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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

#331

Post by passwert »

newsbinator wrote: post #300
tibbydudeza wrote: post #48

So "Planet of the Apes" was not so far fetched after all. Now somewhere someone will think ... hmmm why can't we replace all our complaining factory workers and their wages/healthcare/retirement plans with these "creatures" and only pay them peanuts and banana's.

> why can't we replace all our complaining factory workers and their wages/healthcare/retirement plans with these "creatures" and only pay them peanuts and banana's. Automation would probably be cheaper, more consistent, and more effective. Biology wasn't designed for production line work. Humans are really bad at it. Engineered primates might be better at it because they'd be engineered not to get bored or frustrate…

So we need monkeys with 100 arms, got it.

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

#332

Post by TeMPOraL »

MinusGix wrote: post #218
cubano wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you possibly even say "We are not Nature"? Of course we are Nature. We came to being the exact same way every other current living species did, thru natural selection. So then how can we be living, as you say, somehow outside this "Nature" you speak of? Hell, I know I may be in a small minority who says, by definition, nothing that we do is "wrong" because we are simply doing what our brains, which are 100% a…

In part this is arguing over a definition of nature. You're going for the obvious "We are part of nature because nature created us and we work within the system." while they're going for the idea of it being more strictly influenced by evolutionary change which we have the ability to 'escape' (escape in the sense that we can go farther than an animal can due to being able to design larger systems without having each…

> Well, as stated before, morality isn't the same between humans. There's no objective authority that decides X is right or Y is wrong, simply social/cultural influences throughout the world.

Worth remembering that it's also not the case that every person has different morality, and everyone's moral values are uniformly distributed across the space of possible values.

No, the moral values of humans are all very strongly correlated, both within and across societies. We spend a lot of time bikeshedding the details, but we essentially have a shared sense of what's right and wrong.

(I hypothesize it's because we all have the same brain architecture - the basic moral sense is encoded in firmware, and through culture we adapt it to fit the environments and societies we live in.)

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

#333

Post by TeMPOraL »

imtringued wrote: post #321
ninjanomnom wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I assume you meant un inhabitable) For the individual the answer is almost certainly yes. If we have the ability to survive elsewhere than earth and we have brought earth to the point that it is 99% uninhabitable then going someone else is probably the best choice. One could easily argue that our ability to consider our environment and make changes to our behavior accordingly is unnatural. Avoiding the above scenari…

>For the individual the answer is almost certainly yes That type of thinking will ruin the second planet just as much.

Hence the root cause of all human-caused problems: what is locally, short-term beneficial for an individual is often long-term detrimental to the group, and long-term success of an individual depends on long-term success of the group.

I.e. we're too competitive, not cooperative enough, and can hardly coordinate at scale. Our best coordination mechanism we've ever came up with is the market economy, which is essentially taking the survival instinct of individuals and building a distributed coercion system with it. Sure, it works, but wouldn't it be nicer if we could just talk our way into working together on shared goals, instead of using money and threats of starvation?

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

#334

Post by abellerose »

imtringued wrote: post #322
Veedrac wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly some people care a lot about factory farming. Even so, the key difference here is that brain function and intelligence are tied so tightly to the idea of human exceptionalism; that it is OK to enslave a horse but not a human, because humans have more capacity for autonomy, suffering, and so forth. How precisely to draw the line is very much a matter of disagreement.

>that it is OK to enslave a horse but not a human, because humans have more capacity for autonomy, suffering, and so forth. That's illogical. No, we enslave animals because we can. If animals were to coordinate and start a rebellion we would stop enslaving them and try to appease them through diplomatic means. Humans are known for their coordination and so monkeys with human intelligence and communication like humans…

I propose my assumption instead of your own. Humans would exterminate the animals that started to rebel and even if it's an entire species.

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

#335

Post by TeMPOraL »

imtringued wrote: post #325
renewiltord wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have killed renewiltord because I failed to invent immortality.

There is a solid argument to be made that the minuscule effort we put into life extension research has moral weight that will haunt our descendants.

