[ExI] opinion

[William Flynn Wallace]

I agree with Ben - mostly.  Accidents causing brain damage, for one, are
not genetic.  I do think it makes sense to ask just what environments can
bring about what consequences, without the need of assigning relative power
to Nature or Nurture.  Apparently no environment can make up for an earlier
environment of being raised by wolves - which is assuming that the kid was
fairly normal to being with;; which is maybe a shaky assumption, since the
reason he was in the woods may have been that he was defective to begin
with.

And what about Huntingdon's chorea?  It is so strongly genetic that nothing
can change what it does to the carriers later in life- at least with
current medical knowledge.  Nearly pure Nature.

So it comes down to what you can change and what you can't, which is the
title of a great book I read decades ago.  In the future there will be
genetic manipulations that we can't do right now - lack of knowledge or
maybe ethical problems.

bill w

On Sat, Oct 27, 2018 at 4:12 PM Ben Zaiboc <ben at zaiboc.net> wrote:

>
> On 26/10/2018 23:12, extropy-chat-request at lists.extropy.org wrote:
>
> Subject:
> Re: [ExI] opinion
>
> From:
> SR Ballard <sen.otaku at gmail.com> <sen.otaku at gmail.com>
>
> Date:
> 26/10/2018 20:18
>
> To:
> ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
>
>
> I think it would take extreme environments to alter the power of genetics.
>
> bill w
>
>
> I’m not saying genetics have no power, I’m asking how much power they have
> in relation to environment. Is environment 10%? 25%? I sincerely doubt it
> would be near or above 50% actually.
>
>
>
> The whole 'nature vs nurture' concept is a red herring. Genetics and
> environment aren't two competing forces, they're so intricately tied up
> with one another that it's not even sensible to consider them as separate
> things. A 'gene' on its own is useless (in fact the word itself is of
> doubtful use). What we call 'Genetics' is already a complex interaction
> between environmental signals and sequences of base pairs. Look at the
> production of haemoglobin as a simple example. There's no such thing as
> 'The Gene For Haemoglobin' really. There's some information and some
> environmental influences, and a large set of interactions between the two
> that produce different types of haemoglobin for different purposes. One
> can't achieve anything without the other, so it makes no sense to say
> something like "how much power genes have in relation to environment". It's
> like arguing about whether petrol or pistons are more important in
> combustion engines, but a lot more complicated.
>
> --
> Ben Zaiboc
>
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