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Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

interestingengineering.com

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Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#121

Post by hutzlibu »

grawprog wrote: post #94
vikramkr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're giving nature too much credit. Nature doesn't try and balance life. Nature doesn't care- it throws asteroid impacts and supervolcanos and natural disasters all over the place. Life just happens to be very very resilient and consistently able to jump back and fill new niches. Nature also "created" us - were a product of the universe like everything else. If we are destabilizing, so is nature. And most scientist…

I don't give it credit, like it's trying to gain balance, but functioning ecosystems do maintain a balance. Most of our climate problems have come from humans disrupting this. If you take any functioning healthy ecosystem on earth, one generally less tampered with by humans, you'll find from a microscopic, right up to a macroscopic level, the life in those ecosystems have adapted to function together. If you want to…

"I prefer the native songbirds and shrubs that are local to my area than a landscape full of Japanese knotweed and starlings."

Don't you think, you feel that way, because you grew up with the native songbirds?

"If we barely understand how life works on a macroscopic level, what makes us think we're ready to change it at an even lower level? "

Like the other poster have said: nature does not plan in advance or makes ethical discussions. Nature just is and everything in it trys to adapt. Some prosper, some die out. Now with our technology we disrupted quite a bit, but why must we understand everything we do, when nature aparrently does not either?

With research like this, I am more worried, what things like this, does to us. To maybe get to the point, where new babys are created in a laboratory and the less successful experiments goes to the bin. All for Evolution.

Now I am grossed out by that thought. But from a philosophical point of view, I have to ask myself: "who defines that this is bad?"

Maybe this gets us to the stars, so life can spread, in case earth life gets vanished, by a big asteroid. So maybe it is ethical to do all we can, to get there? To preserve life itself? (humans are not at all adopted for space, radiation, zero g etc., so CRISPR?)

(well no, I don't think it is ethical to do by all means, but I do think ethics are subjective and the next generations might have different ethics)

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#123

Post by ben_w »

renewiltord wrote: post #89
layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, we’ve read The Selfish Gene, too.

Naturally, it's 50 years old and one of the most influential science books of all time. If you hadn't, then the reference wouldn't work as well.

What it’s worth I haven’t read that book (or seen that passage before) and I still understood.

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#124

Post by mlavin »

hutzlibu wrote: post #121
grawprog wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't give it credit, like it's trying to gain balance, but functioning ecosystems do maintain a balance. Most of our climate problems have come from humans disrupting this. If you take any functioning healthy ecosystem on earth, one generally less tampered with by humans, you'll find from a microscopic, right up to a macroscopic level, the life in those ecosystems have adapted to function together. If you want to…

"I prefer the native songbirds and shrubs that are local to my area than a landscape full of Japanese knotweed and starlings." Don't you think, you feel that way, because you grew up with the native songbirds? "If we barely understand how life works on a macroscopic level, what makes us think we're ready to change it at an even lower level? " Like the other poster have said: nature does not plan in advance or makes e…

It's an easy qualitative decision to consider a variety of species with pleasant calls and plants which coexist in their own niches better than swarms of one single species of bird and an aggressively invasive plant species which chokes out all other growth. Knotweed in particular is an absolute pox on the landscape in North America.

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#125

Post by renewiltord »

ben_w wrote: post #123
renewiltord wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naturally, it's 50 years old and one of the most influential science books of all time. If you hadn't, then the reference wouldn't work as well.

What it’s worth I haven’t read that book (or seen that passage before) and I still understood.

Richard Dawkins did do very well with the way he expressed the concept. It is quite intuitive for something of such great significance. Easy to forget, I suppose for me, how intuitive it is.

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#126

Post by ajuc »

renewiltord wrote: post #55
grawprog wrote: post #46

I find it hard to describe how I feel about this. These scientists essentially created what may have been a new species, that perhaps would have had similar sentience to us and had them terminated after 100 days. The cat's out of the bag with this research so to speak now. Someone's bound to do this again The part about whether they should have been born or not, which was the ethical thing is what tears at me. Is it…

Our track record for messing with the fundamental fabric of reality is creating antibiotics, and over the period of a century saving so many lives that wars of earlier periods are negligible in comparison. A natural reaction from people with high sanctity/degradation (in the MFT sense) is to avoid touching the trolley lever at all points. Decision making is considered association with the decision. The naturalistic f…

> If you can uplift species and you choose not to, you have killed their cognition.

By that logic you killed all the kids you could have made when you weren't having sex.

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#127

Post by wombatmobile »

grawprog wrote: post #46

I find it hard to describe how I feel about this. These scientists essentially created what may have been a new species, that perhaps would have had similar sentience to us and had them terminated after 100 days. The cat's out of the bag with this research so to speak now. Someone's bound to do this again The part about whether they should have been born or not, which was the ethical thing is what tears at me. Is it…

> The cat's out of the bag with this research so to speak now. Someone's bound to do this again

If they do it again and again and again, the progress will be substantial, and society stands to benefit enormously.

With exponential increases in the parts of the brain responsible for intelligence, morality and justice, imagine a future president of the United States elected from this cohort.

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#128

Post by jjoonathan »

nwienert wrote: post #113
hohloma wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re missing survivorship bias - nature didn’t just create these balanced ecosystems, it creates anything that goes, and things that don’t work out just die. Humans ruining earth for themselves is just as natural, just that we might die as result. But life won’t - it’s much more resilient than just one species. Or several.

Following this line of logic you can justify anything. If I kill your entire family, that’s natural. Would you be ok with that? I think if you accept at all that there is suffering and there is beauty, then you shouldn’t hide behind “everything’s natural” and instead try and have a backbone and stick up for something more.

That's the point: naturalism can justify anything, and that makes it a poor guiding principle. As do many other things.

There are many natural things that are good. Clean air, unique little ecosystems like GP describes, endless variety -- and we should strive to respect and preserve those, but not because they are natural. Poor animals teeming with parasites, population "balance" maintained through periodic overpopulation and starvation (How do people think it happens? Forest fairies tell the deer how many babies to have?), predators feasting on the organs of their prey while the prey is still alive. All these things are natural but not good and we should not seek to replicate them.

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#129

Post by Vinnl »

grawprog wrote: post #46

I find it hard to describe how I feel about this. These scientists essentially created what may have been a new species, that perhaps would have had similar sentience to us and had them terminated after 100 days. The cat's out of the bag with this research so to speak now. Someone's bound to do this again The part about whether they should have been born or not, which was the ethical thing is what tears at me. Is it…

I understand the sentiment, but given our track record of being OK with causing the suffering of billions of creatures capable of suffering - and in fact even being the reason those creators were born in the first place - I wouldn't be surprised if we brushed it aside relatively easily after the first few.
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