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 Please stop the slapfighting. Obviously the two of you disagree, try to do it without calling each other assholes.
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Nov 30, 2020 23:02
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I don't think you are using this word correctly. I think the word you're looking for is "reason", not rationalism. Correct: I am generally opposed to the idea of scientific "truth". I do not believe Marxism is a science. I am a fan of Kuhn. But yes, one of the specific critiques about Marx is that his thinking of a typical 1800s worldview in some of its assumptions about rationalism, objective truth, and progress.
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Nov 30, 2020 23:05
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Disnesquick posted:What a moronic way to write a post. If you want people to actually take you seriously then drop this aggressive line of phrasing things. You come across as an angry little child. Don't whine about tone, especially when the post is fairly innocuous. Report it if you have a problem.
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Nov 30, 2020 23:05
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Aruan posted:Correct: I am generally opposed to the idea of scientific "truth". I do not believe Marxism is a science. I am a fan of Kuhn. "Is Marxism a science" is a fascinating question, and one I was hoping to tackle in a later post. I'll try to work my way through an even handed analysis sometime soon.
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Nov 30, 2020 23:09
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Cpt_Obvious posted:"Is Marxism a science" is a fascinating question, and one I was hoping to tackle in a later post. I'll try to work my way through an even handed analysis sometime soon. I don't know of any contemporary scholar who believes that Marxism is a science.
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Nov 30, 2020 23:11
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Aruan posted:I don't know of any contemporary scholar who believes that Marxism is a science. Could that be because contemporary scholars have subjective views funded by capital authorities?
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Nov 30, 2020 23:12
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Aruan posted:I don't know of any contemporary scholar who believes that Marxism is a science. Many contemporary non english speaking scholars in regions where the definition of science didn't go through that 1900 shift believe that Marxisms is a science.
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Nov 30, 2020 23:17
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https://twitter.com/ArborErich/status/1333269591246692354
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Nov 30, 2020 23:47
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Could that be because contemporary scholars have subjective views funded by capital authorities? Not everyone who disagrees with you is a tool of capitalism - or, to put it another way, considering all of us live (and benefit from) a capitalist society, we're equally biased.
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Nov 30, 2020 23:58
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Aruan posted:Not everyone who disagrees with you is a tool of capitalism - or, to put it another way, considering all of us live (and benefit from) a capitalist society, we're equally biased. Yes, we are all biased towards capitalism. Bias isn't a binary metric.
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Dec 1, 2020 00:10
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Ok Comboomer posted:I literally work in evolutionary biology you petulant clownbaby. If we're playing credentialism then let me know when you've published at Nature/Science level in EvoBio because that's what I've got under my own belt in the field. The rest of your post just seems to be nonsense, really. I'm using the immune system as an example of a system that expects a certain level of activity and appears to malfunction when it is operated outside of its standard boundaries. Where's the anthromorphizing in that? You're just adding these absurd extrapolations where they don't exist. Turns out when you put animals in an environment that is too small or barren, they also don't cope well. This isn't any more than it is but we can draw some conclusions about biological systems not functioning well when placed into a context that provides stimulation below the levels that the system has adapted to expect. This same effect can be seen in a much simpler system within the context of epistasis: A mutation appears, providing a benefit to e.g. an antibiotic. However the mutation nerfs fitness elsewhere. A second mutation then appears which "fixes" the first mutation but fitness is still lower overall than to begin with, in the absence of the environmental factor. Both mutations are, by themselves, negative but the interaction term is positive in terms of RC. Even when the drug is not present, the mutations are fairly fixed because both now need to be removed to reset to normal and a double mutation is a far less probable event. Summary: Fitness landscapes are shaped by external factors and dependencies come about both between loci and environment and between loci themselves. How does this tie into stimulation of immune systems and central nervous systems? Eons of evolution have resulted in systems that are primed to a non-zero baseline. As humans construct artificial environments, these systems do actually encounter zero, or near zero, environmental contexts and,it turns out, the function of fitness (in whatever metric you want to measure that) against the strength of these factors is non-monotonic. Drop too far below the baseline and fitness drops too. You are reading far, far too much into a throwaway remark, to the point of constructing a grand narrative of your own. Spinning "humans need conflict and that should be against external factors and not ourselves" into whatever it is you've constructed here is extremely silly. You've extrapolated that way beyond anything the original comment was even close to and talking about "fetishizing" anything or "boot-camp mentalities" is entirely from your own mind. It's bizarre. Finally, on the subject of anthropomorphizing, since the idea of drawing analogy to the human experience seems to be the problem here: This is done all the time in the field. We will talk about "expectations" and "this virus wants to get into the pulmonary system" but everybody understands what is meant here. There is a host/parasite co-evolutionary dynamic called the "Red Queen Hypothesis" that respected greats like Nowak and Bonhoeffer will often reference. They aren't literally talking about Alice Through the Looking Glass. It's just a metaphor.
