[FRIAM] semi-idle question

[Steve Smith]

I want to accede to something here, but I can't quite find what the "it"
is here to accede to.  

In the spirit of Cordwainer-Smith's "objects",   there is something
*like* humanity which is adapting (ok, call it evolving) rapidly,
especially if you extend  "phenotype" to include our co-evolved
relations (microbiome,  cohort of domesticated animals,  our persistent
social, cultural, political, economic and technological artifacts, etc.)
which I do not intend to quibble with.  

I don't think our eyesight is getting measureably worse because we
started wearing glasses a few hundred years ago.   I  do think that
higher and lower production of melanin is an evolved trait in isolated
populations of humans who lived closer/further from the equator, and
similarly for the genes for proteins that are implicated in insulin
production/sensitivity.   And I think that happened over hundreds of
generations.    Is this something you are disagreeing with?  It seems
more likely that you are disagreeing with the *import* or relevance of
these things?

Are you "just" criticizing the conventional way of talking about
genotype/phenotype evolution or are you coining/invoking something
useful to replace/supercede it?  


On 4/26/21 4:04 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> It's sentences like "outstrips the phenotype/genotype evolution" that confuse me. I can twist my mind into restricting *generators* to mean sub-strands of DNA and the machinery that manipulates it. And I can twist my mind into restricting "phenotype" to be those traits that *seem* to be more governed by DNA and development than not. But it's that twisting that, in my ignorance, seems flawed.
>
> If we can't even crisply identify the nongenetic contributors of something like type 1 diabetes, how are we supposed to believe that the *generators* are well- and/or completely- described by substrands of DNA?
>
> And if we can't estimate how *coherent* our generators are, then how can we assert that that stuff moves so much slower than the other stuff? We can't even clearly state what the other stuff is, much less that it moves faster or slower. E.g. if a "nongenetic" factor in diabetes 1 is exposure to viruses, then we have to figure in the (fast) evolution of viruses. Sure, they're "snapshotted" during gestation (even 9 months is a long time in viral evolution). And that human lives for half a century after that snapshot. But then their younger sibling may be exposed, during their gestation (say a year later) to a very different snapshot of evolved virii. 
>
> And that's not even the most rate-confounding case given microbiomes and such. I'm just really really curious what gives y'all such confidence that DNA evolution is so separate from higher (or lower) forms and why you think you understand the rate differences. Maybe I'm simply too ignorant to get it?
>
> On 4/26/21 2:25 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> I accept (embrace) that the larger human enterprise that includes our
>> myriad social/political/economic/technological systems is the element
>> that is "evolving" and that practices such as Engineering "evolve" in
>> that context.
>>
>> I believe that the rate of evolution in the social/political and NOW
>> technological aspects of 'being human' outstrips the phenotype/genotype
>> evolution by orders of magnitude...  many of the things that select
>> humans for "reproduction success" have been inverted (e.g. "Development
>> is the most effective contraceptive") from our pre-industrial selves.
>>
>> Trans/Post humanism is already in it's nascent phase if I understand
>> your binding of the term.   We may look back at our archives in 2030 and
>> laugh at how naive/arrogant we were here.