Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

interestingengineering.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 384 posts

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

#51

Post by to11mtm »

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.

Oddly, I came up with a pretty good plan for Enslaving Humanity without most of them noticing (and the software architecture that would power it) during a Sunday Drive today.

I'll say that the concept I came up with was probably far far cheaper than gene therapy and could be reached in 5-10 years. So I wouldn't lose sleep over this

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

#52

Post by 0-_-0 »

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.

Brave New World had a similar idea

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

#53

Post by wizzwizz4 »

to11mtm wrote: post #51
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.

Oddly, I came up with a pretty good plan for Enslaving Humanity without most of them noticing (and the software architecture that would power it) during a Sunday Drive today. I'll say that the concept I came up with was probably far far cheaper than gene therapy and could be reached in 5-10 years. So I wouldn't lose sleep over this

Unless you can think of any steps to prevent your plan from working, try to forget about it. Somebody will re-invent it later, but that'll be later. We've created more of the readily-accessible good technology than the readily-accessible bad technology, and it'll take an active effort to keep it that way.

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

#54

Post by grawprog »

konart wrote: post #50
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…

>shouldn't we take responsibility for the results of our creation? "I gave you life, I will take it" - Taras Bulba.

https://youtu.be/BpaRouocBes

>You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it.

Mark Twain

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

#55

Post by renewiltord »

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 fallacy pervades all.

No, if you can save billions and you choose not to, you have killed them. If you can uplift species and you choose not to, you have killed their cognition. Keine Wahl ist auch eine Wahl. We are gods over the Earth. We have dominion over it and the creatures that inhabit it. And godhood carries responsibility more than it carries power. We owe the monkeys their sapience.

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

#56

Post by vikramkr »

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…

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 scientists do not assume they can blindly mess around. There was a whole section of this article related to ethics, they didn't let the fetus be born (which would definitely have been messing around). They're not trying to "do better" or control nature - they're just trying to understand what makes us tick. This is a mutation that already exists in humans. It might make us human. If anything, that makes nature the one that was blindly messing around.

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

#57

Post by chacha2 »

to11mtm wrote: post #51
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.

Oddly, I came up with a pretty good plan for Enslaving Humanity without most of them noticing (and the software architecture that would power it) during a Sunday Drive today. I'll say that the concept I came up with was probably far far cheaper than gene therapy and could be reached in 5-10 years. So I wouldn't lose sleep over this

Currently most of humanity is oblivious to it's enslavement, what does your strategy add?

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

#58

Post by golemotron »

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…

It would be good to use science fiction to explore some of these ideas before we do them.

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

#59

Post by coryrc »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #42
riazrizvi wrote: post #29

From an engineering perspective, when trying to explore a dynamic, you simplify the experiment to reduce extraneous variables. So along these lines, I’d be more interested in following experiments like these on say sea slugs. Give them a proto-amygdala/hippocampus or limbic system and test them for increased memory, adaptive behavior etc. This choice of monkey experiment seems to be more sensation and less investigat…

unfortunately, the further you move generically from the human, the more extraneous variables you introduce and the lower the relevance of any result. There is a reason drugs and experiments are performed on primates. Any result you saw in say a sea slug would provide no insight into the human function. The ideal experiment would be to delete the gene from a human, but this is unethical for obvious reasons.

We support women knowingly giving birth to trisomy fetuses. We're in trolley problem territory here.

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

#60

Post by CyberRabbi »

scott31 wrote: post #21
CyberRabbi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But brains aren’t made of digital logic elements

You'll never play Doom on a single neuron.

You’ll never play doom on any amount of neurons... brains are not cpus
Post reply on HN