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Dec 1, 2020 00:40
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Disnesquick, I'm kind of at a loss about what you are trying to argue, because it sure read to me like biological essentialism in the defense of a fascist ideal. If your immune system example is merely a metaphor then where are you drawing the idea that human culture requires conflict to thrive, in the same way the immune system does?
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Dec 1, 2020 00:58
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fool of sound posted:Disnesquick, I'm kind of at a loss about what you are trying to argue, because it sure read to me like biological essentialism in the defense of a fascist ideal. If your immune system example is merely a metaphor then where are you drawing the idea that human culture requires conflict to thrive, in the same way the immune system does? That's not the argument I've tried to convey though. Let me try and take a different angle. Firstly I am taking a very broad angle on "conflict" than something which might mean "armed struggle". We talk about "internal conflict" or "spiritual/mental conflict" all the time: The essence of the word here is to convey a sense of being at variance with something. I do think this is an essential part of the human condition: If we are not improving ourselves (either in a social or individual context although I'm more referring to the former) then we are in a state of decay. Fascists think that this conflict must be between different groups of people, usually in the form of actual violent action. Whilst I think that we need something to strive for, to be in motion to be fully immersed in the joy of existence, I don't think that needs to be a conflict against our comrades (although games can be fun) but can be much more of a spiritual struggle against the fundamentally stark nature of the universe. I draw the analogy with the immune system because it reasonably (albeit not fully) accepted that it can't function well when there is nothing to respond to at all. It causes problems in fact. My own observation of the human condition is that we need something to move towards to be truly happy. Whilst an organism could exist that could be happy with stasis, I don't think that's us. It seems to be a rule that empires collapse into decay pretty soon after reaching a state of dominance. If we ever did achieve communism then I think we'd need to find external struggles to prevent that. A quasi-divine mission to bring green to our galaxy seems, to me, the kind of thing that could keep a post-scarcity society invigorated. Edit: Specifically on the subject of biological essentialism. I think this would be a reasonably fair statement if you consider a human society to be a biological system (I do, actually) but that argument normally concerns instinct in an individual context and I think there's something else at play here, because the dynamic in whether a society is growing or stagnating is more of an immergent property of instinct, culture, rational thought etc. than just instinct itself. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Dec 1, 2020 |
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Dec 1, 2020 01:23
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Disnesquick posted:That's not the argument I've tried to convey though. Let me try and take a different angle. Firstly I am taking a very broad angle on "conflict" than something which might mean "armed struggle". We talk about "internal conflict" or "spiritual/mental conflict" all the time: The essence of the word here is to convey a sense of being at variance with something. I do think this is an essential part of the human condition: If we are not improving ourselves (either in a social or individual context although I'm more referring to the former) then we are in a state of decay. Fascists think that this conflict must be between different groups of people, usually in the form of actual violent action. Whilst I think that we need something to strive for, to be in motion to be fully immersed in the joy of existence, I don't think that needs to be a conflict against our comrades (although games can be fun) but can be much more of a spiritual struggle against the fundamentally stark nature of the universe. FWIW this is how I understood your original post, and I started drafting a few replies to say as much but kept deleting them bc I was getting tripped up. I can understand the hesitation to under any circumstances "gotta hand it to em" to fascists, which is where I think the pushback against your post largely comes from, but I think it is important to understand the allure of the fascist framing of conflict in order to combat it for the green-galaxy utopia movement. I do worry that it's "easier" to sell people on reactionary conflict than a more positive, "progressive" (for lack of a better term) type of conflict. Therein lies the rub!
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Dec 1, 2020 01:42
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:FWIW this is how I understood your original post, and I started drafting a few replies to say as much but kept deleting them bc I was getting tripped up. I think you've captured the essence of what I was trying to convey here (and why I actually referenced fascism). You haven't "gotta hand it to fascists" but you do, absolutely, have to recognise that fascism offers a dynamic vision that's appealing, particularly in a society in decline. Socialists will be often be competing for the same hearts and minds as they are.
