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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

> Iguanas are at the mercy of evolution. We aren't.

Not being at the mercy of evolution is an illusion caused by being at the mercy of both genetic and memetic evolution. If we do things that are at odds with either our biological and social adaptation, we tend to not replicate as much as otherwise.

For instance we can chose not to eat or have sex, but that just edits our patterns out of the population as it always has. We can change society such that acts that were adaptive are now maladaptive, but that just changes evolutionary pressures rather than eliminating them. Even as we master evolution it still masters us.

It's like the illusion in orbit that you have escaped gravity, but you're just falling continuously.

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I do care whether I'm subjected to cultural pressures or to genetic pressures and I would rather not muddle my worldview by conflating them to a single category. Calling them collectively "evolution" is not a subtle mistake to make.

In fact placing together memetics and genetics in a single sentence doesn't even compile for me. It's like stamp-collecting and murder. Yes, my whole point is that we are operating on memetic engine and it works wonders.

I'll point out one thing "that just edits our patterns out of the population as it always has", just like not eating or not having sex: being infected by tuberculosis bacteria. By your reasoning developing a vaccine is just silly. Do we even want to rescue any Chopins or Orwells or Kafkas. Vaccine (which is effectively a meme) "just changes evolutionary pressures rather than eliminating them". If it happens, good, if it doesn't happen, no worries? That's the message?

Iguanas surely don't give a fuck about their Chopins.

> I do care whether I'm subjected to cultural pressures or to genetic pressures and I would rather not muddle my worldview by conflating them to a single category. Calling them collectively "evolution" is not a subtle mistake to make.

But they absolutely are the same category. 100%, and always have been. Just look at how mating preference has affected many species, ex: the peacock. "Cultural" pressure preferred men with a colorful booty, and over time genetics conformed. The same is true if the "culture" prefers people who are soft spoken, adversarial, drawn to the color green, or have a funny left ear. If the culture means that people with a certain trait are more successful and thus more likely to reproduce over a sufficient period of time genetics will trend towards producing more individuals like that.

As for the rest of your comment, I keep reading it over and over and I can't figure out what your getting at. Developing a vaccine means more people in my group are likely to survive to reproduce, thus (given sufficient time) evolution will favor those species that can produce vaccines (or not be vulnerable to the disease in the first place).

This is called "Baldwinian evolution" [0] after the biologist James Baldwin. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_effect

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

Let's swap the vaccine example with something more showy.

You seem to be saying that Crocs users have a serious chance to die out in one or two thousand years (after all 30 or 60 generations are peanuts). I'm sure the effect is real. I'm not holding my breath though, because seemingly humans posses another mechanism which can mysteriously mask the trait of i-like-ugly-shoes within just one or two generations. (And with almost no one dying out?)

Just like it didn't take 30-60 generations for the trait of i-hate-suspicious-injections to die out.

I avoided the word "evolution" in hope of achieving understanding at least about the territory if not about the map.

You're assuming memetic information propagates in the same way as genetic information. Not eating or having sex has been used to great memetic success historically.

It’s a tortoise and hare race with genetic and memetic evolution. Recently, the sexual revolution (with contraceptives) has severely depressed population growth. In the long run, the tortoise will win out though. Genetic evolution will select for people resistant to these ideas. Communities with high fertility rates (such as some religious communities) will grow quickly and replace the contraceptive-using public.

Then where did all the contraceptive-using seculars come from? Hasn't our history already selected for religious communities with high birthrates?

Even if secular people went extinct today, there would be more 30 years from now. Religious communities can produce secular individuals, from which secular communities form that generate secular memes.

They operate on independent planes. Unless a sort of direct genetic disposition to specific ideas can be established, I believe the complexities of genetics and memetics allow for such a broad range of complex interaction that they cannot be correlated so easily.

How specific? Steroids can make people more aggressive and presumably more attracted to aggressive ideas. Adrenaline can do that in the short term. There are many such mood altering substances that DNA can code for. We know that they can be set to trigger by the environment, as in mood changes in the presence of a potential mate or predator.

It may be that as behavior driven by memes versus genes diverge enough, the population naturally falls. That could be the solution to the Fermi paradox, that sentient population growth is limited by the growth of their meme pools, as they diverge in purpose from their gene pools.

Contraceptives came about within the blink of an eye, genetically-speaking. Until a few decades ago, they did not affect selection at all. The ancestors of contraceptive-users might have wanted contraceptives but they didn't exist and so they had no choice.

Now that contraceptives exist, people who choose them and deliberately avoid ever having children will select themselves out of the gene pool. The same goes for people born in religious communities who are skeptical of their religion. The people who remain in those communities will be the ones who have some sort of genetic predisposition to religious experiences. This is already a hypothesis (the God gene [1]).

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

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