From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Jul 24 2003 - 06:49:33 MDT
On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Robin Hanson commenting on comments
by Emlyn and Damien (the thread of which has gotten rather
complex) wrote:
> The aberration is temporary because DNA will soon be replaced by other
> faster-changing forms of genes, including those you mention.
Just to offer some related observations...
- People would be very lucky to have 20 kids -- most humans throughout
evolutionary history died long before they could have raised that number.
- Given the huge amount of junk DNA in mammalian genomes (and the
success of mammals over the last 60+ million years) and the fact
that the junk is mostly remnants of self-relocating genetic
elements that would happen to carry other genes along with
them (speeding up evolution) it would appear that there may be some
selective advantage for faster evolution. We can't say for sure about
this since we don't have the genomes of say birds, reptiles or amphibians
(which have been around longer than mammals and have similar complexity).
- *But* given the Fugu genome which is very old and relatively
small compared with mammals (it is a vertebrate so the complexity
should not be "too" different) it would appear evolution can
develop a means to interfere with the elements that would
naturally tend speed up evolution (how this is accomplished isn't
known at this time).
- There has been proposed some interesting secondary effects in
evolution involved in nurturing (or promoting the survival of)
offspring [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/07/030717091254.htm].
Similar effects may be promoting the development of "ethical
behaviors".
- Language (memes) seems to have played a role in speeding up
human evolution over the last 100,000+ years. But one might
wonder whether memes and genes are not competing to see which
can drive evolution faster without completely driving the
carriers towards elimination.
- At the simple chemical level DNA is not a terribly bad information
storage mechanism (compared with say a Drexlerian polymer tape,
e.g. Nanosystems sec. 12.6.4). But I suspect that there may be
some interesting limits on the equipment that allows an ever
faster changing of genes/memes. So the process seems unlikely
to continue indefinitely.
Robert
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