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Dec 1, 2020 02:02
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Look at it this way. We are all of us entrenched in Class Struggle. At all times, and in all places, we are in conflict with our bosses. By day, we toil our lives away for their fattening. At night, we rest so that tomorrow we do the same again. Meanwhile, they ship our jobs overseas, and the replace us with automated workers. And what do we get in return? They cut our wages and kill our benefits. And they laugh, and grow fatter. We are in conflict with our bosses, and our food, our housing, our welfare is reliant on enriching our enemy. Our entire world is framed in competition, class against class, business against business, group against group. And what is fascism if not the creation of a new socially constructed group? But is it "natural" for us to view everything as conflict? Or has our society impressed upon us that conflict is the only relation we have with each other? Does the "natural" state of conflict merely justify our bosses getting wealthier? For our conflicted society pervades our entire lives. Our society biases the way we interpret data. Even if that data is gathered scientifically, it is interpreted by social creatures. Therefore, our interpretations are colored by the social conflict in which we are engaged: Class Struggle. Look at our Darwinian paradigm; strange, isn't it, that our evolutionary competition is framed as a competition among creatures; certainly there is an aspect of that. We can see the fox as in conflict with the sheep, or we can look at the fox requiring the sheep for survival. Just as the sheep requires the grass. And so on. And those needs create conflicts, certainly. However, we tend to ignore how we also cooperate with other species. In each of our cells is housed a mitochondria. They do not have human DNA, they have their own. And no human can live without our mitochondria. So it seems that if the human race were to be defined as "conflicted" that would ignore the cooperative social relationship with other species, and we never really talk about those. We don't talk about our cooperative relationship with plants that we harvest for resources. Could our relationship with sheep and cattle be viewed as conflict? Certainly. But what of dogs? Cats? We can tell ourselves that the only thing we get from them is "labor". We could claim that we took care of them because they were good work animals and exterminators. But I'm not gonna lie: My dog don't do poo poo. She just lays there and is adorable. She is a companion to me. Because companionship can cross the biological boundary of species. We are in a cooperative relationship with our furry friends, not conflict. And I refuse to believe that my natural state is ONLY conflict when I can be friends with a creature that licks its own rear end. Because cooperation is a far more vital element of our lives. We don't talk about how we spend every waking moment of our life cooperating together in a society. How we are naturally capable of cooperative survival. We exist in a society in which we work together, we go to school together, we make families together, we love one another. We pretend those moments are anomalous and that is conflict is our natural state, when really we cooperate always with everyone, and we are only in conflict with our bosses and the oppressive powers they control. Because the reality is that our conflict was rarely with each other, but mostly with our environment. We struggled most commonly not in wars, but with exposure, famine, and illness. And we have nearly conquered those. Just look at Covid. It is not the disease which is so dangerous. Vietnam and Korea have weathered it earlier and more effectively. The disease is loving us not because we lack the scientific breakthroughs to defeat it. It has been defeated in foreign countries without vaccines. The reason we suffer is because our bosses refuse to share the resources that we, the workers, have extracted, refined, manufactured, and transported. Our bosses stay home and get richer, while we go to work and get sicker. It's not the virus killing us, it's the assholes in charge. We are in conflict with the capitalist, because capitalism is our newest environment! It pervades every part of our lives. Capitalism feeds us, houses us, keeps us in good health...or does it? Does capitalism keep us fed and housed and healthy? Or, do we feed and house and empower capitalism? Does our bank and landlord house us? Or do we pay him to live in a house built by a worker? Do the shareholders of Tyson foods feed us? Or do the farmers grow the food, the workers process the food, and we deliver the food? Does the Sackler family keep us healthy? Or do they prosper from our illness while the healthcare professionals suffer? Why does the fact that wealthy people own money mean that they are entitled to more of it? Because they take it from us. Because they can. Because within the capitalist environment, they are the predators and we are the prey. Or at least, that is what they would have you believe. And let me make a theoretical appeal to Liberals/rationalists. Consider this: Assume that we are, indeed, creatures driven by Darwinian logic. That we strive only for survival at all times. What happens when we develop to a point that conflict is impossible? What happens when we develop weapons capable of absolute destruction? How can we still have wars when nuclear war will kill us all? We must change to a cooperative system by necessity. We have no choice. We are watching what happens to the environment, to our health, to our most vulnerable populations, in a world of conflict. At this point, we change or we die. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Dec 1, 2020 |
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Dec 1, 2020 06:13
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BTW, I know I probably stole a few of those ideas from theorists and some people around this very website, so for that I apologize that my rant was not annotated. So, just to be clear, many of those ideas are not my own. I just forget where I picked them up.
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Dec 1, 2020 06:14
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Disnesquick posted:I think you've captured the essence of what I was trying to convey here (and why I actually referenced fascism). You haven't "gotta hand it to fascists" but you do, absolutely, have to recognise that fascism offers a dynamic vision that's appealing, particularly in a society in decline. Socialists will be often be competing for the same hearts and minds as they are. Ok yeah, I see what you're going for in light of this, and that's a valid point.
