As usual both fascinating and so far beyond my scientific pay grade which is zero. Might waiting for what happens in the comments to choose a path forward be 'unintelligent design'?
In the vein of 'Idiocracy', which seems to be playing out rapidly in real time, the dysgenic selection pressures of socially engineered - and technologically "nudged" (to put it mildly), manufactured anti-reality of the modern environment, plus the natural mutation factor you lay out here, have likely spiked (heh) up the shaken-not-stirred double helix cocktail to some exponent error rate.
Said another way, more fitting to my finger-painter credentials, the mutation rate is now on a social-environmental-technological e-ticket ride in which we may very well be seeing collapse-level mutations on our watch. Now, perhaps nature in her wisdom - and ruthlessness, will provide harsh doses of reality to pierce the manufactured anti-reality and correct some of the dysgenic inputs, but to your point, beneficial accretive mutations are something else entirely - that seem rather divine and not so easily sciency.
Anyhow, your metaphor reminds me of the game we played as kids called telephone. The initial phrase whispered into the first kid's ear was simple and quite clear. But by the time it was whispered ear-to-ear around the whole circle of kids and back to the start it was some kind of hilarious nonsense so divorced from the initial phrase that it just must be a function of someone purposefully inserting the nonsense.
But nope. The whisper-drift effect(TM) is real. This is true today in the 'meta' as the clowns say. It's how we get "Brawndo's got what plants crave; it's got electrolytes!". See also, "diversity is our greatest strength" and "climate change is real".
Like how humans have converted the over all environment into more 'habitable' conditions, from mud huts to mansions! Automobiles! Medicines! Then humans adapt to all of this technology and most can never go back, are not satisfied, then in this weakened state produce even more habitable conditions. Hahahaha!
Then they want to move to Mars where there are no biological threats!
Start a garden and begin the process of becoming human again.
Excellent article! The fact that deleterious mutations are accumulating, rapidly, since our ancestors succeeded in largely eliminating childhood mortality helps explain why Western Civilization is crashing and burning. Fitness-destroying errors compound more rapidly. "Spiteful Mutants" are one result.
"... the brain makes up 80% of our genome ... the males were unable to defend their territory, due to decreasing testosterone, and females and males swapped gender roles, with the former behaving more aggressively than the latter. After day 600, when the population hit it's maximum, a precipitous decline began and it didn't stop until extinction... during this decline, females were unable to reproduce, as the males had withdrawn from the mating scene... despite pestered by aggressive female mice, chose to stop reproducing entirely...
... later, these behaviors were linked to actual genetic mutations "
It is true that our modern healthcare (well until the start of 2020) does tend to keep many more people alive who would have otherwise died, and their deleterious mutations more likely passed on to the next generation.
Not just modern healthcare - childhood mortality rates declined dramatically with the increase in sanitation and wealth of the industrial revolution (say ~1820 in England and US?)
This reduction in childhood mortality effected the rich, first, so they would have begun accumulating (previously deadly) mutations first, and compounding said mutations for more generations.
Could this help explain the sociopathology "at the top" of today's hierarchies?
Dr. Ed Dutton has written and spoken extensively on this dysgenia. Anglo elite IQ peaked around 1780-1820(?), average English-American IQ around 1860-70(?) and we've fallen more than one standard deviation in IQ since the late 19th century. Something like that.
Just to play - ahem - devil's advocate for a moment (and also to understand your metaphor better)
In your malfunctioning printer example, what is the statistical heuristic, if any, for determining how often the printer will replace the typos of the previous generation with new ones in the same locations. For example, "pinaples" in version 54 becomes "pinpripples" in version 55. Or is the principle that the errors will always occur in new random locations, similar to "lottery sampling" randomness?
The theory is that it’s random, but this may not be exactly true, depending on the environmental conditions - exposure to radiation in one group may cause a particular set of mutations. But will likely be a loss of information, not an X-Man with new superpowers.
Not sure if that satisfies the devil’s question ;-)
I totally disagree. Mutations can be very beneficial. How about the X-man Wolverine? His mutation allows him to instantly heal, so that is very beneficial. And let's not forget professor X, whose mutation allows him to read minds, like I'm doing right now to Winston. Oh, wow, you naughty boy. Behave!
Sorry I meant to say mutations are vanishingly rare, except in the case of the X-Men - I thought that would be obvious to everyone - thanks for making that point clear.
Again, I must strongly disagree. Mutations happen all the time. What about Dr. Bruce Banner? Didn't his exposure to gamma radiation cause his genes to mutate him into a big bad green thing when he gets angry? And don't get me started on Peter Parker getting bitten by that radioactive spider which mutated a mere human into Spiderman. I have enough natural spideysense in me to know that mutations happen all the time!
