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Newborns of wild animals raised in captivity cannot be released back to the wild, because they lack the survival skills they could otherwise have learnt from their parents. It is true with many species - a species' accumulated and inherited knowledge, passed down generation to generation, about how to survive and thrive in the environment, is part of that species' evolution history. This apply to humans as well as to almost all other animals. It is misguided to think human evolution is "not in the hands of nature", because the accumulated inherited knowledge we have about the world, the capital we build that is passed down to our children, and technology we implement, are part and parcel of nature itself. Are our bodies nature? Are our gut bacteria nature? Do our neurons work apart from nature? Is the tendency to want to be "better than the joneses" to attract a better mate ourselves, or help our children to do so, part of nature, or an artificial phenomenon? What about our desires to live in shelter of our construction, impulse to educate our children, to pass them what we have and improve their ability to thrive? I think all of these behaviours are nature in and of itself, and because all things we do spring from nature, those things are nature too, even down to our computers and any AI we may build in the future - because products of nature is nature itself.

Nature, in the broadest sense, is the natural, physical, or material world or universe [1] If humans are separate from the universe, then where does the universe end, and we begin?

However, besides this nitpick, I agree with all your points. In the future, nature will select some genes based on their fitness as predicted by nature, as well as actual fitness at the current moment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature

Surely there is also instinct at play here. A cat raised in captivity still can hunt mice and if its released into the wild it could survive and reproduce. And of course there is the famous california condor story where they are now all either raise in captivity or decedents of those.

Survival data were available for 169 kittens. Overall, 127 of the 169 (75%) kittens died (n = 87) or disappeared (40) before 6 months of age. ...Eighty-one of the 169 (48%) kittens died or disappeared before they were 100 days old.

Well, some of them are bound to make it... http://pets.stackexchange.com/questions/9571/can-cats-surviv...

Not quite. Here in Australia we have feral pigs, feral cats, wild rabbits and wild horses (brumbies). All of them started as domesticated animals. And even in this harsh climate they are doing pretty well.

Technology manipulates selection pressure; it doesn't eliminate it.

That is true, but the GP's implication is designer babies. Then normal selection is out the window.

For already living, it is hard to predict how hard it will be to go from in vitro to in vivo for gene modification.

At a minimum, with robotisation we will get cheaper beauty surgery and chemicals can affect confidence and work ethics. So e.g. looks and first impressions (for sexual selection) will be quite irrelevant.

No, normal selection is not out the window then. You've only added a second selection mechanism (parents) on top of nature's. And I'm afraid that selection will be based on hype alone.

As to "first impressions" and such, they're based on thousands of years of both social and genetic selection, and I don't think those traits are conveniently located in a single location. Even then, what if the same genome location controls both "first-look judgements" and "jump away from the path of that speeding bike"?

As to editing the genome, I'm afraid I don't share your optimism. I consider our genome to be a 3.2 billion-line BASIC program (the old-skool one, with line numbers and no variable scoping), without unit tests or documentation of course. Sure, you can replace a single line and still have the program compile or run correctly. But how are you going to conclusively prove that your modification has no unintended side-effects, for either current or future generations?

Ok, the title of the article might be misleading, but I suggest you actually read the article, because it talks about the evolution of the microbial community that lives inside you, not your genome at all.

To paraphrase the study by Sonnenburg: It is theorized that a depletion of the microbial biodiversity caused by a low-fiber diet is responsible for many chronic diseases. Mice that were fed a low-fiber diet developed less microbial diversity, but if they were put back on a high fiber diet, their microbial community recovered quickly. However, and most revealingly, if they gave birth to a litter while on a low-fiber diet (and therefore with a weak microbial community) the second generation mice were unable to develop a strong microbial community regardless of diet.

The conclusion is that microbes already present in one's body can adapt according to diet. If a microbial species metabolizes fiber and the host does not consume fiber, the microbe will possibly enter a "dormant" (my invented term) state, but it can be recovered to full strength. Still, "dormant" microbes will not be prevalent in the birth canal to ensure transmission to the next generation, so that generation will not have that microbe species regardless of diet. Over generations, this could lead to extinction of entire microbial species.

THIS is the evolution that the article talks about, NOT genome evolution.