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Dec 1, 2020 06:22
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Eukaryotic life exists because of the aforementioned mitochondrial endosymbiosis and AFAIK all macro-organismic life owes the function of its digestive processes to endosymbiotic microorganisms. We would not exist as humans without our gut microflora, full-stop. Most of our eukaryote ancestor species (at least the ones with GI tracts) wouldn’t have existed without theirs. And for all that we eat our livestock and exploit them and often seriously mistreat and abuse them, from a reproductive and very loose quality of life standpoint, domestication can be pretty great population-wide, if not at the individual level By which I mean that an individual steer or heifer won’t get to spread their genes, but the numbers of cattle we produce and protect to slaughtering or breeding age is immense and they are provided with food, shelter, water, defense from predators and parasites, and some degree of medical care. And the way in which we tend to select for traits and create breeding lines means that the millions of cattle produced every year, or the acres of crops planted, come from very limited lineages. An entire field of corn representing a single monoculture. As one of my old professors once said, all the beef cattle in America passes through one of a relative handful of different pairs of testicles. Prize breeding bulls end up siring hundreds of thousands if not millions of offspring via artificial insemination. Sure the overwhelming majority of them (or of the males at least) get turned into burger, but the prize bull’s genes are valuable enough to humans that they pay big big money for them (bull sperm can cost on the order of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, particularly when sex-sorted) and they’re always at least producing new crops, producing millions of breeding females with a given bull’s genes, and generally stewarding the survival and ongoing development of valuable lineages. From a purely “fitness based” perspective, those bulls have it really great thanks to us humans. trilobite terror fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Dec 1, 2020 |
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Dec 1, 2020 06:38
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Disnesquick posted:It seems to be a rule that empires collapse into decay pretty soon after reaching a state of dominance. It should be pointed out that this is complete bunk, and only gets trotted out to justify a "good times make soft men" fascist narrative. Take Rome as an example: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/30/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-ii-water-spilled-on-the-sand/ quote:Pop history has a nasty tendency to compress all of that into one idea of ‘Rome,’ which rises once and falls once, as opposed to the reality of a Rome which rose, fell into civil war, then rose some more, then had a crisis, then stabilized, then fragmented, then fell in some places while remaining stable in others. And so, for example, Sallust’s complaints about Roman decadence – which date to the first century B.C. nearly five centuries before its ‘fall‘ – are often quoted as somehow explaining Rome’s eventual demise, but Rome wasn’t even done expanding at that point. This isn’t the place to get into a complete periodization of the Roman state, but we’ll break it down into four broad periods based on Rome’s military expansion, and then address each one in turn: And this kind of behavior, where the power of an empire fluctuates in response to material events and not some abstract "I'm decadent now, time to collapse" is the rule, not the exception.
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Dec 1, 2020 06:44
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Yeah IDK, didn’t the Egyptians have a “dominant culture” in their region for like four millennia, including the pre-dynastic era where they developed their religion and much of their culture? Three millennia, I guess, if you wanna start with the first dynasties.
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Dec 1, 2020 06:54
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Ok Comboomer posted:Eukaryotic life exists because of the aforementioned mitochondrial endosymbiosis and AFAIK all macro-organismic life owes the function of its digestive processes to endosymbiotic microorganisms. I totally agree, I just didn't wanna get bogged down in an ethical discussion over animal rights, so i just kind of preemptively ceded that ground.
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Dec 1, 2020 07:02
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Cpt_Obvious posted:But is it "natural" for us to view everything as conflict? Or has our society impressed upon us that conflict is the only relation we have with each other? Does the "natural" state of conflict merely justify our bosses getting wealthier? Taking the broad view of conflict as discussed by Disnesquick, I would still argue that it's healthy to embrace it in a measured way. Imagining yourself as a better person in the future creates a conflict, but is essential for doing good, for instance; e.g. wanting to be better at cooperating implies an internal conflict. If taken in this context, I don't think conflict and cooperation are necessarily oppositional. Cpt_Obvious posted:Look at our Darwinian paradigm; strange, isn't it, that our evolutionary competition is framed as a competition among creatures; certainly there is an aspect of that. We can see the fox as in conflict with the sheep, or we can look at the fox requiring the sheep for survival. Just as the sheep requires the grass. And so on. And those needs create conflicts, certainly. However, we tend to ignore how we also cooperate with other species. In each of our cells is housed a mitochondria. They do not have human DNA, they have their own. And no human can live without our mitochondria. So it seems that if the human race were to be defined as "conflicted" that would ignore the cooperative social relationship with other species, and we never really talk about those. I also would be careful not to minimize the fundamental importance of competition as a driving force of evolution, and as an extremely effective explanatory tool for many (most?) adaptations. And I don't think this hurts the case when bridging it back to social relations/structures. Humans have escaped natural selection due to technology and society, but technology begat industrialization which is going to destroy the world as we know it unless we make some pretty drastic changes. And those changes aren't possible until we shed the "competition above all else" neoliberal ethos & structures and embrace collectivism. I guess this is what you're getting at with your appeal to rationalists/liberals, but I don't think you have to grant the premise that humans are fundamentally Darwinian creatures. Darwinian evolution has undeniably shaped human ancestry in deep, durable ways, but it's not some intrinsic constraint on what we're capable of accomplishing as a species. e: agree with the overall take & tenor of your whole post though, just singling out these two points for discussion
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Dec 1, 2020 07:29
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I know this is purely aesthetic/academic but humans have not “taken themselves out of natural selection” for all that people like to say that, just because we’ve developed technology and medicine and societal behaviors that lead to certain reproductive trends like 2.5 children in US households and so forth. Tons of people still die of natural, non-senescence causes all of the time. Genetic diseases and disorders still rob plenty of people of the opportunity to procreate and in many cases their genes exit the active population when they die. People get cancer or they suffer injury, either fatal or sterilizing. Sometimes natural disasters kill hundreds or thousands of people and entire lineages are wiped out as a result. And even if we become ultimate masters of the planet and stave off climate collapse and develop life extending technology ZARDOZ-style who’s to say a meteor or solar flare doesn’t wipe us out and reset the board for another dominant species? Or wipe out all life on the planet altogether?
