| |
| ▲ | sitkack 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > It’s no accident that many of the same genes active in embryonic development have been implicated in cancer. Pregnancy is a lot more like war than we might care to admit. Amazing article. Another reason that hardshelled laid eggs are such a great invention. The offspring can do its thing from a safe distance. | | |
| ▲ | andai 4 days ago | parent [-] | | The article suggests the external egg also limits the creature to a small brain. | | |
| ▲ | nine_k 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Birds, the inheritors of the venerable Dinosaur brand, managed to both produce very large eggs (e.g. ostriches), and impressively capable brains, rivaling those of larger mammalians (e.g. parrots, corvids), interestingly, without the use of very large eggs. | | |
| ▲ | __s 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Also amazing with birds is how effectively they've evolved intelligence with a small brain https://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-06-term-bird-brain.html | | | |
| ▲ | c22 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Okay, crows are impressive. But I'm not going to let one do my taxes. | | |
| ▲ | thih9 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Not doing taxes is a plus for corvids in my book. Seriously, you picked one of the least impressive human activities. Makes me think about my potential reincarnation choices. Crows fly, mate for life and are considered positive for the ecosystem. Humans do taxes. | |
| ▲ | throw-qqqqq 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The crow wouldn’t let you build its nest either ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ | | |
| ▲ | mort96 3 days ago | parent [-] | | No, but humans would be capable of making something which could serve as a crow's nest, while a crow wouldn't be able to do taxes if we let it... | | |
| ▲ | throw-qqqqq 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Are you sure? I would be very surprised if a human could build a nest that a crow would accept unaltered. Most birds’ nests are built much more intricately than just a pile of sticks thrown together! Usually built from layers of different materials, sometimes weaved or plastered with mud/clay/bird-spit. E.g. sparrows pick up lavender in my garden, because the oils repel some pests etc. |
|
| |
| ▲ | geenkeuse 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
| |
| ▲ | ekianjo 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Still nothing remotely close to a human brain. | | |
| ▲ | alganet 4 days ago | parent [-] | | That seems about right according to research. There are many articles about bird intelligence available from multiple sources. A more open minded perspective would instead try to look to what is "remotely close" to a human brain. Although primates can't quite communicate like humans, they are known for being our closest relatives in scientific biological terms. I know I am deviating from the birds subject a little, but stick with me. I need to address the "remotely close" expression you used. Primates can display what humans would recognize as human behavior. Work in groups, social dynamics, use of simple tools. The "looks like human" effect could be explained by anthropomorphization performed by those very humans (to put it simply: an effect where humans see human features in non human things). In fact, some behaviors considered as human are not commonly displayed by primates, like the ability to keep a pet. There is no clear definitive answer to it, and any dismissal of such behaviors could be also used to dismiss humans themselves, therefore I must refrain from entertaining them too much. Birds also show a lot of human like behavior. Like the ability to gather objects (to construct a nest and to attract a partner are common examples). Remember, the closest thing to humans in anatomy and biology (primates) is not very much different from birds in terms of "how it presents human-like" behavior. So, as a counter argument, I would ask: what makes the difference of thinking between a primate and a bird so different to you? Is it their anatomy that prevents you from anthropomorphizing it so readily? Or do you also think primate brains are "nothing remotely close to a human brain"? It cannot be denied that "closeness" is a loose definition and could generate endless discussion. I tried to concede a little bit to find a reasonable common ground that is both based on rational thinking and a little bit of open mindedness. Under such criteria, I can assert that birds might be much more intelligent than previously assumed. | | |
| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | disqard 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Thoughtful (and thought-provoking) comments like yours are why I frequent this site. Thank you, stranger! For my part, I'll add that "Humans are visual creatures", which biases every aspect of our culture -- and might help explain why many would consider other primates "closer" to us than birds. | |
| ▲ | ekianjo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Thanks for your answer. Let me elaborate a little bit. What diffentiates humans from most animals is not about solving complex puzzles (some birds are able to do that) or be able to learn things (birds and primates can do that as well) but in the ability of humans to plan for the future. As far as I know (but do correct me if you have better information) there is no animal that exhibits: 1) the ability to plan ahead of time