> In that time [decades] we'll start altering the general human genome, and likely remove countless inherited conditions out of it either directly or indirectly.

What's the rush? You're talking about altering the human genome, something COMPLETELY IRREVERSIBLE in a single generation. This article asserts that an enormous part of our bodies was barely beginning to be researched five years ago! The reason this hubris is so common is that a few parts of our bodies are relatively simple and easily understood: the circulatory, respiratory and other systems that exist as meat. On the other hand we barely understand the many systems that live in a complex state of delicate equilibrium: endocrine, immune, and microbial which seems to be apart of both of them.

> Still, "dormant" microbes will not be prevalent in the birth canal to ensure transmission to the next generation

It has always been my impression that much of the microbiome is transferred after birth through breast milk, not in utero. I don't have any authority at hand to verify whether this is true, or to what extent, though.

A lot of microbial diversity comes from putting random shit in your mouth - an activity babies engage in with alarming (to new parents) frequency. Caged mice with impaired microbial diversity don't have the same breadth of opportunity to pick up new microbes via this mechanism that humans do.

One of the primary benefits of raw food is that it is a great way to introduce microbial diversity. On the other hand, a diet comprised only of cooked or sterile processed foods is going to exacerbate microbial diversity issues.

Sexual selection is still a thing, and unlikely to go away for the foreseeable future. Diet affects appearance, appearance affects chances to pass on your genes.

If you're referring to overweight people, people with diabetes or with heart disease don't necessarily look overweight.

I also don't believe that appearance affects chances to pass on your genes. The ability to have sex does. But people with a lower than average appearance score (lets say), have the option of having sex with other people having the same problem. This also bypasses the fact that human beings are very complex animals, capable of falling in love with pretty much anything, including a piece of fiction and that when looking for a partner we also end up looking at other traits.

And please forgive me for my political incorrectness, but as an anecdotal experience, from what I've noticed the people that are breeding a lot (you know, the communities where families of 6 children or more are common place), well those people are downright ugly on average. Which makes sense, given that the people that are breeding a lot are usually the poor and they are ugly and in bad shape mostly due to not having access to health-care. Yet when it comes to having sex, they don't seem to care.

Sexual selection is culturally relative and most people who want to reproduce get to reproduce in most societies, i.e. there is very little sexual selection. Human appearances are very diverse, especially sexual characteristics. It is hard to come up with a characteristic of human appearance that doesn't have a large diversity of phenotypes and from this observation we can reasonably infer that appearance is not strongly selected for.

Basically this. I think that we are in a very awkward time right now, where are we understand how things work mainly in a read-only degree, but are just finally turning on write access.

The next genetic leaps in the next century are going to be stratospheric.

Regarding the headline of this article, if anything, the past century has been great for keeping death at bay and promoting life when it otherwise would not have thrived, but I don't think there will be a major shift in evolution from this because there won't be enough time for it to manifest vs the changes we're about to institute via the above paragraph.

> The next genetic leaps in the next century are going to be stratospheric.

Agreed. I'm afraid your assumption may be completely true. The sad thing is that such a rapid market capture will preclude verification of cross-generational effects of our modifications. And we don't have a good track record for getting things right on the first try.

As a hypothetical example, how many generations do you think it will take to recognize if one particular gene splicing will make interbreeding between spliced vs non-spliced offspring impossible?

Well, not impossible. Just splice again. Nothing is irreversible.

Of course, "just splice again". Why not. We can always take one of the original eggs, undo the modification, and put it back in the womb of the now 70-year old mother. And kill the 30-year old defective daughter, while you're at it.

I do hope that is not what you meant with your comment though. I prefer not to think of fellow human beings as living petri dishes, so I don't consider field-patching an acceptable solution when discussing genetic manipulation.

Of course I meant, the next generation need not be split into two types of human. The next generation can change again. The point of genetic modification is, that the next generation doesn't have to exactly resemble the one before. So the straw-man of 'what if they can't interbreed' is moot.

If we truly hit an exponential curve, won't standard sexual interbreeding become a thing of the past? I think the big problem will be actually figuring out which DNA configurations yield a human/whatever that's acceptable by human standards? That is mapping DNAs to expected phenotypes.