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Dec 1, 2020 07:46
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fool of sound posted:Don't whine about tone, especially when the post is fairly innocuous. Report it if you have a problem. And yet here you are whining about tone. Amazing.
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Dec 1, 2020 13:53
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Ok Comboomer posted:I know this is purely aesthetic/academic but humans have not “taken themselves out of natural selection” for all that people like to say that, just because we’ve developed technology and medicine and societal behaviors that lead to certain reproductive trends like 2.5 children in US households and so forth. I don’t think escaping natural selection means immortality. Society and technology just mean that individual fitness isn’t nearly as much of a driver of survival or reproduction, so the forces of evolution that shape life in a hostile world of scarcity don’t necessarily need to apply to humans anymore.
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Dec 1, 2020 16:27
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Microcline posted:It should be pointed out that this is complete bunk, and only gets trotted out to justify a "good times make soft men" fascist narrative. Take Rome as an example: So, let's look at the top five largest empires on this planet of ours:
The Mongol Empire: Greatest extent in 1260s, fragmented by 1300. The Russian Empire: Greatest extent in 1890s, ceased to exist 1917. The Qing Empire: Greatest extent in 1790, suborned to Britain in 1839. The Spanish Empire: Greatest extent in early 1800s, disintegration started in 1810. Now obviously that list misses the American hegemony and the Soviet Union, which seem likely to be treated as empires in the future, but we don't know the end of the former and the latter fits the "brief flame" narrative I'm presenting here. So firstly, as pointed out I'm exactly not justifying that fascist narrative so that directly contradicts your first statement. However, I can see that the subtletely in distinction is getting lost so let me try and explain further. My observation here is that these mighty forces seem able to coallesce, for a short time, and create a unity of purpose, which is extremely powerful: All the normal internal conflict of class struggle is turned outward. Given an overwhelming advantage in power and technology, and the material ability to produce better technology and power, it should be the case that a super-power rapidly consolidates its eternal dominion over everything but this is never the case. This is not down to a weakness of spirit or some fascist narrative like that, but usually down to internal conflict, in the form of corruption, class struggle, power plays etc. taking precedence again. The larger the empire, the greater the scope is for fractures. The question that begs is "How to maintain a cooperative society forever?". Let's assume that humanity has achieved communism across the planet. At that point, what now? Do we stay on the planet and just enjoy a static life until the sun bloats? Would the ennui of knowing that no improvement is possible destroy the society from inside? After a million years of peace, could an individual rediscover violence, take over a group and restart history? Cpuld we engineer our progeny to be better suited to that life of stasis? None of the above is really appealing to me. Right now, those on the Left are locked in an existential battle for survival against Liberalism and the fascism that it incubates. That's not "fun" but it is vital and the kind of personalities who could even succeed in mustering those energies to overthrow the current hegemony are not the kind of personalities that are likely to conceive of the stasis described above. The kind of people who'd fight in the vanguard probably are driven more by anger and compassion than a philosophical consideration for a perfect, static Utopia. Prior revolutions have had the benefit of being able to paint a picture of whatever the listener wants (and this goes for fascists too) but that luxury doesn't exist any more. Fascists will talk about reclaiming a golden age of the past (at least modern ones do, in my experience) but Socialists are trying to sell a vision of the future and that's much harder, particularly since the Liberals will always point to the failed experiments in response. So where am I going with this: Socialism isn't an overnight thing. Thinking a revolution will solve all the problems is like the lonely kid who thinks a girl/boy-friend will magically make their life better. It's a long hard slog after that, possibly spanning centuries before we can develop the kind of social technology that would bind people into a stable, non-hierarchic system. The left needs more than a call to arms, it needs a vision that can both inspire people to answer that call but also inspire people to beat their swords into ploughs. So why "conflict"? Because I do think this is a large component of our selves. I know I couldn't be content with an unchanging world and feel an intense drive to make a better world for the people I care about. I honestly can't imagine a life without something to push up against. I'm projecting a little now, but I do think most people are the same: Materialism doesn't seem to make people joyful in the same way that I've seen in e.g. scientists pushing against the boundaries of understanding.
