> Let me just completely dismiss your "evolution is a good optimizer" - it's a decent optimizer,
Perhaps I put it badly. I wasn't saying natural selection is perfect - just that it is better than us. Obviously it isn't perfect because evolution makes mistakes - our blood vessels being in front our rod and cones is an example.
So why don't we just fix that?
It because it's utterly beyond us. It's inevitably controlled by 1000's if not millions of genes acting in concert, tuning when they switching on and off according to the body they find themselves in (small or large) over our lifetimes. It's an extraordinarily complex mechanism.
We have made very simple adjustments to that mechanism. They are invariably involve just one gene that has one clear effect. But playing with something as complex as how the eye is laid out is completely and utterly beyond us and our computers. Yet natural selection pulled it off.
It really is just a question of computational power available. Natural selection is currently doing some phenomenal number (as in many zero beyond trillions) of experiments on eyeball construction every year. We can't hope to match that, and until we can natural selection will always out compete us in the "lets design a super organism" game.
So, when we do beat natural selection, it's in environments we create so the design natural selection chose is no longer optimal. Nonetheless it's only a temporary advantage, as our losing the battle against antibiotic resistant bacteria demonstrates. The same thing will happen with round up ready and Cowpea - we didn't just get round up ready crops, we also set in motion the mechanism that will create round up ready weeds. We had an advantage when we created round up ready crops - we cheated by taking an existing example from nature. Natural selection doesn't have that advantage, but over the long term it won't matter - it will just invent it again. Unlike us, it can do that. It really can create new super organisms. Right now we can't do better than copying what natural selection has done in other organisms.
Perhaps I put it badly. I wasn't saying natural selection is perfect - just that it is better than us. Obviously it isn't perfect because evolution makes mistakes - our blood vessels being in front our rod and cones is an example.
So why don't we just fix that?
It because it's utterly beyond us. It's inevitably controlled by 1000's if not millions of genes acting in concert, tuning when they switching on and off according to the body they find themselves in (small or large) over our lifetimes. It's an extraordinarily complex mechanism.
We have made very simple adjustments to that mechanism. They are invariably involve just one gene that has one clear effect. But playing with something as complex as how the eye is laid out is completely and utterly beyond us and our computers. Yet natural selection pulled it off.
It really is just a question of computational power available. Natural selection is currently doing some phenomenal number (as in many zero beyond trillions) of experiments on eyeball construction every year. We can't hope to match that, and until we can natural selection will always out compete us in the "lets design a super organism" game.
So, when we do beat natural selection, it's in environments we create so the design natural selection chose is no longer optimal. Nonetheless it's only a temporary advantage, as our losing the battle against antibiotic resistant bacteria demonstrates. The same thing will happen with round up ready and Cowpea - we didn't just get round up ready crops, we also set in motion the mechanism that will create round up ready weeds. We had an advantage when we created round up ready crops - we cheated by taking an existing example from nature. Natural selection doesn't have that advantage, but over the long term it won't matter - it will just invent it again. Unlike us, it can do that. It really can create new super organisms. Right now we can't do better than copying what natural selection has done in other organisms.