OK, yes, you’ve blown the whole thing open! Banner, Parker, and so many others prove without a doubt that we are rapidly evolving into a superhuman race.
Damn straight, man. Don't be so sloppy on the research in the future. Why would evolution ever stop? So, the highly evolved alien Q on Star Trek is just around the corner, in the context of eternity. Humans are evolving into "gods" like Q who could snap his fingers and do any magical thing you could imagine the Almighty could do. So, I am God and so is everybody reading this ... .at least we will be after billions of more years of evolution, where somehow our spirits continue on after death and we continue to evolve and then we are all Q one day.
Jokes aside, I challenge anybody who believes in evolution to point out some logical flaw in my thinking here, and prove to me logically that Star Trek's "Q" isn't just an entertainment character, but a pretty good approximation of what humans will become in billions of more years. Assuming evolution is true, then it just proves God exists as our higher evolved selves in the "future" (but Q understood time was just an illusion he could manipulate).
I identify as a Goddess too (although I am male), so I will snap my fingers like Q and demand all address me as such.....or you will go to jail. That is the nearest to Q powers I have right now to make my desires come true.
As grey-maned quip goes, evolution is good at explaining selection of the fittest; as to their arrival—not so much 😉
Your earlier entire library metaphor still looks apter for a genome, redundancy et al. Not only supplies information/instructions for a patron to use, but also presents options to choose from. Eg, to better match a particular learning style 😇 The patron of course encompasses all the numerous epigenetic factors. The further step in linear logic would be to explore what Mx Ze as a player character does with acquired knowledge, why & how.
To accommodate genetic entropy, the library may need a qualifier—of physical books. Some of which we seem determined to actively destroy, in °F 451 manner. On quick second thought, e-books fare just as well if not better 🤸
~~
PS Love how your Upgrade button continues to sprightly adapt to its changing circumstance! 🤩
PPS Benign mutation detected: *careeNing [down the river].
You have reminded me to touch on the topic of fine tuning (every book in the library can impact other books in the library in a non- linear manner, and the tolerance for some books/chapters/ phrases/words is very tight)
Some more flora to already thick jungle, not to be discarded: methylation & acetylation, of nucleotides & histones, banish books to deep-cellar repositories, or redact chapters, or conversely may foia them into public domain 😉 What, ~70% of our genes are already methylated at birth?
[If only Unacceptable-turned-Unconditional Jessica-the-Heroine knew, she’d be proud of me 😇]
PS wrt ↑ PPS Sorry for my proofreader gone all haughty, not unlike fauci-funded daszaks & barics of this world tinkering with what they have no slightest notion of. On the bright side, learned a new shining meaning of humdrum word. Fascinating this to happen in given context, innit? Mutation or not mutation, that’s the question 😂
I'm curious, have you ever read Dr. Weston Price's book on Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. He was a dentist who lived a 100 years ago and discovered on his world travels that those native peoples who ate there natural diets, had wide dental arches with perfect teeth, wide noses, good health, the women easily had birith, etc. When they adopted western food, what they call a SAD diet, they developed first dental caries, then loss genetic integrity. Pottenger did studies with animals and discovered that on poor diets, their genetics degenerated. I can't remember the scientist's name, but he used an Agouti mother mouse and identical embryos to discover that on a poor diet her offspring was born albino and diabetic, but when fed well, had a healthy brown mice. It is the science of epigentics. Mutations? Just a lack of good diet. Which reminds me many of the native peoples fed their mothers and fathers to be a special diet.
That’s a great point. But epigenetic expression is different to mutation. Epigenetic expression, given the right environmental conditions, is the turning on or off of genes to best adapt to those conditions - the information is already there - it’s just expressed or not expressed.
However a bad diet may cause more mutations and a good diet may limit them.
I got banned from a sub redit for posting A Strong Delusion 1.0 ....and debating with the mod. He appears to be convinced that I wrote that unacceptably religious blog post. I think the proximate cause of my banishment was my pointing out his religious faith in science. I found the whole thing quite humorous.
If I understand your hypothesis, mutation and natural selection can't be the basis for human evolution, because most mutations (that we see) have a negative effect on the 'fitness' of the organism.
How was the "reduced fitness may be somewhere between 1%-5% per generation" calculated? How does this differ between humans, and other organisms?
As usual both fascinating and so far beyond my scientific pay grade which is zero. Might waiting for what happens in the comments to choose a path forward be 'unintelligent design'?
In the vein of 'Idiocracy', which seems to be playing out rapidly in real time, the dysgenic selection pressures of socially engineered - and technologically "nudged" (to put it mildly), manufactured anti-reality of the modern environment, plus the natural mutation factor you lay out here, have likely spiked (heh) up the shaken-not-stirred double helix cocktail to some exponent error rate.
