Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution" | Hacker News Reader

Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution"

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It's really not a new stage of evolution per se. The switch from random variations being selected through breeding, to deliberate enhancement takes us from "evolution" to "intelligent design" by definition.

But he's right overall: we've transitioning into a period in which traits will be passed on by choice rather than by chance.

Right now, yes. But throw in some resource constraints and random violence, and then you've got competition among the "intelligently designed" progeny. Then you're back in evolutionary territory. It's just an evolution that is more conscious of itself.

The eventual ability to use a brain to reason about and change your own species's genes isn't evolutionarily selected for? The brain and human intelligence itself doesn't exist outside of evolution. If it turns out that humans being smart enough to modify their own genes doesn't work out, doesn't produce viable offspring, and ultimately loses out to undirected selection, would we say that that's a failing of our capabilities or that evolution didn't select for human control of their own gene selection? Does the answer to this question change over different time scales or if our evolution was to be studied by other intelligent species?

It ceases to be undirected natural selection, but continues to be evolution.

"Intelligent design" assumes an intelligence outside and other than humans. This is part of the "playing God" argument against research in this area. So while I agree that the term "intelligent design" may be more appropriate, that doesn't preclude it from still being "evolution" over the long term (which is largely what evolution is focused on). I'd also rather not have the terms get mixed up; calling this "intelligent design" serves to confuse the ongoing religion vs science argument/debate that is holding back innovation and laws in this area.

How about "human engineering" instead of intelligent design?

Exactly. By "evolution," Hawking doesn't mean "the biological process by which randomly generated, heritable traits that foster survival are passed on," he means "the gradual development of something, especially from a simple to a more complex form."

The human brain already does some selection based on genetic traits. And not just simple heath/fit = good DNA, but it also evaluates your immune system. Apparently people look for other people whose smell suggests that they have an "apposing" immune system so their children will have a wider range of immunity.

Just because I'm a programmer doesn't mean my progeny automatically are. Nothing I learn is passed on through my genes.

Hawking and yourself aren't describing evolution, you're describing learning and education.

No, you're missing the point. Hawking is saying that we're reaching the point where we actually can make modifications to our physical bodies both pre- and post-natally. I could see why you might be confused if you just read the first couple paragraphs of the article though.

Pre-natal we can apply selection, changing the initial population. However, the effect of that on survival is complicated.

Post-natal changes aren't inheritable. They can merely be applied to subsequent generations, which is not really evolution. These changes may affect survival, which can have a second order effect on genotype, but that's tricky and subtle. (If a culture cuts off foreskins for thousands of generations, will boys evolve to not have them at birth? By cutting them off, the population gets no benefit from having them, but there's no cost to being born with them.)

I did, in fact, read the entire article. Hawking says:

"""In the last ten thousand years the human species has been in what Hawking calls, "an external transmission phase," where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed significantly. "But the external record, in books, and other long lasting forms of storage," Hawking says, "has grown enormously. Some people would use the term, evolution, only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too narrow a view. We are more than just our genes."""

See? He's not talking about evolution. He's trying to redefine a biological concept in terms of something much more. What he's describing is learning, and specialization of behaviour through learning.

Evolution is not the same as natural selection. The switch is from natural selection to design, they are both methods of evolution.

Always cool to hear what Stephen has to say but there isn't anything most of us don't already know in the article.

but it's the first time someone didn't make it sound scary.

The future is going to be relatively great. Just like the present is great relative to the past.

There are about 3 billion people on Earth to whom your statement doesn't necessarily apply: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/397-eliminating-...

In purely economic terms, a lot of those 3 billion are a lot better off now than they would have been a century ago. The top of the list, Namibia, has US$5500 or so per-capita purchasing-power parity GDP. If your income is US$5500 per year, you're already pretty far up Maslow's hierarchy.

Of course, just because someone isn't starving to death doesn't imply that they aren't miserable; probably most people reading this comment know somebody in a rich country who has committed suicide.

"Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression."

Commit crime --> Get sent to Rehabilitation Center --> Get a few bits flipped in your DNA --> Off you go.

This could go Really Wrong (ex: extremist pacifists take control and turn off the aggression bits in everyone) but it's an interesting scenario.

The more inclusive corollary to Murphy's Law: Anything that can happen, will happen. I imagine we'll see a lot of positive change, as well as widespread injustice and abuse. So it goes.

There's a couple issues here: this would be fairly difficult, as you'd need to change the DNA in probably several billions of cells before any phenotypic change could be effected. Perhaps one mechanism may be to engineer a retrovirus that would rewrite portions of DNA. This could obviously have far more important impacts as well: such an RV could reprogram cancerous cells to die off like proper cells, or disable their angiogenic capability; and of course it could be programmed to rewrite genes implicated in diseases like sickle-cell anemia or multiple sclerosis.

Another issue is that while genetics of course plays a role in behavior, I think it plays out more in directing the development of the brain, not the actual millisecond-to-millisecond activities of it. Based on my ankle-deep knowledge of neuroscience, I think that adjusting the DNA is unlikely to cause an adult brain to rearrange itself in such a way as to modify behavior. A more likely use for it could be in adjusting brain chemistry, which I'm guessing can have dramatic, if not entirely targeted, effects.

> This could go Really Wrong (ex: extremist pacifists take control and turn off the aggression bits in everyone) but it's an interesting scenario.

Which isn't a problem until we encounter the Kzinti...

Perhaps where evolution is really happening, then, is in the criteria we use to decide which limited number of books to read.

So much important information is being posted outside books: on the web, on kindles, etc. In evolutionary terms this is about as reliable as keeping genes on mitochondrial DNA.

i think this is the whole script.

http://brembs.net/SWH.html

If you want the crotchety, overly pedantic, poorly critical response by PZ, http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/02/futurists_make_me...

just as DNA may have replaced an earlier form of life.

What might that form of life have been like? Was it on earth? Where did it go? Why don't we see any fossil or other remnants of it?

Without being an expert I believe that science leans toward the theory that RNA, or something similar, preceeded DNA.

If that happened, it was certainly a good time before there were multicellular life. Hence, no remnants.

There are some hints that there was an RNA-based world before DNA. A strong one is that ribosomes is made partly from RNA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis

I seem to remember hearing about some organism that only has RNA, but I couldn't find it with a quick search through wikipedia.

Are viruses organisms? They aren't, but they only have RNA.

An interesting link, if you have organic chemistry interests but haven't read that much on pre-RNA.

Thanks, should have checked that myself.

The Precambrian fossil record is pretty thin, even though DNA-based Precambrian life existed for about six times as long as we've had multicellular organisms. There's a discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life#From_organic_mol...

I have to agree but I think this happened as soon as we had language which was thought and learned and wasn't pure instinct like other animal vocalizations.

We should not ignore, once in a while, that we only talk about hypothesis here, quite nothing about his (certainly very interesting theories) can be proven empirically -- so it's far from universally acceptable, real, concrete science.

Sad to say this, but this kind of science has much more from fiction than from concrete science.

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