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Comment by reader5000 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of these debates ignore that evolutionary success is simply defined as persistence. If population A has 90% infant mortality and lives on $1 day but has genetic descendants 1000 years from now, then they are evolutionarily "better" than population B that has <1% infant mortality, lives on $100 day, and has no genetic descendants 1000 years from now. Declaring one group a "have" and another group a "have not" is myopic. Literally every group on the face of the earth at some level believes they are "chosen" and superior to other groups. The only way to actually tell though is to see which genes are still geneing 1000 years, 10,000 years, etc into the future. To date it's not even clear that multicellularity is that great of a branch to be on.

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> To date it's not even clear that multicellularity is that great of a branch to be on.

Doesn't it hurt to realize your multi-cellular brain came up with this?

Of course you want multi-cellular life. It's the only known answer of nature capable of particle physics, space exploration and postulating one's bad ideas on HN.

You shouldn't become that agnostic to your place in the universe, and unless a couple of much better reasons aren't more obvious to you, at least because people will think you like insulting yourself, together with your entire branch of life, that also includes the reader.

If the point of a gene is to reproduce itself, the GP's conjecture is likely correct.

Evolution itself is non-judgemental and has no inherent bias to the development of spaceflight over, say, a massively distributed system willing to tolerate huge die offs. They are simply two different approaches (not even strategies) for dealing with local conditions.

I kind of see the utility in prevailing in the universe can much more be an active and guided persuasion through us humans (maybe by proxy, through whatever robotic arks we can come up with), because it can be so much more effective than a passive and kind of brittle and to me unconvincing process of post-solar system panspermia.

You may have a bias towards humans but nature doesn't care: all the bets are played in parallel.

In fact by your own preference, the unicellular organisms are more likely to successfully spread their DNA (as it's "packetized" into a complete organism) via the surfaces of the robot ships you describe than the multicellular ones are.

Gumby is right here. While it's obviously important to US whether or not we survive, Mother Nature doesn't care whether we live or die.

As long as the genes keep propagating, she's good.

I think it's healthy for humans to look to their own survival, but I realize that Mother Nature only cares for the propagation of genes. We should never confuse the one with the other. We should never start to believe that Mother Nature has an interest in our survival more than the survival of some other fish, or alien lifeform far away, or some bacteria, or virus. That could be a fatal mistake for us.

I see my argument solely as one driven by my own survival instinct.

And as it's nature that biases me towards my species, is it wrong to try live up to that and build those spaceships?

That’s up to you — I also think spaceships are great (and also don’t really see the point of putting humans in them). We’re all just telling you that nature doesn’t prefer you or me to the amoeba, nor vice versa.

I would take it further and say that nature doesn't care about genes either. Caring is a property of whole organisms with complex information processing abilities. Genes kinda tend to propagate, just because the ones that were slightly less good at that didn't make it very far.

You seem to be suggesting that all values that don't contribute to long-term evolutionary success are not worth pursuing.

Perhaps in the thousand-year timeframe it's irrelevant what it means to be a "have" or "have not" in today's society. But does that really mean that we shouldn't care about the lives of the people around us who are living right now? In fact, why should any of us care all that much about who's still got descendants long after we're dead?

I wouldn't create a dichotomy between these two choices. In many ways our descendants will determine the state of the future far more than any particular change we might engage in today. Imagine that people who are well educated, secular, and generally well off start to stop having children. At the same time people who are poorly educated, highly religious, and generally poor continue to have children at a high rate. Think about what this would mean for the lives of people born into the next generation. They're going to disproportionately come from households that are poorly educated, highly religions, and mostly poor.

And of course this isn't a hypothetical. This is exactly what's happening today on a global and crucially, even on a national level. For instance in the US people who earn < $10,000 per year annually have a fertility rate that is just about exactly 50% higher than those earning > $200,000 per year. [1] And there's a disconcertingly smooth gradient in the incomes in between. This is a very new problem. It was speculated about in the past, but generally well to do families continued to pump out the kids at a decent rate and there were macabre systems in place that prevented reckless procreation from those who could not afford it. Today fertility rates have plummeted and such macabre deterrents have become completely unthinkable which is a very good thing, yet it's simultaneously a very bad thing in that it effectively enables reckless and socially destructive behavior.

It becomes clear that one of the easiest ways to have a society where more people are better off is simply by encouraging those that can afford to have children to do just that! This also goes a step further as well. You might argue that 'well, if we create better social systems then we can start to transform those poorly educated, highly religious, and generally poor families into the [perhaps subjectively] better off households today.' Maybe, maybe not -- it'd be a herculean task in any case. But there's an even more fundamental problem. The future of those systems will be upheld, or tossed aside, by the generation of tomorrow. And we once again end up back at square one as this generation will be comprised heavily of these poorly educated, highly religious individuals who are going to generally have different social motivations.

[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

I think HN User reader500's material point is that while you and I may believe that poor people procreating is "reckless and socially destructive behavior", Mother Nature does not. She's going to go to great lengths to ensure that poor people have a desire to procreate that is, at once, urgent and overpowering. She really doesn't care about anything other than getting the genes propagated. (Basically, in human terms, she just wants more kids. Nothing else matters to Mother Nature.)

She's also going to go to great lengths to instill the same urge in the wealthy, and everyone in between for that matter. She really does just want the genes propagated. The rest she doesn't care about. Ideology, money, whether or not one human has any power over another, social morés, and any other human construct... none of it matters to her.

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