[ExI] Purified humanity Re: Your Genome Is a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2013-10-08 05:33, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>> Removing redundancy to make mutations directly lethal might not be optimal
>> for all genes. A lot of mutations seem to just reduce performance, so you
>> increase the risk of being born with reduced performance genes. After all,
>> being heterozygous for sickle-cell anemia is not lethal, yet pretty
>> annoying.
> ### Aren't heterozygotes almost always asymptomatic, aside from being
> immune to malaria?

Whoops, I intended to write homozygote.


> This said, I agree that changing the levels of redundancy would not be
> a simple project - since we evolved with redundancy, it's woven deep
> into our control logic, and untangling this association would be a
> very complex undertaking, probably much more difficult than a "simple"
> sweep to remove pseudogenes, and correct mutated ones.

I wonder how many of the pseudogenes have accidental regulatory function 
by now? One of the annoyances with a very redundant and messy system is 
that it likely quickly adapts to shifts in the messy contents, but 
shifts in overall level of messiness may have qualitative effects. Would 
be interesting to study.

-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University