2) in a non innate way The consequence is that humans actually build stuff by investing time and energy by visualizing a future benefit without immediate gratification. I believe this is unique in the realm of animals, at least for now. | | |
| ▲ | alganet 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Primates do display acquired learning. Like the knowledge to hunt ants with sticks. A non innate ability that requires planning and is passed along to members of the same social group. It has been reported that some eagles and hawks spread fire to drive out prey from dense vegetation. Whether that is learned behavior and planning for the future, a previously undiscovered innate behavior, or just a myth, depends on results of further research. Whales wearing salmon hats is a story that, if happens to be true, would also be a non-innate behavior, whose purpose we don't know, that could point to something close to what you described. Humans are different, I cannot disagree. My play was to challenge our assumptions of what that perceived distance from humans to animals is consisted of. We can come up with increasingly more convoluted ways of defining what we are. Animals can't. Maybe that is our innate ability. |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | petermcneeley 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The baby probably does not benefit from the death of the mother. | | |
| ▲ | spwa4 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That depends. Look it up. You will find there is a point where it switches. Normally the body (of both baby and mother) will protect the mother. Something goes wrong or just gets too far "out of spec"? Miscarriage. After a few months, the body goes so far as to sedate the mother and child before terminating the pregnancy. There is research claiming it actually shuts down the baby's nervous system before decoupling. But about a month before birth things switch around. The womb partially disconnects from control systems of the mother's body and ... there's an extremely scary way of pointing this out I once heard from a medical professor: "you know just about the only thing a human body can still do when it's decapitated? It can give birth" In less extreme circumstances, you actually have a switch in your circulatory system ... when pregnancy gets to this point and the mother's body loses power, it will initiate a rapid birthing process, and start shutting down organ after organ to give birth with the remaining power. That includes, eventually, the brain. Only the heart, lungs, liver and womb will remain operational. The body will shut down blood flow to the brain to continue giving birth. Once shut down it cannot be turned back on. So this kills the mother, despite the body remaining functional, in some reported cases, for over an hour, and is something gynaecologists get trained to prevent from happening. Given how common it was even a century ago for women to die giving birth, one wonders how often this mechanism was involved. | | |
| ▲ | andai 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Ah, a bit of light bedtime reading... I should really turn off my phone before going to bed. | | |
| ▲ | klipt 4 days ago | parent [-] | | No sources provided and internet failed to confirm ... closest I found was > In extremely rare forensic cases, a phenomenon called "coffin birth" (post-mortem fetal extrusion) can occur, where gases from decomposition expel a fetus from the deceased mother's body. This is not true childbirth and is extremely rare, occurring only under specific post-mortem conditions. | | |
| ▲ | spwa4 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Oh come on, any medical text will confirm that the womb has it's own nervous system and blood supply and a good text will tell you that the system will function correctly in even completely paralyzed women. Just how do you think that works? And any text will SCREAM at you to keep a constant eye on the woman giving birth: if they stop breathing IT WILL NOT stop the birth, rather it will cause severe symptoms afterwards. A gynaecologist is not telling women to breathe to calm them down. The blood supply and nerves are weird special cases in a great many ways. For instance, they're not left-right symmetric (whereas the ones of "nearby" systems, like the bladder, are. So this was not done because there's only one womb) | | |
| ▲ | serf 3 days ago | parent [-] | | >a good text will tell you that the system will function correctly in even completely paralyzed women. Just how do you think that works? the body has a lot of messaging systems; 'completely paralyzed' people still enjoy the use of many chemical messaging signals; they just generally have a hindered spinal cord or neurological interface element. A paralyzed person will still go into shock after a dismemberment, blood-flow will be affected by vaso-constriction, and so on. It doesn't surprise me to hear that childbirth can trigger a similar set of conditions to occur. And that belittles the existence of the underlying support nervous system and the secondary elements. Many completely paralyzed men can achieve erection and ejaculation even with a near total disconnect from the rest of the nervous system. Why? The parasympathetic nervous system and secondary nervous materials in the region in question are taking up the slack from the brain and still allowing 'normal' function. |