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Dec 1, 2020 16:36
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Forgive me if this has popped up before (I'm really trying diligently to read most of this thread before jumping into conversation) but I wanted to share one of my favorite shortform left pieces: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. The essay was later turned into a full length book, but I find it's a very short, easily digestible introduction to leftist labor ideas and the general thought processes that power Capital in the modern day. https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ quote:Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don't like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done—at least, there's only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there's endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it's all that anyone really does. I think this is actually a pretty accurate description of the moral dynamics of our own economy. Ok, I'm going back to page 5.
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Dec 1, 2020 17:23
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:I don’t think escaping natural selection means immortality. Society and technology just mean that individual fitness isn’t nearly as much of a driver of survival or reproduction, so the forces of evolution that shape life in a hostile world of scarcity don’t necessarily need to apply to humans anymore. To get this into evolutionary theory I think it's worth pushing to an absolute extreme as a thought experiment: Imagine a world where humans have developed sufficient technology that even fatally flawed genotypes can be nurtured to the point they can reproduce by technology. This technology could take the form of machine-assistance, or biochemical assistance, or it could take the form of germ-line genetic engineering to correct the problems. The former is a modification of the fitness landscape itself (and could be described as a form of ]I] epigenetic phenotypic robustness[/I]) but the latter is actually fixing the genotype in place and preventing mutation. These two forms already exist in nature, the former in the form of molecular chaperones (proteins that reduce the likelihood of misfolding of other proteins, e.g. due to a point mutation. Note that chaperones are NOT epigenetic), and the latter in the form of genomic repair machinery and polyploidy. It is absolutely essential at this point, to observe that natural selection applies to phenotypes, not genotypes. Phenotypic robustness, which reduces the impact of the genotype on the phenotype, therefore reduces the impact of natural selection on the genotype, which allows for greater exploration of the genomic space (i.e. higher genotypic variance in the population). It's probably impossible to flatten the landscape entirely but you'd end up with a much more diverse population due to generic drift. You've effectively reduced the selection part of the inheritance/mutation/selection trifecta of evolution but maintained the other two. The question then becomes: Is this greater breadth of exploration able to discover genotypes that can outcompete the others e.g. through more efficient integration with the epigenetic (technologica) scaffolding? The answer is almost certainly yes, if only because of the vast number of possible genomes that such a flattened fitness landscape would enable. Genotypic robustness, on the other hand, prevents the deleterious mutations in the first place. Whereas the former type increases the rate of landscape exploration, this type decreases the rate. It's reducing the mutation part of the trifecta. Taken to its extreme, every individual is a clone of a single genotype. At this point evolution actually has stopped (or near as possible,depending on whether the cloning apparatus can make any mistakes), as no further adaption is possible. Species extinction is still possible, e.g. a virus exploits an unknown flaw and kills the entire, uniform population so it's hard to say that you can escape natural selection. We (researchers in evobio and related fields) talk about "rates" of evolution all the time and it's a well known problem. E.g. when establishing a common ancestor when heterogeneous selection pressures and mutation rates are present. It's a fuzzy term though, with no clear metric. This became a much longer post than I expected but the take home of the above should be: Evolution is not an on-off thing and also has more than one axis (i.e. mutation and selection, also these interact because selection reduces the rate of heritable mutations). The effects that you've described are therefore like to shift things quantitatively across that space but not induce any real qualitative shift on the dynamic. And that's not even getting into the thornbush of sexual selection. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Dec 1, 2020 |
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Dec 1, 2020 17:47
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:I don’t think escaping natural selection means immortality. Society and technology just mean that individual fitness isn’t nearly as much of a driver of survival or reproduction, so the forces of evolution that shape life in a hostile world of scarcity don’t necessarily need to apply to humans anymore. I don’t think it means immortality either I just brought the idea up as an example. I understand what you meant and I agree, I’m just saying that humans, individually, and at population scale, and as a species, are still subject to natural selection even though we’ve been able to insulate many people from the worst the world has to offer. There’s a school of thought that says that resource/political inequality means that different groups, or populations, of people have different levels of insulation from the effects of nature. For example, millions of people in Africa have died from famine and drought over the last several decades, and millions more from HIV. Landslides have become fairly commonplace in south and Central America for a variety of reasons, and when they happen they often kill many people, most of them rural/poor. Obviously there’s a political and an ethical/argument to be had here, as well as one about the culpability of the global north in setting up the conditions in the global south and the responsibility of people to provide each other aid/make reparations for the effects of colonialism, slavery, and contemporary economic colonialism. But from a purely “this is what’s happening right now” angle, like if an alien biologist came to Earth purely to observe humans as animals and take notes, they might say that different populations of humans have different levels of insulation from their environments thanks to technology and social dynamics. Now that’s simply, technically, adaptation but the fact that we’re so deliberate and aware and unequal about it makes our case unique. But there’s also another school of thought that looks at these things and argues that if you place enough distance between ourselves and our hypothetical alien observer, does our global culture of exploitation, resource/wealth inequality, and indifference to the mass suffering of others look that different from what other species do? Chimpanzee troops will regularly go to war (like, literal war) with each other over access to territory, water, food, shelter, because one guy in one troop really doesn’t like a guy in another, etc. In some cases victorious chimp troops let their defeated foes run away while they celebrate and enjoy whatever spoils they fought for. In other cases, troops have been seen waging what looks like extermination campaigns where they work really hard to try to kill as many members of the opposing/target group as possible, or they go after the juveniles. And tons of animal species display often really violent intra-specific competition, from fighting over territory or mates, to also fighting over food, shelter, water access, and so forth.
