58 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2023
  2. Sep 2023
    1. synthetic bioengineering provides a really astronomically large option space for new bodies and new minds that don't have 00:04:28 standard evolutionary backstories
      • for: cultural evolution, cumulative cultural evolution, CCE, bioengineering, novel life form, culturally evolved life, bioethics, progress trap, progress trap - bioengineering, progress trap - genetic engineering
      • comment
        • cultural evolution, which itself emerges from biological evolution is acting upon itself to create new life forms that have no evolutionary backstory
        • this is tantamount to playing God
        • progress traps often emerge out of the large speed mismatch between cultural and biological/genetic evolution.
        • Nowhere is this more profound than in bioengineering of new forms of life with no evolutionary history
        • This presents profound ethical challenges
  3. Aug 2023
      • for: gene culture coevolution, carrying capacity, unsustainability, overshoot, cultural evolution, progress trap

      • Title: The genetic and cultural evolution of unsustainability

      • Author: Brian F. Snyder

      • Abstract

      • Summary
      • Paraphrase
        • Anthropogenic changes are accelerating and threaten the future of life on earth.
        • While the proximate mechanisms of these anthropogenic changes are well studied
          • climate change,
          • biodiversity loss,
          • population growth
        • the evolutionary causality of these anthropogenic changes have been largely ignored.
        • Anthroecological theory (AET) proposes that the ultimate cause of anthropogenic environmental change is
          • multi-level selection for niche construction and ecosystem engineering.
        • Here, we integrate this theory with
          • Lotka’s Maximum Power Principle
        • and propose a model linking
          • energy extraction from the environment with
          • genetic, technological and cultural evolution
        • to increase human ecosystem carrying capacity.
        • Carrying capacity is partially determined by energetic factors such as
          • the net energy a population can acquire from its environment and
          • the efficiency of conversion from energy input to offspring output.
        • These factors are under Darwinian genetic selection
        • in all species,
        • but in humans, they are also determined by
          • technology and
          • culture.
        • If there is genetic or non-genetic heritable variation in
          • the ability of an individual or social group
        • to increase its carrying capacity,
        • then we hypothesize that - selection or cultural evolution will act - to increase carrying capacity.
        • Furthermore, if this evolution of carrying capacity occurs - faster than the biotic components of the ecological system can respond via their own evolution,
          • then we hypothesize that unsustainable ecological changes will result.
  4. Mar 2023
    1. In literature genetic criticism studies the development of a work from reading notesand drafts; this approach is most feasible after the mid-19th century, once national librariesstarted amassing the working papers of authors, either by bequest or by purchase.5

      National libraries began to more commonly acquire the working papers (nachlass) of authors and researchers after the mid-19th century.

    1. It has been suggested that - the human species may be undergoing an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI).

      there is disagreement about - how to apply the ETI framework to our species - and whether culture is implicated - as either cause or consequence.

      Long-term gene–culture coevolution (GCC) i- s - also poorly understood.

      argued that - culture steers human evolution,

      Others proposed - genes hold culture on a leash.

      After review of the literature and evidence on long-term GCC in humans - emerge a set of common themes. - First, culture appears to hold greater adaptive potential than genetic inheritance - and is probably driving human evolution. - The evolutionary impact of culture occurs - mainly through culturally organized groups, - which have come to dominate human affairs in recent millennia. - Second, the role of culture appears to be growing, - increasingly bypassing genetic evolution and weakening genetic adaptive potential. -Taken together, these findings suggest that human long-term GCC is characterized by - an evolutionary transition in inheritance - from genes to culture - which entails a transition in individuality (from genetic individual to cultural group). Research on GCC should focus on the possibility of - an ongoing transition in the human inheritance system.

    1. Here's why: Culture is group-oriented, and people in those groups talk to, learn from and imitate one another. These group behaviors allow people to pass on adaptations they learned through culture faster than genes can transmit similar survival benefits. An individual can learn skills and information from a nearly unlimited number of people in a small amount of time and, in turn, spread that information to many others. And the more people available to learn from, the better. Large groups solve problems faster than smaller groups, and intergroup competition stimulates adaptations that might help those groups survive. As ideas spread, cultures develop new traits.In contrast, a person only inherits genetic information from two parents and racks up relatively few random mutations in their eggs or sperm, which takes about 20 years to be passed on to their small handful of children. That's just a much slower pace of change.
      • key observation
      • paraphrase
      • why cultural evolution is too fast for genetic evolution

        • Culture is group-oriented, and people in those groups talk to, learn from and imitate one another.
        • These group behaviors allow people to pass on adaptations they learned through culture faster than genes can transmit similar survival benefits.
        • An individual can learn skills and information from a nearly unlimited number of people in a small amount of time
          • and, in turn, spread that information to many others.
        • And the more people available to learn from, the better.
        • Large groups solve problems faster than smaller groups,
        • and intergroup competition stimulates adaptations that might help those groups survive.
        • As ideas spread, cultures develop new traits.

