Antonym for Transhumanism Term "Uplifting"?

[Matthew Raymond]

Which, in retrospect, makes a handy excuse for why they didn't have feathers.

Especially when you fill in the missing gene sequences with frog DNA instead of bird DNA.

Again, you are equating natural selection with evolution.The two are related but distinct concepts.

No, natural selection is a fundamental part of the scientific theory of evolution. It's like saying wheels are a distinct concept from cars, then offering tanks with treads as examples of "cars".

Which is correct, that's exactly what was happening to those grey wolves and isn't in any doubt.

No, it's not. What happened to those grey wolves is called Selective Breeding. We don't need to expand the definition of "evolution". We already have a term for it.

Artificial selection is a well established mechanism of evolution, Darwin himself coined the term.

From Wikipedia:
[quote url=[URL]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_breeding[/URL]]Darwin used artificial selection as a springboard to introduce and support the theory of natural selection.[/quote]
He coined the term as a stepping stone to the concept of natural selection.

Yes it does I'm afraid to say, that's exactly what it means. Back mutations do occur but there are provisos, the genotype will not revert to an earlier form and the tendency is always towards greater complexity as adaptations reflect ever increasing mutations on the original genetic material, regardless of the apparent direction of physiological change.

There's nothing about evolution that necessarily leads to greater genetic complexity. Humans, for example, have less DNA than rice. If evolution always led to greater complexity, the genomes of every species in existence would be positively massive. Do you think the modern Coelacanth has significantly more DNA than the one from 400 million years ago? Are you under the impression that the Coelacanth has "failed to evolve" because, to our knowledge, the fish has largely remained unchanged?

The degree to which things have "evolved" is an arbitrary one based on our own judgment. It is not based on any measurable quantitative property of nature. Evolution doesn't care about progress or improvement, because it is not a conscious, top-down decision maker. It is a natural process, and the results do not imply intention. There is no forward or backward. There is merely a tendency to adapt based on selection pressure.

However even at the physiological level there are significant limitations on this process as the very traits being selected for themselves become part of the selective environment. One cannot go back to the "drawing board" so to speak. An elephant, for instance, could not evolve wings in order to gain access to food sources out of it's reach, nor could selective processes reduce it's mass in order to prepare for such a mutation. The likely solution would be to develop a longer trunk or more powerful hind legs precisely because it's own naturally evolved physical dimensions have limited the available options. The organism is a part of it's own environment and it's own form both applies selective pressures and sets boundaries on the adaptive options.

Where we talking about the effects of non-genetic information on evolution, or were we talking about how gradual genetic change under selection pressure will tend to follow the path of least resistance?

Assuming you do so via our currently available means what you have is a new, more complex genome which functionally mirrors an earlier form on the morphological level.

I would dispute that the genome would necessarily be more complex, unless you're specifically selecting for animals with higher gene complexity. As for being functionally similar, only in the way you're selecting for. For example, what the ancient animal had a capacity to evolve into naturally might be different from that of the animal you artificially produced, because the two have different DNA. (And even if there genomes as a whole were relatively the same, individual variances in the ancient species could result in different outcomes.)

This is not a new concept, it's merely a particularly contrived form of convergent evolution, with a modern organism adopting the same (or similar) functional adaptations that had served an ancestor.

I never said it was new, and this is all contrived because we were originally talking in the context of uplifting, remember?

However from the point of view of your story I'm assuming you are talking about a species reverse mapping the genotype? The distinction between that and the scenario above (selecting for phenotypes via artificial selection) is redundant for this discussion as both would warrant use of the term "reverse evolution" on the phenotypic level.

In my story, there is no "evolution" of any kind because the species is having their DNA rewritten using earlier mappings of the genome on a species that underwent artificial genetic enhancement. However, even if the species had naturally evolved greater intelligence over a short time period, any artificial means of reverting their DNA to a previous state could not be considered evolution.

The fact they would result in the end characteristics via a different combination of genetic materials (or that only one is capable of reproducing an ancient genotype) doesn't make one jot of difference to use of the term. After all bear in mind the vast majority of any species genetic material is "junk" from the organisms point of view anyway.

(Emphasis mine.) Of course it doesn't make a difference, because in the context of the theory of evolution, "reverse evolution" doesn't exist. The way you use the term is yours to determine because the term is nonsense. As for the significance of different DNA performing the same function, I would point out that the resulting mutations from both DNA sequences could actually be wildly different in function.

Which was exactly the point I made in my earlier post, which is making your objections somewhat bewildering. There's no resetting the clock on the genetic level, there's always an entropic process and a tendency towards complexity, therefore evolution does have an inherent direction, despite the lack of master plan.

Entropy is the tendency towards homogeneity, loss of information and disorder. It does not naturally follow that it would lead to complexity, although there can be an increase in order within a system so long as the sum total order of the system still decreases with time.

