Josh Hill  wrote:
> Doug Freyburger  wrote:
> > Josh Hill  wrote:
>
> >> I agree that bioengineering is likely to swamp Darwinian processes.
>
> >Uhm, that's not how the words work. =A0If bioengineering changes
> >the demographics of the populations of future generations then
> >bioengineering IS a Darwinian process. =A0But your point is noted -
>
> Not quite sure why you say that.
>
> Main Entry: Dar=B7win=B7i=B7an =A0
> Pronunciation: \d=E4r-'wi-ne-?n\
> Function: adjective
> Date: 1860
> 1 : of or relating to Charles Darwin, his theories especially of
> evolution, or his followers
> 2 : of, relating to, or being a competitive environment or situation
> in which only the fittest persons or organizations prosper
>
> I was using Sense 2.

Thing is evolution isn't about a single organism living or
dying no matter how successfull while alive.  It's about
genetic change generation to generation.  Have no
offspring and you weren't fit as far as evolutional counts.

In that sense genetic engineering can be viewed as the
ultimate in Darwinian evolution - We get to not only decide
if a child is born based on genetic tests but we get to
influence traits in the next generation.  It stops being about
the success of the individual in any social sense which it
never meant and gets even more explicitly about generation
to generation.

If some person is cruel whatever and has 6 children that
person is fit in the Darwinian meaning.  If another person
is a billionaire and Nobel lauretate without children that
person is unfit in the Darwinian meaning.  Now add in
genetic engineering available to more and more of the
population eventually to virtually everyone.  Say goodbye
to every listed problem gene - Thus lowering genetic
diversity.  Say hello to an unknown number of new traits -
Thus increasing genetic diversity.  Evolutionary fitness
becomes a matter of choice and humans habe always
wanted their children to be better.  A genetic engineering
that wipes out genes declared problematic and that
introduces genes that are new is far more Darwinian in
it's own meaning of fitness than using "natural" selection
to randomly kill people before they have kids and randomly
let certain people have more kids.

> We haven't for example used formal selective breeding
> programs since the fall of Nazi Germany, as opposed to the selective
> breeding that men and women engage in all the time, without quite
> knowing what they're doing.

It will get VERY interesting when people get to pick certain
designer options in their offspring.  The subconscious
desires that now drive pair mating will be overridden by
conscious decisions (with subtle subconscious motivations).

> >Remember how evolution is defined - Genetic change from
> >generation to generation. =A0Anyone who has studied biology
> >has known from the gate that evolution has coninued all
> >along. =A0It's not the scientists who are starting to come
> >around to that view; they've known all along. =A0It's the general
> >population that's gradually coming to realize that humanity is
> >a work in progess not an end product
>
> Perhaps my lack of knowledge is keeping me from properly identifying
> the trend to which I'm trying to refer. I know for example that
> there's been a certain amount of tension between those who emphasize
> gradualism and those who emphasize punctuated equilibrium.

And like so many answers in science like nature versus
nuture the answer is ending up at a place with both.

> But the
> general idea to which I'm referring here wasn't that human evolution
> had ceased entirely, but that it hadn't been significant in recent
> years, e.g. since events like the introduction of agriculture.

Evolution works on a time scale closer to 5 million years
than 5 generations.  Thus 20,000 years or less of evolution
can't be called significant.  In 20,000 years humans can not
have gone from hunter-gatherers eating widely varied foods
to grain eaters.  This has implications like understanding
why the USDA food pyramid that suggests a diet based
on mostly grain has to be nonsense.

> How
> that would have coexisted with known shifts like the development of
> adult lactose tolerance in cultures that domesticated cattle or strong
> selection pressure like epidemics I don't know.

It points to what "significiant" has to mean.  No speciation
just diversity.  And since overly uniform species are
specialists who go extinct when their niche vanishes, I
want humans to be generalists.  As such this diversity is
good to me.

Moving into SF it would involve specific adaptations - zero
gravity, various gravities on assorted planets, who knows
what else.

> >History says any period of exponential expansion of
> >anything eventually tapers off. =A0We're now seeing that in
> >transoprtation. =A0We got to the moon in the 1960s and have
> >not been back since ...
>
> FWIW, while I agree that exponential expansion doesn't last, I'm not
> sure that manned spaceflight ever qualified.

Nope.  It was just at the roll-over point.  Start with making
ships that has sails as an improvement over kayaks or
canoes or rafts.  So we have an inflection point that starts
an exponential phase that started several millenia ago.
Have gradual improvement like Roman road systems
then get to a point where railroads and steam ships can
make changes that are visible within a single human
lifetime.  This peaks with aircraft putting nearly the entire
planet within the travel of most individuals in a week and
all individuals within a couple of years.  Going to the Moon
was a bit of noise in that general trend.

But once travel became easy enough that a person can
travel the world, the rest of the gain is what percentage
of the population can travel the world how fast.  And so
the exponential growth phase saw another inflection
point and the roll-off towards a new plateau began.

> Manned exploration was
> after all driven mostly by a competitive paradigm that's no longer
> operative. Perhaps when the Chinese economy grows sufficiently, we'll
> once again feel the need to compete. But for manned flight to expand
> exponentially, I suspect we'll need a new economic incentive, the
> equivalent of the gold that paid for Spain's New World empire.

I don't know about the details of the need.  Space travel is
gradually exitting the rare government effort like Spain
funding an expedition across the Atlantic to see if they
come back and entering the growing market.  Some
exponential growth is going to happen in the next few
centuries.  Or maybe it's already started and the curve is
still far more noise than signal.

> Right now, we seem to be caught in a chicken/egg situation, in which
> the economies of scale that would make orbital and interplanetary
> spaceflight economical can't be achieved because spaceflight is too
> expensive to use for anything but satellites, the occasional research
> project, and breast beating contests with rival nation states. Perhaps
> space tourism will fill that gap. Once the chicken and egg gap was
> overcome and profit could be made, I'd expect to see the exponential
> expansion to which you refer, and perhaps the beginning of other space
> activities that are currently too expensive, like Helium 3 mining or
> power satellites.

And that expansion will follow another S curve that looks
exponential up for a while, then asymptotic approach to a
final level for a while.

> I suspect too that we'll eventually see another generation of land
> transport using hypersonic vehicles. Unfortunately, while there are
> lots of interesting designs on the drawing board, they're currently
> beyond our technological ability.

The nature of the S curve of progress.  Progress continues
slowly after the inflection point.

> >> Immortality would
> >> effectively end human evolution, unless we found a way to evolve
> >> without dying. Interesting premise for science fiction, isn't that . .
>
> >Except it doesn't effect the change rate of new generations
> >just the pressure to go somewhere else. =A0Heinlein scratched
> >the surface of that trend without doing much about humans
> >changing.
>
> I've made an unstated assumption here that immortality would lead to
> the cessation of childbirth.

Almost all SF stories do so to avoid handling that problem.

> But you're right, that may not be the
> case, hell, given our usual lack of wisdom, I wouldn't be surprised if
> it wasn't. OTOH, it could be just the sort of pressure we need to
> begin the conquest of space . . .

Larry Niven's Tales of Known Space.
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