        • In contrast, a person only inherits genetic information from two parents

          • and racks up relatively few random mutations in their eggs or sperm, which takes about 20 years to be passed on to their small handful of children.
        • That's just a much slower pace of change.
    2. human culture may be driving evolution faster than genetic mutations can work.

      !- key finding - human culture may be driving evolution faster than genetic mutation can work - the major delay, measured in many orders of magnitude - does not allow genetic evolution to adapt quickly enough - to harmful environmental changes brought about through cultural evolution

    3. Humans might be making genetic evolution obsolete
      • TItle: Humans might be making genetic evolution obsolete
  5. Jan 2023
    1. In the near future, we will be in possession of genetic engineering technology which allows us to move genes precisely and massively from one species to another. Careless or commercially driven use of this technology could make the concept of species meaningless, mixing up populations and mating systems so that much of the individuality of species would be lost. Cultural evolution gave us the power to do this. To preserve our wildlife as nature evolved it, the machinery of biological evolution must be protected from the homogenizing effects of cultural evolution.

      !- Progress trap : genetic engineering - careless use of genetic engineering will interfere with biological evolution

    2. In each case, a small population produced a star-burst of pioneers who permanently changed our way of thinking. Genius erupted in groups as well as in individuals. It seems likely that these bursts of creative change were driven by a combination of cultural with biological evolution. Cultural evolution was constantly spreading ideas and skills from one community to another, stirring up conservative societies with imported novelties. At the same time, biological evolution acting on small genetically isolated populations was causing genetic drift, so that the average intellectual endowment of isolated communities was rising and falling by random chance. Over the last few thousand years, genetic drift caused occasional star-bursts to occur, when small populations rose to outstandingly high levels of average ability. The combination of imported new ideas with peaks of genetic drift would enable local communities to change the world.

      !- explaining human history : combination of cultural and biological evolution

    3. Nature is forcing genetic drift to move faster in mating systems than in other bodily functions. If this is generally true, as Goodenough observes, it means that genetic drift in mating systems must have a special importance as a driving force of evolution. She proposes a general theory to explain the facts. In the big picture of life evolving over billions of years, established species with large populations evolve slowly and have a mainly conservative effect on the balance of Nature. The big jumps in evolution occur when established species become extinct and new species with small populations diversify. The big jumps, made by new species, are driven by genetic drift of small populations. For small populations to form new species, they must become genetically isolated. Rapid change of mating systems is a quick road to genetic isolation. Goodenough concludes that the rapid mutation of mating-system genes is Nature's way of achieving big jumps in large-scale evolution. Rapidly evolving mating systems gave us the diversity of species that astonished Darwin.

      !- Ursula Goodenough : rapid evolution of mating genes

    4. Nature knows that, in the long run, established species are expendable and new species are essential. That is why Nature is ruthless to the individual parent and generous to the emerging species. Risk-taking is the key to long-term survival and is also the mother of diversity.

      !- nature is designed with a natural bias : it favours new emerging species over established ones

    5. Kimura's theory explains the diversity paradox that puzzled Darwin. Why are we surrounded by such an astonishing diversity of birds and insects and microbes? From the point of view of Darwin, a small number of dominant species would have been sufficient. Kimura explains the mystery by invoking the power of genetic drift, which becomes suddenly rapid and effective just when it is needed, when small populations can vary fast enough to become genetically isolated and form new species.

      !- solution to : diversity paradox - genetic drift

    6. Sewall Wright, then 98 years old but still in full possession of his wits. He gave me a first-hand account of how he read Mendel's paper and decided to devote his life to understanding the consequences of Mendel's ideas. Wright understood that the inheritance of genes would cause a fundamental randomness in all evolutionary processes. The phenomenon of randomness in evolution was called Genetic Drift. Kimura came to Wisconsin to learn about Genetic Drift, and then returned to Japan. He built Genetic Drift into a mathematical theory which he called the Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution.

      !- Sewall Wright : genetic drift

    7. In the near future, we will be in possession of genetic engineering technology which allows us to move genes precisely and massively from one species to another. Careless or commercially driven use of this technology could make the concept of species meaningless, mixing up populations and mating systems so that much of the individuality of species would be lost. Cultural evolution gave us the power to do this. To preserve our wildlife as nature evolved it, the machinery of biological evolution must be protected from the homogenizing effects of cultural evolution.

      !- genetic engineering : risk - cultural evolution via genetic engineering could make the concept of species meaningless - it is a significant b potential progress traps

  6. Dec 2022
    1. at some point in human history, culture began to wrest evolutionary control from our DNA. And now, they say, cultural change is allowing us to evolve in ways biological change alone could not.

