[FRIAM] semi-idle question

[uǝlƃ ↙↙↙]

Let me say it another way.

I think gene guns are an evolutionary operator like sexual crossover. But that doesn't quite get at what I'm saying either, because it still targets DNA. So I'll also say that the marketing campaign by cereal companies to get us to eat breakfast every day is *also* an evolutionary operator. An older example would be the slow modification of bananas so that I can slice up a banana on top of my cereal and it'll be genetically (roughly) the same banana you slice up on your cereal. We can make a more interesting case with lactose [in]tolerance. The engineering of our food is an evolutionary operator.

Sure, the speed of the gene gun is faster than the domestication of bananas. But they're of the same category. What I'm disagreeing with is the *categories* that allow us to say "humans won't evolve anymore" and think we're making any sense. Cultural evolution *is* human evolution. The only difference is the collection of evolutionary *operators* in play.


On 4/26/21 3:27 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> 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?  

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