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

#336

Post by TeMPOraL »

D_Alex wrote: post #290
kypro wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what political ramifications this would have. Say these monkeys were intelligent enough to have conversations with and they had thoughts and opinions on the world, but they weren't quite as smart as humans – they couldn't do advanced maths and were intellectually closer to young children – would we deny them the right to vote? Would we deny them employment rights? Etc... If we did on what grounds would we do…

>Say these monkeys were intelligent enough... Great questions, we will need some good answers soon. Not so much for the monkeys, but for AI.

Yup. Ironically, it's in the context of AI where I first saw those questions being brought up. And there's an extra difficulty there: biological organisms can can reproduce only so fast. Software can reproduce as fast as you can provision new VMs in the data centre. So we can easily imagine suddenly going from 1 human-like AI program to a hundred billion instances of it, and then humanity becomes an insignificant minority from the point of view of democracy.

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

#337

Post by DoingIsLearning »

danieltillett wrote: post #326
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unnecessary ad hominem with the 'special mind' but I will try to bring it back to the actual discussion point. All the points I mentioned were massive breakthroughs and improvements in their primary application. The point is they had massively wide scale secondary effects which Humans at the time were unable to predict. You say a small percentage of outcomes but many of those small percentage of occurences have had a…

I find it rather ironic that someone with the handle “DoingIsLearning” is arguing against doing new things. Everything we do that is new has risks. History has shown us that the benefits of innovation far outweighs the costs. This does not mean progress comes with no downsides, but that the good is vastly better than the bad. Many people seem so scared now of the possible risks that they are afraid to do anything rea…

> I find it rather ironic that someone with the handle “DoingIsLearning” is arguing against doing new things

(On top of trying to twist my words) I think this is where we diverge, I am not arguing.

I really mean this in a non snarky way, you should check the guidelines section 'In Comments' [0]. There is nothing wrong with pushing arguments like this, they just don't contribute anything to anybody else reading this.

If you want this kind of polarizing discussion, Twitter is probably a better platform.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#338

Post by SomeoneFromCA »

lucb1e wrote: post #243
Geminidog wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, aborting in some circles is the same as murder so the "ethics" is a bit blurry here. The crossed the line by creating life and then they killed what could essentially be something that could have had the intelligence of a regular human being. I'm not an anti-abortionist but I can't deny that the ethics in this area is blurry. Even worse is when you're aborting genetically modified life.

> aborting in some circles is the same as murder so the "ethics" is a bit blurry here You give those circles too much credit, it's like the mythical flat-earthers. I don't know anyone who feels that way and would expect only countries like saudi arabia to have problems with abortion (though I recently learned it's also state-dependent in the USA). Probably takes some time to get the people of countries in various sta…

I am in that circle, so what?

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

#339

Post by burtonator »

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 part about whether they should have been born or not, which was the ethical thing is what tears at me.

I gotta say... for me, this is close to murder. I realize these things are complicated but if it was a hybrid species, we might not know how close it was to us. It may have been close and it would absolutely be murder to kill a 100 day old child.

I think if it could potentially be murder you should just error on the side of caution.

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

#340

Post by fjfaase »

yread wrote: post #327
fjfaase wrote: post #311

The interesting thing about gene ARHGAP11B is that it is a truncated version of ARHGAP11A, meaning that it was caused by a degenerative mutation, which goes totally against creationist arguments that degenerative mutations can never lead to improvements, let alone the development of new species. This should be mentioned in every textbook about evolution to counter the arguments of creationists.

I don't get your argument about degenerative mutations. All nonsilent mutations change a perfectly fine working protain so they are all 'degenerative'? Conversely, insertion of random garbage in the middle of a an exon does not delete anything so it's not 'degenerative'?

Some creationist are reasoning that because mutations in genes usually have a negative effect, evolution can not lead to improvements. Here we have an example of a gene that became shorter (probably due to a mutation (deletion, change or insertion) in the middle causeing a stop to be encoded) and lead to a significant improvement, even to the extend that it resulted in a new species. Even if creationist accept that evolution is possible to some extend like we see in dogs, they argue that it cannot lead to the development of new species. Now some people, especially those from pro-life camps who usually support the idea of evolution, are having ethical problems, because they feel that due to a generative mutation a new species of ape has been created.
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