      !- in other words : cultural evolution is transcending traditional genetic evolution

  7. Sep 2022
    1. if cultural evolution is sufficiently rapid, it may act to pre-empt and slow genetic evolution. That is, in solving adaptive challenges before genetic evolution takes place, cultural inheritance may reduce the opportunity for natural selection on genes and weaken the adaptive value of information stored in genetic inheritance in the long term. This process is the opposite of genetic assimilation, in which a plastic trait becomes genetically encoded. We call this mode of GCC cultural pre-emption.

      !- Question : Genetic Evolution

      Does this mean that our predominantly cultural evolution threatens to freeze our genetic evolution? This is possible, since genetic evolution takes place on time scales that are orders of magnitudes larger than cultural evolution Unless theoretically proposed, it may have escaped detection for a long time

    2. Evidence [28] and theory [29] support the assertion that cultural evolution is more rapid than genetic evolution [27,28,30,31], even when measured on comparable scales [30,31]. One simple reason for this difference is that the ‘generation time’, G, of cultural transmission can be orders of magnitude shorter than that of genetic transmission [30]. In humans, the average time between the birth of parents and the birth of their offspring, genetic G, ranges from roughly 2 to 3 decades, while cultural G, the average time between learning a piece of information and transmitting it, ranges from seconds to decades. Thus, it is reasonable to presume that cultural inheritance may provide greater adaptive capacity than genetic inheritance.

      !- definition : Generation time - generation time of genetic transmission in range of 2 to 3 decades while for cultural transmission can vary from seconds to decades.

  8. Aug 2022
  9. Jul 2022
  10. bafybeiapea6l2v2aio6hvjs6vywy6nuhiicvmljt43jtjvu3me2v3ghgmi.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeiapea6l2v2aio6hvjs6vywy6nuhiicvmljt43jtjvu3me2v3ghgmi.ipfs.dweb.link
    1. Many hotspots ofagrobiodiversity and of crop wild relatives arealso under threat or lack formal protection(58), jeopardizing the pool of genetic varia-tion that underpins the long-term resilienceof agricultural production and food systemsin the face of environmental change (59).

      loss of genetic variation threatens future food production systems.

  11. Jun 2022
    1. Kahler et al. (2011)and Kahler (2010) found that wild rice populations in lakes and rivers at the landscape scale tend to behighly distinct from one another and that the St. Louis River estuary may have its own “genetic identity”(Kern and Kahler 2014).

      Highly distinct populations with own genetic identity. Check out these papers for in depth info on Manomin genetic diversity - Kahler et al 2011, Kahler 2010, Kern and Kahler 2014

  12. May 2022
    1. Indeed, as David Haskell, a biologist and writer, notes, a tree is “a community of cells” from many species: “fungus, bacteria, protist, alga, nematode and plant.” And often “the smallest viable genetic unit [is] … the networked community.”

      Explore this idea....

      What does it look like quantitatively?

  13. Apr 2022
    1. DICER1 syndrome is a rare genetic disorder that predisposes individuals to multiple cancer types

      GeneName: DICER1 PMID (PubMed ID): 29762508 HGNCID: Unavailable Inheritance Pattern: Autosomal Dominant Disease Entity: cancer, rare genetic disorder, pleuroplumonary blastomas, cystic nephroma, rhabdomyosarcoma, multinodular goiter, thyroid cancer, overian Sertoli-Leydig cell tumors, and other meoplasias Mutations: Germline mutations or Somatic mutations Zygosity: Heterozygosity Variant: unregistered Family Information: Cystic nephromas has been reported in approximately 12% of children with pleuripulmonary blastomas or those with a family member with cystic nephroma. Patient with two DICER1 mutations and several of his family members shared these mutations. All members developed a least one type of tumor with differing origins. The patient was an 11-year old boy with a rare Hodgkin lymphoma with DICER1 in 2016. (c.5299delC and c.4616C>T).

    1. Genetic criti-cism seeks to reconstruct the creative process of great authors by examining thesuccession of working papers from reading notes to drafts and editorial changes.
    2. The study of personal papers was pioneered by a school of literary criticism (“ge-netic criticism”) that focused on famous authors of the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies who often deposited their papers in national libraries.
  14. Feb 2022
  15. Jan 2022
  16. Dec 2021
    1. The role of accidents in the theory of science is not disputed, If you employ evolutionary models, accidents assume a most important role. Without them, nothing happens, no progress is made. Without variation in the given material of ideas, there are no possibilities of examining and selecting novelties. The real problem thus becomes therefore one of producing accidents with sufficiently enhanced probabilities for selection.
  17. Nov 2021
  18. Oct 2021
  19. Sep 2021
  20. Jul 2021
  21. Mar 2021
  22. Feb 2021
  23. Dec 2020
  24. Nov 2020
    1. Chromosomal:eory of Inheritanc

      This states that chromosomes drive the genetic heredity of living organisms. Chromosome behavior takes part in segregation, assortment, and sometimes linkage.

