that will prolly die, horribly.
Hopefully we'll do this to puppies, or kittehs, first, rather than actual people.
Quite recently scientists claimed that DNA was the only means of passing down traits. Epigenetics has come along, now, and made liars of them. Not so long ago, scientists claimed that 90% of our DNA was 'junk' that coded for nothing. Many still maintain this is so.
I don't want such short-sighted and hubristic people mucking about in the genepool.
We've got a long way to go before we can claim 'War is Over' regarding evolution. We presently have no real understanding of what the mind even is, or how it is created. Plenty of theories, and claimants, many contradictory, and a great deal of our behaviour is heritable, so messing with DNA will mess with minds, and it is our minds that make us human, not our fingernails, or other body parts.
It'll be a while, but this will prove useful, once we are schooled about hubris a few dozen (more) times.
Hmm, depends how you classify "quite recently". . . I think perhaps you have heard of it quite recently. Darwin in his tome; "The Descent of Man" talks about sexual selection over natural selection; which arguably is the first mention of epigenetics some 200 years ago.
Then around the 1940s studies into epigenetics continued once we had a bigger understanding of DNA.
As far as junk DNA is concerned they are talking specifically about DNA that is non-protein coding, or DNA that leads to RNA molecules that again are non-protein coding.
The process for working out DNA is phenomenally complex and requires vast amounts of computing power, so we will continue to make massive strides in those areas as our tech gets better.
Just because we don't know, or aren't sure of something now, does not mean that will always be the case. At one point we didn't know how to make flying machines, yet around 2 million years into human history, we did it, and now we have computers to help us.
Not so; you should read some books by VS Ramachnadran, in particular; "The Tell Tale Brain."
It's the whole kit and caboodle, if you were to do a genetic analysis of a chimp's fingernail and a human's, you would be able to tell the difference instantly.
Ultimately I'm a little more optimistic than yourself, but let's see what happens after about 2022 . . .
Cg
The problem isn't that we don't know, or that we think we may know, but that we are sure we know, when we don't. Science is essentially a history of wrong ideas, that were later disproved, and all too often hubris has produced misfortune intolerable suffering.
I do not disparage science even a mite. Rather the failure to consider our humble lack of capacity to understand, and to proceed with ill considered and devastating policies as a result of our foolish hubris.
There remain realms unconceived of by man that moderate every process we reckon we have thoroughly understood, and the perennial discovery of harm we do our posterity, and the examples of such harm span every industry, social program, and science, demonstrates amply how dangerous hubris is.
The very expectation that we might presently grasp the intricacies of what our minds are and how they operate may well be the penultimate example we could consider, as the implementation of social control programs by folks that reckon they know how it all works and intend to 'fix' society could well be the very end of humanity.
The words of Plato should be carved into the flesh of every demogogue and scientist: "I know one thing, that I know nothing.", so that the proud flesh might remind them of their own fallibility, and the awful human costs that have resulted from hubris throughout history.