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Dec 1, 2020 17:59
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Disnesquick posted:To get this into evolutionary theory I think it's worth pushing to an absolute extend as a thought experiment: Imagine a world where humans have developed sufficient technology that even fatally flawed genotypes can be nurtured to the point they can reproduce by technology. This technology could take the form of machine-assistance, or biochemical assistance, or it could take the form of germ-line genetic engineering to correct the problems. The former is a modification of the fitness landscape itself (and could be described as a form of ]I] epigenetic phenotypic robustness[/I]) but the latter is actually fixing the genotype in place and preventing mutation. These two forms already exist in nature, the former in the form of molecular chaperones (proteins that reduce the likelihood of misfolding of other proteins, e.g. due to a point mutation. Note that chaperones are NOT epigenetic), and the latter in the form of genomic repair machinery and polyploidy. My first thought about this is the curious way that abortion plays into this. On the one hand you can picture a society that gets better at treating/curing genetic disorders, etc. On the other, you can picture a society that gets better at identifying problem genotypes/phenotypes early and much more comfortable with terminating those pregnancies. The contemporary example would be how rates of Down Syndrome are exponentially lower in many parts of Europe than they are in the US because there’s a culture of “opting in” to having a child with trisomy 21 and “opting out” of terminating the pregnancy, vs in the United States where things like abortion stigma (but also stronger advocacy groups for people with DS) mean that the culture is one of having to request an abortion. In many parts of the US the default expectation is that a pregnancy will be carried to term, unless it is currently sending the mother to the emergency room (and even then), even if the infant ultimately doesn’t/isn’t expected to survive. And from a purely selfish gene-standpoint, it begs the question—say we develop scalable germ-line gene editing and we gain the ability to literally fix or replace problem/faulty genes. Have we essentially aborted that gene? And yeah, talking about sexual selection and its effects in contemporary/future human populations is a really fun thought exercise. You could probably write an entire series of books just exploring all the ins, outs, and implications of how human attraction/coupling/child-having dynamics do or do not play into shaping the ongoing evolution of humans.
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Dec 1, 2020 18:22
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Ok Comboomer posted:My first thought about this is the curious way that abortion plays into this. On the one hand you can picture a society that gets better at treating/curing genetic disorders, etc. On the other, you can picture a society that gets better at identifying problem genotypes/phenotypes early and much more comfortable with terminating those pregnancies. The contemporary example would be how rates of Down Syndrome are exponentially lower in many parts of Europe than they are in the US because there’s a culture of “opting in” to having a child with trisomy 21 and “opting out” of terminating the pregnancy, vs in the United States where things like abortion stigma (but also stronger advocacy groups for people with DS) mean that the culture is one of having to request an abortion. In many parts of the US the default expectation is that a pregnancy will be carried to term, unless it is currently sending the mother to the emergency room (and even then), even if the infant ultimately doesn’t/isn’t expected to survive. You're effectively describing eugenics in the first paragraph and I think there's an important distinction to be made with the latter example. Aborting an entire foetus due to one bad allele has the massive twin problems of linkage and epistasis. By tying survival so closely to that one allele, any possible mitigating interactions are ignored (and in the case that the bad allele isn't actually fatal and doesn't preclude reproduction) and also those epistatic effects can't then come about later. I would actually say this is the extreme other end of the phenotypic robustness argument I presented in the OP: For these alleles you've reduced phenotypic robustness to zero. Since nature tends to favor phenotypic robustness, this seems like it would be generally a bad idea (and that's not yet getting into the slippery slope of more and more alleles getting added to the bad list). This seems like the kind of thing that could actually be modelled in an ALife system and might make an interesting paper (e.g. effect of direct gonotypic selection on an evolved population). The second paragraph is, I feel, a different case because you haven't really "aborted" the gene (it's still there as a gene but only one configuration is allowed) and there's no real case to be made for linkage effects. What you've done here is reduce the mutation rate to zero on a range of contiguous loci. This more falls onto the genotypic robustness axis, in my opinion. It becomes interesting if, instead of enforcing one 'good' version, you blacklist a set of bad versions (and replace them and not harmless variants. I suspect this version of things is what you meant in your reply). I don't think there's a good example of that in nature but, again, seems like an experiment could be run in silico. It almost feels like you'd add a wormhole to the fitness landscape here as it just jumps to a potentially-distant configuration. Ok Comboomer posted:And yeah, talking about sexual selection and its effects in contemporary/future human populations is a really fun thought exercise. You could probably write an entire series of books just exploring all the ins, outs, and implications of how human attraction/coupling/child-having dynamics do or do not play into shaping the ongoing evolution of humans. I started writing a post on this subject (with specific reference to European aristocracy as a Petri dish of post-scarcity) and scrapped it. The epigenetics of socioeconomic status also profoundly complicate any argument you could construct here. It just seems like the kind of rabbit-hole that will lead to pseudo-scientific arguments about physical beauty and heritable capacity to accumulate wealth under capitalism. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Dec 1, 2020 |
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Dec 1, 2020 18:52
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Disnesquick posted:.
