[ExI] hard science

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 12:49 PM, William Flynn Wallace
<foozler83 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>
> There is no evolution anymore affecting humans, except perhaps in 3rd
> world countries.  We have taken over evolution and will bend it to our
> will, by uploading, eugenics and all the rest.
>

### To the contrary, evolution is  strongly affecting human gene
frequencies everywhere, maybe even especially in developed countries. Here,
evolutionary pressures have dramatically changed, multiple times in the
last 200 years. I would guess that the welfare state and feminism changed
the fitness landscape more than the development of dairy farming or the
invention of the atl-atl, and these did cause major selective sweeps back
at the dawn of history.

I am all for eugenics (intentional manipulation of the genepool) but for
now this is unfortunately only a minor contributing factor in our evolution.

-----------------


>
> I am interested in just what kinds of minds you are contemplating.  We
> have thousands of adjectives describing human behavior but only five have
> reliable heritability (plus IQ).  What would you add?
>


### I don't know. It's really complicated. If I could upload I would most
likely bind myself to serve others on condition of preserving my indexical
information (name, a personal history narrative) but I don't know if this
is going to be a good survival strategy. There may be a lot of selfish gain
in (almost) complete altruism but then maybe not. Evolution will tell.

A lot of what happens in the substrate will depend on the viability of
zero-knowledge proofs and similar cryptographic validation protocols, but
that's something for another thread.

Rafal
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