He nevertheless proceeds as if this is something that is generally true, with it only being false in exceptional situations. There is no reason to suppose that this is generally true, which makes the heuristic useless, and hence his reasoning gets very shaky, for example:
How about opiates? Morphine and other painkillers can easily be justified as evolution not knowing when a knife cut is by a murderous enemy and when it’s by a kindly surgeon (which didn’t exist way back when), and choosing to make us err on the side of always feeling pain. But recreational drug abuse?
#1 doesn’t seem too plausible - what about modern society would favor opiate consumption outside of medicinal use? If one wishes to deaden the despair and ennui of living in a degenerate atheistic material culture, we have beer for that.57
#3 doesn’t work either; opioids have been around for ages and work via the standard brain machinery.
#2 might work here as well, but this dumps us straight into the debate about the War on Drugs and what harm drug use does to the user & society.
He completely misses here what he wrote himself earlier for example about there not existing a simple mutation from the current state to the "desired" one.
There is reason to believe that it's true except in exceptional situations, and this is covered in the article:
Theoretical calculations apparently indicate that in a changing environment, the fitness gap between the current allele and its alternatives will be small and large gaps exponentially rare19; this is as one would expect from the market analogue (the bigger the arbitrage, the faster it will be exploited).
I understand this research to say: if there exists a simple mutation that is hugely beneficial, it will spread fast. This does not mean every beneficial change to the DNA we as intelligent beings can come up with can be expected to have most likely already happened in the course of evolution. The article acknowledges this at one point, but some of the further discussion in uninformed by this issue.
> He completely misses here what he wrote himself earlier for example about there not existing a simple mutation from the current state to the "desired" one.
We don't need a simple mutation. Learned associations and mental activity is quite enough for generating or suppressing pain. People can be terrified and panicked at the presence of particular people, pain can be controlled by hypnosis, or caused by phantom limbs. Is there a mutation, simple or complex, for phantom limbs? If I beat my dog brutally every day, does he need mutations to experience pain and stress at my approach?
I don't understand what this is about now. I understand in this fragment you are discussing why can't we make pain go completely away at will, and why didn't evolution invent such a thing. Among the causes you don't consider is this not being beneficiary overall, or not being "a simple mutation away" at any point of our evolution so far, both of which are perfectly feasible explanations.
How about opiates? Morphine and other painkillers can easily be justified as evolution not knowing when a knife cut is by a murderous enemy and when it’s by a kindly surgeon (which didn’t exist way back when), and choosing to make us err on the side of always feeling pain. But recreational drug abuse?
#1 doesn’t seem too plausible - what about modern society would favor opiate consumption outside of medicinal use? If one wishes to deaden the despair and ennui of living in a degenerate atheistic material culture, we have beer for that.57
#3 doesn’t work either; opioids have been around for ages and work via the standard brain machinery.
#2 might work here as well, but this dumps us straight into the debate about the War on Drugs and what harm drug use does to the user & society.
He completely misses here what he wrote himself earlier for example about there not existing a simple mutation from the current state to the "desired" one.