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Dec 1, 2020 20:10
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Cpt_Obvious posted:The only heritable capacity to accumulate wealth is wealth itself. If anyone on the planet Earth can explain Donald Trump's fortune any other way, they should not be listened to. Many traits - including race, gender, and physical characteristics - are correlated with higher economic mobility (and ability to succeed under capitalism). Dinesquick is saying there's a particular rabbit hole in which we allow eugenics based on existing structural inequalities which is problematic because it's selecting for traits which are arbitrarily highly valued due to a subjective system. See: GATTACA.
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Dec 1, 2020 20:18
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Cpt_Obvious posted:The only heritable capacity to accumulate wealth is wealth itself. If anyone on the planet Earth can explain Donald Trump's fortune any other way, they should not be listened to. Yeah, absolutely. I was denouncing the idea of a genetic (normally what biologists mean when they say heritable but not always) capability to accumulate wealth rather than supporting it. Sorry if that wasn't as clear as I wanted it to be. That's an argument that always comes up wrt sexual selection (or even standard selection) in humans. There probably is some argument to be made here e.g. relating wealth to status and drawing parallels to primate behavior with regards to silverbacks but we're firmly in mumbo jumbo town at that point. Evopsych was brought up earlier and it's one of those fields that does have genuine scientists working in it but they are immensely frustrated because the narratives that make it to the mainstream are all the bullshit ones. Sexual selection in humans and evolutionary effects of socioeconomics is one of those danger zones. You could do decent work here bit everyone is going to be listening to professor snake oil instead. Edit: I think eugenics is one of those things which falls well into the earlier convo about intuitive ideas Vs logical ones. Eugenics is intuitively appealing: We've had great success in agriculture via selective breeding, therefore why not us. It is actually a difficult line of thinking to discredit (and I am talking about non-racist eugenics here. Yes, please suspend disbelief just for the sake of argument) because the understanding of how the notions of "good" characteristics are so shaped by capitalistic short-termism (and the racial hierarchy of our society) is not as universal as you'd hope. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Dec 1, 2020 |
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Dec 1, 2020 20:21
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Aruan posted:Many traits - including race, gender, and physical characteristics - are correlated with higher economic mobility (and ability to succeed under capitalism). Dinesquick is saying there's a particular rabbit hole in which we allow eugenics based on existing structural inequalities which is problematic because it's selecting for traits which are arbitrarily highly valued due to a subjective system. See: GATTACA. See? This is exactly what I'm talking about. There is literally no discernable genetic pattern by which wealth is distributed.
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Dec 1, 2020 20:41
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Cpt_Obvious posted:See? This is exactly what I'm talking about. I am pretty sure we could find alleles which correlate with wealth concentration. I am equally sure that those alleles would have no causative relationship to that wealth. I am also sure you could sell gene therapy, based on those alleles, to a lot of cargo-cult neoliberals.
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Dec 1, 2020 21:06
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Disnesquick posted:I am pretty sure we could find alleles which correlate with wealth concentration. I'm in. Here's 30 million dollars of startup capital.
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Dec 1, 2020 21:20
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There are millions of parents who would easily pay $10,000 to make their kid taller.
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Dec 1, 2020 21:34
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Aruan posted:There are millions of parents who would easily pay $10,000 to make their kid taller. This would be an actual product though. I just want to scam aspiring petit-booj with some neutral mutation that was found in a high concentration amongst the super-rich.
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Dec 1, 2020 21:44
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