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | tgv 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | But some form of evolution might make it a local optimum. It would at least require 3 or more offspring per pregnancy, and could not happen in mammals, though. | | |
| ▲ | petermcneeley 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Much harder than that. All mammals drink milk. | | |
| ▲ | worik 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > All mammals drink milk. I don't | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 4 days ago | parent [-] | | If that was true when you were an infant, you're part of an extreme minority. You would not have survived more than a few weeks past birth in the absence of modern medical interventions — well, that part at least was true for most of us — but specifically an inability to process milk as an infant is very rare, precisely because "mammary" is what puts the "mam" in "mammal". | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > precisely because "mammary" is what puts the "mam" in "mammal" It puts the "mamm" in; that second m is also part of the root. | | | |
| ▲ | echelon 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I get downvoted every time I feel like posting this (the thread is markedly appropriate), so I'll give some background this time. I'll get to the point after a little bit of setup. To segue from your post, I was adopted as an only child at birth, so formula was the only option. No IgA exposure, which probably over-taxed my early immune system. But in being adopted, I have very nontraditional feelings about cloning, artificial birth, etc. I knew about my adoption from an early age, so it deeply worked itself into my thinking. At about elementary school age, some of my asshole neighbors bullied and called me a bastard, but that didn't really impact me as much as the feeling of being a genetic island completely alien to everyone else. All of my peers were related to their birthing parents and sometimes clonal siblings, yet I was alone in the universe. My weird hobbies and behaviors and preferences were out of the norm for my family. Despite my closeness with them, I didn't feel the same as everyone else around me. I wasn't. I was a nerd, absorbed into science books and Bill Nye. The southern culture and football and Christian God I grew up around wasn't my home, and I couldn't understand it just as others couldn't understand me. Everyone talks about blood as being a big deal - it's even in the foundation of the religion I was raised in - but to me, it meant nothing. It really shaped how I feel about humanity and biology and families and reproduction and the universe. Ideas, not nucleotides, are the information that matters. I've understated and undersold how fundamentally differently this makes me feel about people. Because of my perspective, I have controversial viewpoints about human biology. I don't find them weird at all, but there's a good chance it'll offend you: If we can ever get over the societal (religious?) ick factor, perhaps we could one day clone MHC-negative, O-negative, etc. monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs. Use genetic engineering to de-encephalize the brain, and artificially innervate the spine and musculature. We'd have a perfect platform for every kind of organ and tissue transplant, large scale controlled in situ studies, human knockouts, and potentially crazy things like whole head transplants to effectively cure all cancers and aging diseases except brain cancers and neurodegeneration. Because they're clones engineered to not expose antigens, their tissues could be transplanted into us just like plants being grafted. No immunosuppressants. This might become the default way to cure diseases in the future. We could even engineer bodies that increase our physiological capacity. Increased endurance, VO2 max, younger age, different sex, skin color, transgenic features. Alien hair colors. You name it. I bring things like this up and get ostracized and criticized. But it feels completely normal to me. Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here. In light of how others think, I don't think I'd have these thoughts so comfortably if I didn't feel like something of a clone already. A genetic reject, an extraterrestrial growing up, tends to think differently. Flipping this around, your aversion to this is because you have a mother and father that birthed you that you share blood with. That you grew up in a god fearing society bathed in his sacrificial blood. If you were like me, perhaps you'd think like me. I'm totally perplexed that other people find this disgusting or horrifying. It feels wholly natural. And we should absolutely do it. | | |
| ▲ | achenet 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here. unlike man-made machines, we do not fully understand our bodies yet, and as such should be careful when trying to make them better. Don't start randomly `rf -rf *` on a Unix system if you don't know what it does, don't start randomly using steroids if you aren't sure of the long term biological consequences. Obviously, your proposed "monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs" would help with that. If you'll also allow me a quick remark on your upbringing, as someone from an intellectual Parisian family who grew up in God-fearing, football-loving Texas... I'm sure that somewhere in the South, there is a little gay kid, or one born with an odd mutation, to his birth parents, who felt or feels the exact same way you did - as something of an alien. I believe that the vast majority of cultures will produce outsiders, and it's also very probable that somewhere in Paris, there is someone who doesn't feel at home in the midst of heavy intellectual conversation and would prefer a simpler world focused on traditional religion and football (possibly association football/soccer, rather than American football). Humans can form 'tribes', in the loosest sense of the word possible, based on genetics, but we also form tribes based on similar beliefs, values and interests - for example, Hacker News :) | | |
