“The simple fact is that when one would be doing the editing and or selection, one would also make sure to keep the natural machinery for reproduction working.”
I had the exact same objection you did reading the exact same passage. He doesn’t seem to think of it himself despite claiming to have thought about this theory for five years? It’s very odd.
Once you have a car (artificial births) it is natural to invest less in the old way (walking and horses as natural births). But tech types do understand back ups (store your data in multiple data centers so if any one goes down your system stays up)
Sure there will be redundacy but there will be no need to keep natural births as a backup, just keep artifical wombs and genomic information in multiple locations and bunkers
With artifical wombs there will be no need for natural reproduction, perhaps the sexual organs will be maintained for social bonding reasons but the reproductive aspect will be unnessarary and perhaps detrimental
It's good to have a backup solution in case of some catastrophe. It would be very unwise to remove functional sexual reproduction just because some people die of testosterone/cervical cancer.
There's a cost for that backup solution besides cancer and that's natural babies, every natural birth is less resources for gene selected babies. Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper just to keep caches of artifical wombs in multiple locations and bunkers? In evolution it's use it or lose it, an example of this is Mexican tetra(cave fish) losing its eyes. The evotionary pressure and social pressure will be towards less and less natural reproduction due to the domainance of selected babies, as JFG states in the final chapter of TRP
Evolution/selection through differential reproduction never stops. It seems that a lot of people forget that. If embryo selection tends to select for infertility genes because infertile couples are using it, then, yes, some infertility genes may tend to get propagated. But right now it's being used by elites who are only infertile because they "forgot" to have babies during their naturally fertile years. So this doesn't seem to be a big concern.
Besides, natural selection in the wild currently seems to be pretty dysgenic (from our cultural phenotype preferences, anyway). Sci-Fi speculation about it going off the rails many generations in the future hardly seems like a reason to be against it now.
I mean, it is correct that any form of artificial reproductive technology (ART) selects for infertility. However, as you say, most human infertility is due to women being too old, which is not a direct genetic cause per se (it is of course caused by genetic variations that control behavior that lead to delayed reproduction). This adverse selection from ART problem is not unique to humans, the same issue exists for ART in animals and plants.
All we have to do is make genetic models that predict fertility issues and select against them. E.g., here's some cow breeders doing this thing already.
Not to mention we can, and should, be pushing towards a society that encourages the smart and law-abiding to reproduce early and often, and to encourage against the opposite. The fact that our smartest and most upstanding citizens are the worst at getting laid and the worst at making babies needs to be recognized as the biggest social catastrophe of today. Though it's at many points throughout history been an issue, it need not be one we actively make worse, as everything in our present-day society encourages it to be.
I don't agree with him politically, nothing in his personal life shows a lack of integrity, personal or professonal. He's respected in the scientific community and have endorsed numerous other books including 'The Selfish Gene'
His argument does seem to fail the obvious and significant stress tests that he surely would expect to be applied by skeptics. But a type of his concept of the phenotype revolution is very much on the cards even now.With western society and culture simultaneously promoting the ongoing reduction of the white native birth rate and miscegenation by mostly white females with blacks and browns and homosexual males using surrogates to give birth to babies from those selected embryos that change is already taking place.
In fairness to the Wachowski Autogynephiles, they didn't want to turn humans into batteries. They had human serving as a biological neural network, but the suits at Warner Bros. thought this would be too complicated for the flyover cows of '99 to understand, so they dumbed it down. They also didn't fight back on this, presumably because they got a stupidly good deal from the studio on the revenue split and didn't wanna rock the boat.
Still have no idea how they made such a good film as they never came close to following it up. Maybe all those forced-feminization dominatrix sessions broke their nerd brains:
I mean, even if it could work,* you'd think The Matrix would just run on cows or sheep or something. We've been enslaving them for thousands of years, and have had not a hint of trouble nor rebellion from them. If anything, domestication has been a huge net benefit to them.
That said, while the boineural network thing is significantly more plausible, and I'm sad they didn't push to keep it in, it doesn't seem terribly likely to me, neither. Surely any machines with enough intelligence, capability, and willpower to enslave humanity wouldn't need to rely on us for anything; bioneural network, biobattery, or otherwise; in the same way as we don't rely on gorillas or dolphins for anything, especially with the decline of whaling and exotic-animal performance.
I thought the book was about the phenotype of revolutionaries, you know, a more intellectual version of those "look at these mugshots of Portland antifa" posts we used to see on Twitter.
“The simple fact is that when one would be doing the editing and or selection, one would also make sure to keep the natural machinery for reproduction working.”
I had the exact same objection you did reading the exact same passage. He doesn’t seem to think of it himself despite claiming to have thought about this theory for five years? It’s very odd.
Once you have a car (artificial births) it is natural to invest less in the old way (walking and horses as natural births). But tech types do understand back ups (store your data in multiple data centers so if any one goes down your system stays up)
Sure there will be redundacy but there will be no need to keep natural births as a backup, just keep artifical wombs and genomic information in multiple locations and bunkers
With artifical wombs there will be no need for natural reproduction, perhaps the sexual organs will be maintained for social bonding reasons but the reproductive aspect will be unnessarary and perhaps detrimental
It's good to have a backup solution in case of some catastrophe. It would be very unwise to remove functional sexual reproduction just because some people die of testosterone/cervical cancer.