Said another way, more fitting to my finger-painter credentials, the mutation rate is now on a social-environmental-technological e-ticket ride in which we may very well be seeing collapse-level mutations on our watch. Now, perhaps nature in her wisdom - and ruthlessness, will provide harsh doses of reality to pierce the manufactured anti-reality and correct some of the dysgenic inputs, but to your point, beneficial accretive mutations are something else entirely - that seem rather divine and not so easily sciency.
Anyhow, your metaphor reminds me of the game we played as kids called telephone. The initial phrase whispered into the first kid's ear was simple and quite clear. But by the time it was whispered ear-to-ear around the whole circle of kids and back to the start it was some kind of hilarious nonsense so divorced from the initial phrase that it just must be a function of someone purposefully inserting the nonsense.
But nope. The whisper-drift effect(TM) is real. This is true today in the 'meta' as the clowns say. It's how we get "Brawndo's got what plants crave; it's got electrolytes!". See also, "diversity is our greatest strength" and "climate change is real".
Why don't you try and hijack a police car.
“The whisper-drift effect” - love it!
Yes it’s very real - hyperactive - and boy are we in trouble!
Fascinating!
Like how humans have converted the over all environment into more 'habitable' conditions, from mud huts to mansions! Automobiles! Medicines! Then humans adapt to all of this technology and most can never go back, are not satisfied, then in this weakened state produce even more habitable conditions. Hahahaha!
Then they want to move to Mars where there are no biological threats!
Start a garden and begin the process of becoming human again.
Excellent article! The fact that deleterious mutations are accumulating, rapidly, since our ancestors succeeded in largely eliminating childhood mortality helps explain why Western Civilization is crashing and burning. Fitness-destroying errors compound more rapidly. "Spiteful Mutants" are one result.
https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/spiteful-mutants
Video https://youtu.be/NnWSG8vDqK8?t=64 on the lessons of the "Mouse Utopia" experiments begun by John Calhoun.
"... the brain makes up 80% of our genome ... the males were unable to defend their territory, due to decreasing testosterone, and females and males swapped gender roles, with the former behaving more aggressively than the latter. After day 600, when the population hit it's maximum, a precipitous decline began and it didn't stop until extinction... during this decline, females were unable to reproduce, as the males had withdrawn from the mating scene... despite pestered by aggressive female mice, chose to stop reproducing entirely...
... later, these behaviors were linked to actual genetic mutations "
It is true that our modern healthcare (well until the start of 2020) does tend to keep many more people alive who would have otherwise died, and their deleterious mutations more likely passed on to the next generation.
Not just modern healthcare - childhood mortality rates declined dramatically with the increase in sanitation and wealth of the industrial revolution (say ~1820 in England and US?)
This reduction in childhood mortality effected the rich, first, so they would have begun accumulating (previously deadly) mutations first, and compounding said mutations for more generations.
Could this help explain the sociopathology "at the top" of today's hierarchies?
Dr. Ed Dutton has written and spoken extensively on this dysgenia. Anglo elite IQ peaked around 1780-1820(?), average English-American IQ around 1860-70(?) and we've fallen more than one standard deviation in IQ since the late 19th century. Something like that.
I thank you for this series! I'm loving it.
I cited it today, in: https://heroesvsvillains.substack.com/p/evolution-or-devolution
Great stuff, as usual.
Just to play - ahem - devil's advocate for a moment (and also to understand your metaphor better)
In your malfunctioning printer example, what is the statistical heuristic, if any, for determining how often the printer will replace the typos of the previous generation with new ones in the same locations. For example, "pinaples" in version 54 becomes "pinpripples" in version 55. Or is the principle that the errors will always occur in new random locations, similar to "lottery sampling" randomness?
The theory is that it’s random, but this may not be exactly true, depending on the environmental conditions - exposure to radiation in one group may cause a particular set of mutations. But will likely be a loss of information, not an X-Man with new superpowers.
Not sure if that satisfies the devil’s question ;-)
I totally disagree. Mutations can be very beneficial. How about the X-man Wolverine? His mutation allows him to instantly heal, so that is very beneficial. And let's not forget professor X, whose mutation allows him to read minds, like I'm doing right now to Winston. Oh, wow, you naughty boy. Behave!
Sorry I meant to say mutations are vanishingly rare, except in the case of the X-Men - I thought that would be obvious to everyone - thanks for making that point clear.
Again, I must strongly disagree. Mutations happen all the time. What about Dr. Bruce Banner? Didn't his exposure to gamma radiation cause his genes to mutate him into a big bad green thing when he gets angry? And don't get me started on Peter Parker getting bitten by that radioactive spider which mutated a mere human into Spiderman. I have enough natural spideysense in me to know that mutations happen all the time!
