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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

I always thought the notion that genetics drives anything is mistaken.

Genes are a unit of selection, but even before culture it was the environment which drives evolution, genes just store information. To me the idea that genes drive anything sounds like saying that my hard disk controls my word processor. Despite software being instantiated in hardware, or culture being in some sense instantiated in genes, it's still the software or the culture that is the unit of control and it reconfigures its substrate.

Seems perfectly possible that humans at some point replace genes altogether through some method of engineering and then it should be obvious that they weren't really doing anything.

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Is it unreasonable to say that bacteria, spiders, and frogs are genetically driven to exhibit certain behaviors? If not, why should the line be cut at humans?

To use your analogy, consider that the hard drive has to store some “repertoire of responses,” some code snippets, that your control unit can pick from in order to solve the problem in front of it.

It still very much matters what is and is not stored on that hard drive, even if the bulk of the lifting is done by the control unit and even if (in humans’ case) the control unit can be extremely creative in combining existing snippets into new responses.

Replacing a thing with something else that performs the same function by other means does not demonstrate that the first thing was doing nothing.

I wasn't saying that genes do nothing. If they did nothing, they probably wouldn't exist. I said they're a store of information, but not a driver of behavior. They don't exercise any control in the way that is commonly associated with gene-centric views is my argument.

If culture or technology at some point completely replaces genetics in a literal sense, I don't think it's even necessarily required to reproduce any of the current functions of genes at all.

> If culture or technology at some point completely replaces genetics in a literal sense, I don't think it's even necessarily required to reproduce any of the current functions of genes at all.

Now that you have clarified that genes are a store of information, this passage seems to imply that genes could be replaced in a way that makes no use of a store of the sort of information genes store.

I can't prove it, but I very much doubt that is possible, unless you mean specifically that whatever information store this replacement needs is not precisely identical with that in a genome - but that is trivially true, given that no two genomes are identical in all respects.

Identity arguments are the hobgoblin of the philosophy of the mind, IMHO, keeping one of its feet chained to its vitalist past through tendentious modal arguments about concievability - but I digress.

I was just about to make that comment. Faulty reasoning on the part of the commenter.

That is true, however some previously acquired genetic mutation, that was insignificant to organisms survival or reproduction, may provide advantage (or disadvantage) when environment changes.

Culture also stores information.

Culture is just evolution with new substrates.

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