There's a cost for that backup solution besides cancer and that's natural babies, every natural birth is less resources for gene selected babies. Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper just to keep caches of artifical wombs in multiple locations and bunkers? In evolution it's use it or lose it, an example of this is Mexican tetra(cave fish) losing its eyes. The evotionary pressure and social pressure will be towards less and less natural reproduction due to the domainance of selected babies, as JFG states in the final chapter of TRP
Evolution/selection through differential reproduction never stops. It seems that a lot of people forget that. If embryo selection tends to select for infertility genes because infertile couples are using it, then, yes, some infertility genes may tend to get propagated. But right now it's being used by elites who are only infertile because they "forgot" to have babies during their naturally fertile years. So this doesn't seem to be a big concern.
Besides, natural selection in the wild currently seems to be pretty dysgenic (from our cultural phenotype preferences, anyway). Sci-Fi speculation about it going off the rails many generations in the future hardly seems like a reason to be against it now.
I mean, it is correct that any form of artificial reproductive technology (ART) selects for infertility. However, as you say, most human infertility is due to women being too old, which is not a direct genetic cause per se (it is of course caused by genetic variations that control behavior that lead to delayed reproduction). This adverse selection from ART problem is not unique to humans, the same issue exists for ART in animals and plants.
All we have to do is make genetic models that predict fertility issues and select against them. E.g., here's some cow breeders doing this thing already.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-09170-9
Here's some human researchers studying the genetic basis of male infertility.
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-3897/3/3/18
Not a big worry. Known problem with known solutions that are already in use in animal breeding.
Not to mention we can, and should, be pushing towards a society that encourages the smart and law-abiding to reproduce early and often, and to encourage against the opposite. The fact that our smartest and most upstanding citizens are the worst at getting laid and the worst at making babies needs to be recognized as the biggest social catastrophe of today. Though it's at many points throughout history been an issue, it need not be one we actively make worse, as everything in our present-day society encourages it to be.
I don't disagree, but there's nothing I can do about this issue. It's a cultural problem.
Jean Francois Gariepy is just another doomsayer trying to make a buck from the idiot portion of the populace.
I usually finish listening to most Alex Kaschuta podcasts. When he was on there I just couldn't do it. Too much pseudo-scientific overreach.
Renowned evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist Robert Trivers seems to be part of that populace. He endorsed the book
"Renowned evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist Robert Trivers seems to be part of that populace."
That is not uncommon 'renowned' personalities sometimes are full of crap.
Huey P. Newton and Trrivers were close friends; Newton was godfather to one of Trivers' daughters. Renowned indeed. LOL
What does Trivers' personal life have to do with this? He endorsed the book as a biologist not as a political actor
"What does Trivers' personal life have to do with this?"
His personal life shows a lack of integrity; he can not be trusted.
I don't agree with him politically, nothing in his personal life shows a lack of integrity, personal or professonal. He's respected in the scientific community and have endorsed numerous other books including 'The Selfish Gene'
"I don't agree with him politically, nothing in his personal life shows a lack of integrity, personal or professonal (sic).
The fact that he befriends a scumbag like Huey P. Newton and, on top of that, names him the godfather of his daughter gives claim to his integrity.
"He's respected in the scientific community and have endorsed numerous other books including 'The Selfish Gene'"
I am aware of the leftist pseudo-scientific cadre he is part of.
His argument does seem to fail the obvious and significant stress tests that he surely would expect to be applied by skeptics. But a type of his concept of the phenotype revolution is very much on the cards even now.With western society and culture simultaneously promoting the ongoing reduction of the white native birth rate and miscegenation by mostly white females with blacks and browns and homosexual males using surrogates to give birth to babies from those selected embryos that change is already taking place.
In fairness to the Wachowski Autogynephiles, they didn't want to turn humans into batteries. They had human serving as a biological neural network, but the suits at Warner Bros. thought this would be too complicated for the flyover cows of '99 to understand, so they dumbed it down. They also didn't fight back on this, presumably because they got a stupidly good deal from the studio on the revenue split and didn't wanna rock the boat.
Still have no idea how they made such a good film as they never came close to following it up. Maybe all those forced-feminization dominatrix sessions broke their nerd brains:
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/from-the-memory-hole-rolling-stones
https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/science-behind-the-fiction-humans-as-batteries-as-in-the-matrix-probably-not-gonna-happen
I mean, even if it could work,* you'd think The Matrix would just run on cows or sheep or something. We've been enslaving them for thousands of years, and have had not a hint of trouble nor rebellion from them. If anything, domestication has been a huge net benefit to them.
That said, while the boineural network thing is significantly more plausible, and I'm sad they didn't push to keep it in, it doesn't seem terribly likely to me, neither. Surely any machines with enough intelligence, capability, and willpower to enslave humanity wouldn't need to rely on us for anything; bioneural network, biobattery, or otherwise; in the same way as we don't rely on gorillas or dolphins for anything, especially with the decline of whaling and exotic-animal performance.
*Which it can't, it's preposterous on its face.
I thought the book was about the phenotype of revolutionaries, you know, a more intellectual version of those "look at these mugshots of Portland antifa" posts we used to see on Twitter.
Thanks a lot. I read it recently and have my own criticisms. Can’t wait to read what you have to say on this