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Comment by juskrey | Hacker News Reader

If something can make your body better without adverse effects, it is already there. You are not smarter than 3.5 billions of life evolution, period.

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Really? The polio vaccine made my body better without adverse effects, and there are literally hundreds of other examples.

Evolution is a process, not an endpoint - - it seems highly unlikely that no further improvements to the human body are possible.

Evolution doesn't find a global optimum. It probably doesn't even find a local optimum, because constantly changing environments create a moving target for selection pressure.

> You are not smarter than 3.5 billions of life evolution

That makes a great bumper sticker, but I don't buy it.

Evolution isn't directed. Humans are the product of something that happened to survive in some very specific circumstances. Lots of other things did too: sloths, flies, sea sponges. I'd rather be me than a sea sponge. Maybe there's a potential X that would rather be an X than me.

There are no evolutionary pressures on "I'd rather be".

A bumper sticker on your vehicle that carries you at least an order of magnitude faster than evolution can carry you?

Here's a much more detailed discussion of this idea, and possible loopholes:

http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics

For example, evolution could easily have failed to make enhancements that would burn too many calories, because food used to be scarce.

This reads like a form of faith. I don't share it. Is there literally no potential for artificial selection to outpace natural selection?

I know this thinking can be dangerous and contains serious ethical problems, but the factual side of your statement I just can't agree with. Not without more to convince me.

> Is there literally no potential for artificial selection to outpace natural selection?

Of course there's potential and loopholes but the basic observation (dubbed 'Algernon's law' by some; I've written an entire essay on the topic: http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics ) seems sound for tDCS: it's such a trivial intervention that it shouldn't work, which suggests there must be some catch.

The catch may well be trivial from our modern perspective, in the same way that staying up late or using stimulants and so burning some more calories is a trivial catch from the modern perspective ("'oh no', said the fat American man, 'you mean X might cause me to burn some more calories? how awful'"), but until the catch has been identified, tDCS has not been fully understood.

I don't completely follow this line of reasoning. Something like "a minor enhancement like this would have been selected for by now, so it not being selected means it has a drawback?"

I'm no evolutionary biologist, but it seems like the increased intelligence (or more accurately, cognitive performance) may not have had all that practical a benefit until just recently in our history anyway.

I accept that the verdict is still out on tDCS, but am clamoring to reach that verdict.

It is a rephrasing of "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch". It is safe to assume that everything has side effects and the side effects are going to be roughly proportionate to the primary effects. If you think there are no side effects, then you have not looked hard enough.

This is a fairly cynical point of view. But safe. We are not talking about medicine, we are talking about messing with otherwise perfectly healthy people.

Off the top of my head, vitamins and vaccines are the only side-effect free wonder drugs for healthy people. Similarly, clothing is the only body augment to fit this category. (And even then we get it wrong sometimes. Lots of examples from women's fashion in the past and currently the debate about shoes's effects on the knees/back.)

> Off the top of my head, vitamins and vaccines are the only side-effect free wonder drugs for healthy people.

Vaccines have well-characterized death rates and is why things like the smallpox vaccine stopped being administered as soon as possible even though it'd be comforting to have built-in immunity against that nasty biowarfare possibility; and some vitamins have been shown to increase mortality in RCTs.

> I'm no evolutionary biologist, but it seems like the increased intelligence (or more accurately, cognitive performance) may not have had all that practical a benefit until just recently in our history anyway.

That's obviously wrong, because the brain is so metabolically expensive that if it was not pulling its weight, it would long ago have shrunk considerably. More intelligence is always better - if the intelligence is not too expensive. (I cover this in the link.)

Or, the catch could be such that, with such enhancements, everyone realizes the meaninglessness of existence and kills themselves in a fit of existential rage.

That would have been noticed already.

Well, you're a product of that, so your brain being able to come up with methods of augmentation that are faster than waiting for the "evolutionary process is the 3.5 billions of life evolution" is a product of all that evolution

We make our body better all the time, sometimes there are adverse effects, but that's just more to work on

This seems to be at odds with the existence of tools.

Well shit. Should I just take my glasses off now then?

I get what you're saying, and basically agree. But... A) how much of an adverse effect? And B) Plenty of medical procedures can "make your body better without adverse effects" (at least not as adverse as the medical condition continuing on unchecked).

Ah, at least. Yeah, medical procedures can make you better. In case your condition is acute. But we have no single medicine that will make healthy human better for a lifetime. Well, single medicated "you" MAY outlive "you" without a medicine, but that is a play of statistics, in general there is no force to tell ya if you will suffer instead. Even a vaccine is a simulation of acute condition, but the key for this effect is single stimulation.

Plenty of them are outright harmful too, of course, and this is even after a century of randomized experiments and 'evidence-based medicine' weeding out the worst of the crap. But the medicine that works falls handily under one of the loopholes laid out (exercise for the reader: vaccines work amazingly well. Why hasn't evolution already done the work of a vaccine in humans and what loophole does this argument fall under?)

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