| ▲ | echelon 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Humans can form 'tribes', in the loosest sense of the word possible, based on genetics, but we also form tribes based on similar beliefs, values and interests - for example, Hacker News :) I agree with this, and I'm glad we do. But I've posted the "let's harvest clones for organs" idea numerous times on HN -- a community where many of us are on somewhat of a similar wavelength. It's usually met with a lot of vitriol and disgust. > Obviously, your proposed "monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs" would help with that. That's one of the nice things about this. It would give us an organismal research platform where we could replicate experiments. No more animal studies, imperfect chimera systems, or molecular experiments we can't scale up. We'd have a perfect test bed for investigating almost everything that ails us. |
| |
| ▲ | vacuity 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | On a general note, if this feels natural and right to you, don't be quick to dismiss others' views as having less substance or credibility and being conditioned. But I appreciate that you earnestly believe this, and for that there is nothing prima facie wrong with your view either. > Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here. I feel like this is not obvious. Many people seem to want to enjoy life more than anything else, and if this biotech means curing cancer so they can do so for longer, sure, but at some point it may be too invasive. Like if you have to undergo a procedure every year to get diminishing returns. A lot of the features you mention are nice to have, but not strongly appealing to me personally. Particularly for something like immortality: if I'm going to have that, I want a lot of other things too that biotech won't obtain. Also, at that level of biotech, it seems like we could forgo the clones and enhance our bodies directly. That would remove the ethical concerns of cloning, in particular the notion of creating clones for our own purposes instead of letting them reach their own. Beliefs that boil down to "I was here first" or "I beat you" are common, but I find them problematic. Birth/creation is a fascinating philosophical topic. I have a radical view which isn't quite "life is suffering so being born is a net harm", but I think that life is not all that valuable. I won't go out of my way to harm existing life, but I'm not sure I should go out of my way to accomodate new life. If humans all died off naturally, would that be such a bad thing? Life is great, but it's not that great. If we do gain cloning technology, I think we should afford clones the potential to do as they will, just as we want for ourselves. Again, we could probably obviate clones for the purposes you see. | |
| ▲ | ben_w 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I don't find them weird at all, but there's a good chance it'll offend you: It does not offend me. I cannot say if I would be upset if this were to be turned from idea to reality because the closest thing in reality is quite upsetting; but because I think that the only part of a body capable of suffering is the CNS, I also regard any potential upset on my part about a realisation of your idea as a "me problem", not a "you problem". That said, I don't know how far we are from being able to perfom what you suggest, even in principle. It may well be the case that growing a full human without a CNS is harder than solving 3D bioprinting. One downside of such a degree of biological mastery, is that it does to trust in real life what AI is currently doing to trust online. | |
| ▲ | TimTheTinker 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Have you ever seen the movie "The Island"? I'm curious what your reaction to it would be. > If we can ever get over the societal (religious?) ick factor I believe those kinds of "ick" factors are there for a reason - protecting us from a descent into deep dystopia or something. Implementing new human things at scale often has unanticipated indirect negative consequences. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I think that in this case, the ick factor is because evolved traits can only work with relatively simple patterns. My guess is for many of us, our gut says "looks like a human therefore is human"; if you try to tell gut instinct it's fine because there's no brain, you're gut's response is "Brain and brain! What is brain?" My gut seems to care more about dynamic behaviour than static appearance, but for what it's worth — and despite being able to understand the premise of @echelon's suggestion without being upset by it — even I find images of a real, natural, human birth defect where the brain is missing, to be horrifying (content warning: do not google "anencephaly" unless you're strong stomached). | |
