From: Tim Freeman (tim@fungible.com)
Date: Sun Aug 05 2007 - 17:01:23 MDT
Hi. I'm new here.
Somebody quoted Tom McCabe as saying:
> > Evolution has not had any significant influence on human
> > species for the past thousand years due to time limits and
> > the recent lack of selection pressure see
> > http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/jcollie/sle/.
I think we still have selection pressure, but the most important part
of the environment for humans is other humans. Thus sexual selection
remains, as does the tendency of some to survive genocide attempts
better than others. (What do you call the latter? It's not natural
selection and it's not sexual selection.)
Not that it matters much. Editing genomes is almost possible now, and
it's pretty clear that it will be easy before there's enough time for
much more natural evolution to happen. And if a powerful AI is
created, that radical change will make minor genetic differences
between humans seem unimportant. So why are we talking about human
evolution?
I agree with the cited URL that the rate of information change driven
by evolution is slow. However, I don't know whether there are
radically different ways of being that differ from the status quo by
only a few bits, so I don't know how to draw useful inferences from
the speed limit on evolution.
-- Tim Freeman http://www.fungible.com tim@fungible.com
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