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January 1, 2009

Good for you need not be good for your genes

As we regrow or engineer more body parts we will likely significantly increase average life span and run into a third track of speciation. Those with access to Google already have an extraordinary evolutionary advantage over the digitally illiterate. Next decade we will be able to store everything we see, read, and hear in our lifetime. The question is can we re-upload and upgrade this data as the basic storage organ deteriorates? And can we enhance this organ's cognitive capacity internally and externally? MIT has already brought together many of those interested in cognition — neuroscientists, surgeons, radiologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, computer scientists — to begin to understand this black box. But rebooting other body parts will likely be easier than rebooting the brain, so this will likely be the slowest track but, over the long term, the one with the greatest speciation impact.

Google probably is not an extraordinary evolutionary advantage. Yes, it may increase the likelihood of your survival by increasing the know-how of doctors and perhaps your knowledge of a healthy lifestyle. But survival is the less important part of evolutionary advantage. The more important part is that evolutionary success follows directly from increased reproductive success, and only indirectly from lengthening the creature's survival. That's it came to be that some male spiders get eaten as part of the mating process and why women go through menopause. As part of a broader trend of making us a part of cosmopolitan liberalism society with weakened religious, national, tribal, and ethic ties, Google and other parts of internet integration probably makes us less fertile.

Now by creating a collaborative social and scientific environment, the internet may help us prevent nuclear war and solve global survival threats like an asteroid or climate change. But in many of those situations those survival benefits accrue to everyone, not just the internet connections.

I can never seem to find this story when I need it, but the following story is helpful. Someone once said, if millions of years ago the apes got together to design the future of their evolution, what would they have designed? They would have given their descendants sharper claws, thicker hides, stronger muscles, rougher palms to climb in jungles, and perhaps made them bigger. What are the odds they'd have made a weak, hairless, claw-less ape designed for running on the savannas and with a big brain for social coordination? Sexual reproduction is a successful genetic survival strategy because it creates diversification, not specialization. Kurt Vonnegut's great book Galapagos is a meditation on how evolution can take us in a direction that has nothing to do with what we want or imagine our future to hold.

Google is great, but it likely won't matter to human survival. If you want to maximize the likelihood that your genetic legacy is carried into the future, marry a wife who will bear you a lot of children, and bring them up in a religious environment that will encourage them to do likewise. You should probably also give to sperm banks. And settle your decedents in a variety of different cultural and geographic settings. That will carry your genes far and wide, giving you what you want.

Posted by OneEyedMan at January 1, 2009 10:33 AM

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