| ▲ | echelon 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Have you ever seen the movie "The Island"? I'm curious what your reaction to it would be. It's a typical Hollywood sci-fi film with the usual Hollywood lessons and platitudes. We wouldn't be producing clones with brains or consciousness. We might even have to modify the spine and stomach. So there's no thinking at all. They'd be like plants. | |
| ▲ | throaway1989 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Most of the ick factors are because of our empathy, which triggers upon seeing another human being in "icky" states of being and makes us imagine what it would feel like to be in such a state. |
| |
| ▲ | aaaja 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Have you found that other adoptees feel similarly about or at least are more sympathetic to your ideas? | |
| ▲ | fouc 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Given that you've spent some time thinking about this, perhaps you should spend time thinking about the ethics of it, and write a full report AGAINST your idea from the ethics point of view, and then see if you can address all those concerns in a second report. Some key ethics concerns to consider: * creating brainless clones is almost like creating a sub-species of humans that we're going to farm like cattle. * given that many people consider embryos & fetuses have certain rights, can we find a way to create brain-less clones without killing viable embryos? In reality, most of the work done in this area is going to be focused on growing organs, rather than entire bodies. This lets us sidestep most of the ethical concerns. | |
| ▲ | petermcneeley 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Terry? |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | andai 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | My uncle said yesterday that man's harsh nature goes back to Rome: Homo homini lupus. The article says it goes back a lot further than Rome! > So if it’s a fight, what started it? The original bone of contention is this: you and your nearest relatives are not genetically identical. In the nature of things, this means that you are in competition. And because you live in the same environment, your closest relations are actually your most immediate rivals. | | |
| ▲ | wahern 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | In all non-human species selfless cooperation falls off a cliff beyond siblings, and AFAIU this comports well with Game Theory-type models for understanding genetics. Popular examples of non-human cooperation, naked mole rates and bonobos, actually live in communities dominated by sisters. (It's not often noted, though, in the breathless narratives extolling the virtues of cooperation and anthropomorphizing the rest of the animal kingdom.) Human behavior, however, is still a deep, deep mystery in terms of evolutionary biology. I'm always wary of people applying evolutionary principles to human behaviors. Writ large you can see contours of what we would expect to see, but even then it's unclear why the boundaries are where they are, or to what degree we're projecting expectations into the data, etc. The speculation quotient is extreme. I wouldn't put any stock into evolutionary biology-based explanations for human behavior. And just as a practical matter, it's not like most people would leave their most hated cousin to die in a ditch; and though most people wouldn't leave anyone to die in a ditch--at least, if they knew that's what they were doing--I'm betting they're more likely to save a cousin than a stranger. | | |
| ▲ | achenet 3 days ago | parent [-] | | my viewpoint is that the human ability to cooperate effectively is why there's currently 8+ billion of us on earth and chimpanzees are an endangered species. Our capacity for stories and language helps us create large cooperation networks, which is a unique evolutionary advantage. Chimps have cooperation limited to "we are genetically close and you give me banana so I give you banana". Humans can create something like the Roman Republic, or modern nation states and corporations, based on a shared set of stories and language (culture, also includes stuff like rituals, socio-sexual taboos, etc), which enables millions of us to collaborate together towards a common goal. Which is why we're so successful as a species. | | |
| ▲ | londons_explore 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Capitalism allows thousands of people who don't know eachother or even speak the same language to work together to make all the components of a pencil. All of those people might be selfish, yet they still work together without even knowing they are doing so. |
|
| |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > My uncle said yesterday that man's harsh nature goes back to Rome: Homo homini lupus. What's "homini" supposed to mean? | | |
| ▲ | n3storm 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Homo homini lupus is the latin for "Man is wolf for man", famous quote from Plautus. Homini is the declination of Homo, is dative case. I don't know how to properly translate dative to english, something like "to give". I know this from Philosophy and Latin (separate) in Highschool around the nineties in Spain. They both were compulsory global subjects. I think Latin is not compulsory this days. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > famous quote from Plautus The quote from Plautus appears to be lupus est homo homini, which is much easier to parse. There's a verb and everything. (I didn't know that; I just looked it up.) > I don't know how to properly translate dative to english, something like "to give". Yes, the word literally means "giving [case]", but the grammatical concept in English is generally called "indirect object". English mostly doesn't have cases, so supplemental arguments to verbs tend to be marked by associated prepositions, making them "indirect". When talking about Latin specifically or languages with noun case in general, it is normal in English to refer to the "dative case"; you don't really need to translate it. I assume the case was named after the action of giving because giving is a very common action that necessarily involves three things. (Giver, gift, and recipient.) The name tells you what it means by example: "if a gift is given, the dative case is the one you'd use for the recipient". | |