OK, yes, you’ve blown the whole thing open! Banner, Parker, and so many others prove without a doubt that we are rapidly evolving into a superhuman race.
I’ll work on a retraction.
Damn straight, man. Don't be so sloppy on the research in the future. Why would evolution ever stop? So, the highly evolved alien Q on Star Trek is just around the corner, in the context of eternity. Humans are evolving into "gods" like Q who could snap his fingers and do any magical thing you could imagine the Almighty could do. So, I am God and so is everybody reading this ... .at least we will be after billions of more years of evolution, where somehow our spirits continue on after death and we continue to evolve and then we are all Q one day.
Jokes aside, I challenge anybody who believes in evolution to point out some logical flaw in my thinking here, and prove to me logically that Star Trek's "Q" isn't just an entertainment character, but a pretty good approximation of what humans will become in billions of more years. Assuming evolution is true, then it just proves God exists as our higher evolved selves in the "future" (but Q understood time was just an illusion he could manipulate).
Any takers?
Jokes aside, I for one am perfectly good with being assigned the Goddess pronoun right away. Time is *the* delusion anyway 😊
I identify as a Goddess too (although I am male), so I will snap my fingers like Q and demand all address me as such.....or you will go to jail. That is the nearest to Q powers I have right now to make my desires come true.
Much to think about here... and for some reason, I have an irresistable urge to pull out my DEVO albums.
As grey-maned quip goes, evolution is good at explaining selection of the fittest; as to their arrival—not so much 😉
Your earlier entire library metaphor still looks apter for a genome, redundancy et al. Not only supplies information/instructions for a patron to use, but also presents options to choose from. Eg, to better match a particular learning style 😇 The patron of course encompasses all the numerous epigenetic factors. The further step in linear logic would be to explore what Mx Ze as a player character does with acquired knowledge, why & how.
To accommodate genetic entropy, the library may need a qualifier—of physical books. Some of which we seem determined to actively destroy, in °F 451 manner. On quick second thought, e-books fare just as well if not better 🤸
~~
PS Love how your Upgrade button continues to sprightly adapt to its changing circumstance! 🤩
PPS Benign mutation detected: *careeNing [down the river].
You have reminded me to touch on the topic of fine tuning (every book in the library can impact other books in the library in a non- linear manner, and the tolerance for some books/chapters/ phrases/words is very tight)
Thanks for the proof read!!
Some more flora to already thick jungle, not to be discarded: methylation & acetylation, of nucleotides & histones, banish books to deep-cellar repositories, or redact chapters, or conversely may foia them into public domain 😉 What, ~70% of our genes are already methylated at birth?
[If only Unacceptable-turned-Unconditional Jessica-the-Heroine knew, she’d be proud of me 😇]
PS wrt ↑ PPS Sorry for my proofreader gone all haughty, not unlike fauci-funded daszaks & barics of this world tinkering with what they have no slightest notion of. On the bright side, learned a new shining meaning of humdrum word. Fascinating this to happen in given context, innit? Mutation or not mutation, that’s the question 😂
I'm curious, have you ever read Dr. Weston Price's book on Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. He was a dentist who lived a 100 years ago and discovered on his world travels that those native peoples who ate there natural diets, had wide dental arches with perfect teeth, wide noses, good health, the women easily had birith, etc. When they adopted western food, what they call a SAD diet, they developed first dental caries, then loss genetic integrity. Pottenger did studies with animals and discovered that on poor diets, their genetics degenerated. I can't remember the scientist's name, but he used an Agouti mother mouse and identical embryos to discover that on a poor diet her offspring was born albino and diabetic, but when fed well, had a healthy brown mice. It is the science of epigentics. Mutations? Just a lack of good diet. Which reminds me many of the native peoples fed their mothers and fathers to be a special diet.
That’s a great point. But epigenetic expression is different to mutation. Epigenetic expression, given the right environmental conditions, is the turning on or off of genes to best adapt to those conditions - the information is already there - it’s just expressed or not expressed.
However a bad diet may cause more mutations and a good diet may limit them.
Wow. Just stumbled upon this and am gobsmacked by the little bits i could understand...
Well done Winston. This is my favorite 🍍of the week.
I got banned from a sub redit for posting A Strong Delusion 1.0 ....and debating with the mod. He appears to be convinced that I wrote that unacceptably religious blog post. I think the proximate cause of my banishment was my pointing out his religious faith in science. I found the whole thing quite humorous.
Oops - sorry about the ban!
Yes basic genetics and reasonable arguments must be “unacceptably religious” lol.
If I understand your hypothesis, mutation and natural selection can't be the basis for human evolution, because most mutations (that we see) have a negative effect on the 'fitness' of the organism.
How was the "reduced fitness may be somewhere between 1%-5% per generation" calculated? How does this differ between humans, and other organisms?