Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

Re:Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, r... by TeMPOraL on Sunday November 15, 2020 @07:42PM (#25106597)

> If you take any functioning healthy ecosystem on earth, one generally less tampered with by humans, you'll find from a microscopic, right up to a macroscopic level, the life in those ecosystems have adapted to function together.

You're still taking essentially a static view of a dynamic system, because you're looking at too small a timescales. What we see as "natural balance" is essentially a freeze-frame of nature. The equilibria we see aren't stable - they're just very slow to changing. Everything is evolving and in a constant war with each other at every level - from microscopic to macroscopic. Nature itself doesn't care about the environment as we see it today[0].

The problem with humans boils down to what makes us truly special: intelligence and socializing enabled us to evolve a meta-organism of society at rates many orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution. Language and writing lets us propagate knowledge and technologies between generations, and intelligence lets us problem-solve and simulate in mind space - pruning the solution space quickly and in an efficient way, over evolution's directed RNG.

Point being, no other organism can respond with the speed at which we evolve our societies and technologies. That's why we disrupt the ecosystems and the climate. We're too fast for nature.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event is a good example. An evolutionary leap, leading to most life dying off, only for new and more complex forms to eventually take its place. But as it is with life, whatever comes after a mass die-off isn't the same thing that was there before.

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Re:Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, r... by XorNot on Sunday November 15, 2020 @10:34PM (#25107663)

Also most of the issue with environmental disruption is the same issue as say, when an asteroid slams into the planet: sure, life survived in some form, but a lot of the dominant species didn't.

Human industralization is that sort of a problem - rather then a slow multi-generational change in equilibria, we're looking at rapid change which simply wipes species out (because if you can't have a generational change, you can't have any evolutionary adaptation).

The domestication of dogs for example is something humans definitely did to the native biosphere - dogs don't exist today without us. But it took at least 20,000 years to do. Not 300.

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