| ▲ | anal_reactor 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Homo homini lupus And kiwi kiwi kiwi. Couldn't help myself, being a speaker of a language with grammatical cases, which allows the translation of "homo homini lupus" without changing the grammatical structure. At the same time, some loanwords escape the declination system, giving birth to the joke above. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > At the same time, some loanwords escape the declination system, giving birth to the joke above. I hope I'm safe in assuming that "kiwi kiwi kiwi" comes off as pure nonsense. But if it's possible for loanwords to come in without being forced into the system, there must be something you could add to the sentence to bring back the effect? What would that look like? | | |
| ▲ | anal_reactor 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Honestly it's an edge case, because there are few loanwords that don't get involved in the declension system. For some reason the government made official guidelines that the system only applies to native words, but that didn't stick, and most loanwords do have declension forms. With "kiwi" being one of the exceptions of course. Going back to the question though, I can't think of words I could add without changing the overall structure. As in, our translation of "homo homini lupus" is "człowiek człowiekowi wilkiem", and it's not like you could "just add something to make it full form". Well, you could say "człowiek człowiekowi jest wilkiem", with "jest" meaning "is", but when you say "kiwi kiwi jest kiwi", it still sounds like garbage. I guess the only way out of this would be to use something different, like "kiwi dla kiwi jest jak kiwi", which is "a kiwi to a kiwi is like a kiwi", but that's not what we want, because when we talk about people and wolves again, it becomes "człowiek dla człowieka jest jak wilk", and now it's clear that the cases have changed. Giving an example of a loanword, the government's official position used to be (or even still is?) that "radio" has only one form, but if you ask me, "radio radiu radiem" sounds clear and natural. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | dragonwriter 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Homini is the dative of homo, meaning roughly "to (a) man". The phrase is a latin proverb meaning, roughly, "A man is a wolf to another man". | |
| ▲ | azmodeus 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Man man’s wolf
Homo homini lupus |
|
| |
| ▲ | Barrin92 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | what an odd coincidence to see David Haig mentioned in the article. I just stumbled over his interview on Sean Carroll's podcast a few days ago, discussing the exact same topic (https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/11/30/125-...) "And so while the cooperative outcome would be the most efficient, you lead to a situation in which there are conflict costs, and I think this explains why things go wrong so often during pregnancy. Of course, at first sight it's strange, my heart and my liver have been functioning very well for for 62 years, and yet during pregnancy, you have a natural process that only lasts for nine months, and yet many things go wrong during it. And I would argue that the reason why pregnancy doesn't work as smoothly as the normal functioning of the body is that in normal bodily functioning all the parts of the body are genetically identical to each other and working towards survival of that body, but in pregnancy, you have two different genetic individuals interacting with each other and natural selection can act at cross-purposes, there's a sort of politics going on, and we know that politics does not always lead to efficient outcomes." | |
| ▲ | xg15 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Pregnancy is, it seems, just another (evolutionary) war. I think this is a useful insight even on a higher level. For evolution (if you want to anthropomorphize it), war and conflict are just another set of tools in the toolbox. Where humans see those as evidence of something going wrong and evil to eradicated, for evolution it's "working as intended". (Or, if you don't want to anthropomorphize it, an indication how much of evolution and biology is just barely tamed chaos) (Careful to draw conclusions for human society from this though. People in the past had already seen the Darwinian "struggle between the species" as a model for society, which brought "Social Darwinism" and ultimately the Nazi ideology. A different conclusion would be that biology is in fact not a perfect ideal to aspire to, and even in the situations where it "works", its factual objectives are not always the same as ours. Which does give legitimacy for the endeavor to improve upon it - for everyone) |
|