  25. Sep 2020
    1. Blokland, I. V. van, Lanting, P., Ori, A. P., Vonk, J. M., Warmerdam, R. C., Herkert, J. C., Boulogne, F., Claringbould, A., Lopera-Maya, E. A., Bartels, M., Hottenga, J.-J., Ganna, A., Karjalainen, J., Study, L. C.-19 cohort, Initiative, T. C.-19 H. G., Hayward, C., Fawns-Ritchie, C., Campbell, A., Porteous, D., … Franke, L. H. (2020). Using symptom-based case predictions to identify host genetic factors that contribute to COVID-19 susceptibility. MedRxiv, 2020.08.21.20177246. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.21.20177246

  26. Jul 2020
    1. This encounter then came to mind during a smaller conference the following spring when Tony Kubiak spoke of the recent creation of a chimeric human-cat protein intended to block allergic reactions (in humans).6

      Genetic manipulation has been a running gag/ideal within the furry community for as long as it has existed. The idea of transformation by any means possible is appealing, and these sorts of genetic components would go a long way in establishing that sense of identity.

  27. Apr 2020
    1. The genetic plurality is passed horizontally among bacteria in the wound, adding to the resistance to treatment and allowing the bacteria to avoid the defense mechanisms of the host such as bacterial phagocytosis, neutrophil degranulation, and formation of reactive oxygen species.
  28. Dec 2019
    1. a few simple design principles: high expression of genetic circuits comes with the cost of low evolutionary stability, avoid repeated sequences, and the use of inducible promoters increases stability. Inclusion of an antibiotic resistance gene within the circuit does not ensure evolutionary stability.
  29. Feb 2019
  30. Jan 2019
  31. Mar 2018
    1. have been selectively bred

      There's a difference between selective breeding and altering via genetic engineering. I believe that genetic modification falls into the second category, always.

  32. Nov 2017
  33. Oct 2017
    1. ‘DeExtinction Movement’ (The Long Now Foundation, 2014b). This project supports the genetic engineering of endangered species (altering them physically to become more resilient in the Anthropocene) and the cloning and wholesale re-creation of extinct ones—passenger pigeons, wooly mammoths—work that founder Stewart Brand promotes as ‘genetic rescue’.

      The Long Now Foundation and its views open up a whole chasm of moral, ethical, and legal questions with this 'DeExtinction Movement'. How is genetically engineering endangered species a form of 'genetic rescue'? These species are dying out because of man and man's actions, which is a terrible reflection of the worst part of human nature, but it does not give us the right to clone nature and 'whitewash' all that we have done before. Just because we may have the capacity to do so, does not mean we should. We cannot simply decide that extinction is fine because we can create genetically engineered species in the future to 'make up' for our mistakes. How are we expected to learn from our mistakes if we can simply rewind and start again?

  34. Jun 2017
    1. R1a lineages form only about 17.5 % of Indian male lineage, and an even smaller percentage of the female lineage. The vast majority of Indians owe their ancestry mostly to people from other migrations, starting with the original Out of Africa migrations of around 55,000 to 65,000 years ago, or the farming-related migrations from West Asia that probably occurred in multiple waves after 10,000 B.C., or the migrations of Austro-Asiatic speakers such as the Munda from East Asia the dating of which is yet to determined, and the migrations of Tibeto-Burman speakers such as the Garo again from east Asia, the dating of which is also yet to be determined.
  35. May 2015
    1. Transhumanists are at war with the bioconservatives. This just sounds like a William Gibson sci-fi novel. We live in amazing times. That said, global bans on technology and science never work; they just really mess things up. Regardless of what the bioconservatives think, there are cultures that will embrace these technologies (and already do). Historically, and possibly without exception, countries that ban or hobble new technologies eventually regret it because at least some of their neighbors will not follow suit. Further, by outright turning their back on the technology, they lose any voice they might have had in determining how it will be employed.

  36. Feb 2015
    1. SCID is the most severe form of primary immunodeficiencies,[4] and there are now at least nine different known genes in which mutations lead to a form of SCID.[5]
  37. Sep 2013
    1. A child who has been veryleniently brought up can acquire a very strict conscience. But it would also be wrong to exaggerate thisindependence; it is not difficult to convince oneself that severity of upbringing does also exert a stronginfluence on the formation of the child’s super-ego.

      genetic vs. environmental influences on the formation of conscience