[ExI] Evolution

[William Flynn Wallace]

Completely innocent and ignorant question:  how far are we from examining a
gene and predicting what it will do?  If we could do that, we could design
genes, splice them in and do our own evolution, eh?  bill w

On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 5:04 PM Ben via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On 22/05/2020 13:34, Stuart LaForge wrote:
> >   the error rate that you and John complain about is an essential part
> of evolution. If DNA replication was 100% accurate then none of us would be
> here. Life would never have progressed beyond the RNA world or whatever the
> prototypical life scenario was. The ability to modulate the error rate and
> fine tune it over time and space is a feature of DNA-based wetware, and not
> a bug. Perfect fidelity is unnatural and changing environmental conditions
> will inevitably render any "perfect" organism extinct.
>
> This is perfectly true, and of course I'm not arguing otherwise.
> What I am saying is that regarding evolution as a perfect system is
> silly and that there are other, better ways of doing things. Evolution,
> biology and nature in general has done a marvellous but limited job so
> far, and now (or soon) it's time for something better. My analogy of
> evolution as an abusive parent stands. Without it, we wouldn't be here,
> but we need to get away from it asap.
>
> --
> Ben Zaiboc
>
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