Evolution has no inherent direction. If you're lost in the woods, you have no inherent direction, but when you're rescued and you look at a map, you might discover you're going in a particular direction, perhaps towards a mountain or a valley, or even a lodge with food and air conditioning. That doesn't mean you had an inherent direction in mind, or that fate was guiding you towards the lodge. It's simply a coincidence you observed after the fact.

 

[Christopher]

Evolution has no inherent direction. If you're lost in the woods, you have no inherent direction, but when you're rescued and you look at a map, you might discover you're going in a particular direction, perhaps towards a mountain or a valley, or even a lodge with food and air conditioning. That doesn't mean you had an inherent direction in mind, or that fate was guiding you towards the lodge. It's simply a coincidence you observed after the fact.

Well, evolution isn't just coincidental. Traits arise randomly, bu they're selected by the environment and the demands of survival -- the traits that improve life expectancy and reproductive success are therefore reproduced more successfully. So the analogy would be if multiple people lost in the woods went off in random directions, and only some of them made it out alive, depending on whether they happened to choose the direction that led them to safety.

 

[Spot261]

Sighs....I'm not sure what it is about my posts you're objecting so strongly to, especially as I'm actually trying to help you.

From wikipedia:

Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations.[1][2] These characteristics are the expressions of genes that are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Different characteristics tend to exist within any given population as a result of mutations, genetic recombination and other sources of genetic variation.[3] Evolution occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection (including sexual selection) and genetic drift act on these variations, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more common or rare within a population.[4] It is this process of evolution that has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms and molecules.[5]

There you have the distinction summed up neatly. Evolution is the process of change, natural selection is one of the mechanisms by which that change occurs. Evolution can and does occur sans natural selection, in fact wikipedia neatly summarises several of the better known mechanisms that operate in nature alone.

In reference to artificial selection, from your own link:

Darwin used the term "artificial selection" twice in the 1859 first edition of his work On the Origin of Species, in Chapter IV: Natural Selection, and in Chapter VI: Difficulties on Theory:

Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by his powers of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature's power of selection.[7]

— Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

Evolution existed in the scientific literature prior to Darwin, in fact the observation it occurs had been made two generations earlier by his own grandfather. "Origin of Species" was not the proposal of evolution as a process, that was already well observed, but rather natural selection as a driver.

He used the term "artificial selection" to refer to human driven evolution (which at the time made it synonymous with selective breeding). The term has stuck and is common use to this day within the scientific community. It's really odd that you seem to object to this given it isn't really in dispute anywhere else except here in this thread. A more modern iteration is directed evolution which is an entirely top down process but crucially is still a form of evolution. No one in the scientific community disputes this use of the terminology, but you are acting as though I personally just pulled the idea out of thin air and presented it as speculation or a personal take on the established paradigms for you to shoot down.

There's nothing about evolution that necessarily leads to greater genetic complexity.

Yes there is, at least in nature. Each individual adaptation may or may not introduce greater complexity, but they rarely if ever reduce that complexity, thus the drift is always towards greater complexity. It's a Brownian process of aggregate movement towards complexity and always works on the population level. Genomes never become simpler in nature, only more complex.

Again, another well studied and documented phenomena you seem insistent on disagreeing with as though I personally had proposed it.

Humans, for example, have less DNA than rice.

Which tells us precisely nothing. Why would you presuppose otherwise?

I get the intention here but it's a strawman, comparing genetic complexity between humans and rice to make your point about trends in complexity would only make sense if rice were a genetic precursor to humans. Clearly it is not. Changes in the genome of each will result in greater complexity over time, but comparing the two against each other is an empty argument.

If evolution always led to greater complexity, the genomes of every species in existence would be positively massive. Do you think the modern Coelacanth has significantly more DNA than the one from 400 million years ago? Are you under the impression that the Coelacanth has "failed to evolve" because, to our knowledge, the fish has largely remained unchanged?

The genomes of every single species are positively massive, Limitations on data processing was for a long time one of the difficulties involved in genome mapping. Most of that is "junk" DNA but on the genetic level that doesn't matter, that DNA still exists as the result of chance mutations which have added to the complexity over time.

The degree to which things have "evolved" is an arbitrary one based on our own judgment. It is not based on any measurable quantitative property of nature. Evolution doesn't care about progress or improvement, because it is not a conscious, top-down decision maker. It is a natural process, and the results do not imply intention. There is no forward or backward. There is merely a tendency to adapt based on selection pressure.

And yet you based an argument on the assumption that we were somehow "more evolved" than rice and thus the volume of genetic information inherent in each would somehow give the lie to a statement about the progressive nature of genetic complexity?

Natural selection is not a conscious top down decision maker, that isn't in dispute, it's about a statistical aggregate of the effect on reproductive success of random genetic fluctuation.

However evolution is not limited to evolution by natural selection, it's simply the best known driver. Artificial selection is validly described as evolution throughout the literature and your own personal objection to this idea is baffling.

Entropy is the tendency towards homogeneity, loss of information and disorder. It does not naturally follow that it would lead to complexity, although there can be an increase in order within a system so long as the sum total order of the system still decreases with time.

I didn't say it does?