Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Wolves

You don't get it.
TB — (archived)

The theoretical idea of genetic engineering--designing an organism--is valid, just like the theoretical idea of artificial intelligence.

But when you look at real genes, and real brains, they don't go by the rules of engineering as we like to think about them.

A complex organism, including ourselves, is the product of a billion years of accidents, luck, kludges, and new functions for old designs. A million monkeys slapping DNA combinations together. Evolution is all about duct tape and whatever works. Sometimes, when you fix something with duct tape, you get lucky, and it holds for years. Have that happen often enough, and the duct tape starts to look like clever engineering. It really isn't.

If an organism were architecture, it wouldn't be a glass-covered skyscraper. It would be the Watts Towers.

Wolves are not a perfect product. They are the result of the same haphazard processes--what wolves are Here and Now. Prehistoric giant wolves are extinct. Someday the modern wolf might be too, its environment no longer "wolf-friendly," and something else will fill its niche (probably a relation of the coyote.)

You don't know for sure which genes are "desired" and which ones are "bad." There are too many cross-connections. This would have to be found out the hard way, over many generations, and then we're back to square one, aren't we?

Maybe someday we'll know how to do this, using some vast computational and simulation concept. And hey, maybe artificial intelligence. But not yet.

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