But of course there’s no such thing as “terminal genes”. What’s actually going on is that some genes evolved first, meaning that a bunch of downstream genes ended up selected for compatibility with them. In principle evolution would be fine with the terminal genes being replaced, it’s just that it’s computationally difficult to find a way to do so without breaking downstream dependencies.
I think your analysis is incorrect. The book is called “The Selfish Gene”. No basic unit of evolution is perfect, but probably the best available is the gene—which is to say, genomic locus (defined relative to surrounding context). An organism is a temporary coalition of its genes. Generally there’s quite strong instrumental alignment between all the genes in an organism, but it’s not always perfect, and you do get gene drives in nature. If a gene could favor itself at the expense of the other genes in that organism (in terms of overall population frequency), it totally would.
I think this is a good analogy for how human values work. We start off with some early values, and then develop instrumental strategies for achieving them. Those instrumental strategies become crystallized and then give rise to other instrumental strategies for achieving them, and so on. Understood this way, we can describe an organism’s goals/strategies purely in terms of which goals “have power over” which other goals, which goals are most easily replaced, etc, without needing to appeal to some kind of essential “terminalism” that some goals have and others don’t.
Well, it’s kinda true, right? Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (developing embryos look like worms, then fish, amphibians—they mirror the path of evolution). That’s because it’s easier for evolution to add steps at the end than to changes steps in the beginning. It happens with computers too—modern Intel and AMD chips still startup in 16 bit real mode.
In the coalition of genes that make it into a gamete, newer genes support the old genes, but not vice versa. The genes that control apoptosis (p53 etc.) are obligate mutualists—apoptosis genes support older particular genes, but older genes don’t support apoptosis genes in particular.
Right, the part about layers of more and less conserved genes is true AFAIK. (I think actually ontogeny doesn’t recapitulate phylogeny linearly, but rather there’s a kinda of hourglass structure where some mid-development checkpoints are most conserved—but I’m not remembering where I saw this—possibly in a book or paper by Rupert Riedl or Günter Wagner.)
What I’m objecting to, is viewing that as a growth of a values structure for the values of [the evolution of a species, as an agent]. That’s because that entity doesn’t really value genes at all; it doesn’t care about the payload of genes. Individual genes selfishly care about themselves as a payload, being payloaded into the gene pool of the species; each variant wants its frequency to go up. The species-evolution doesn’t care about that. I think the species-evolution is a less coherent way of imputing agency to evolution compared to selfish genes, though still interesting. But if impute values to a species-evolution, I’m not sure what you’d get, and I think it would be something like “performs well in this ecological niche”—though there would be edge cases that are harder to describe, such as long-term trends due to sexual selection or due for example to any sort of frequency-dependent effects of genes.
I think your analysis is incorrect. The book is called “The Selfish Gene”. No basic unit of evolution is perfect, but probably the best available is the gene—which is to say, genomic locus (defined relative to surrounding context). An organism is a temporary coalition of its genes. Generally there’s quite strong instrumental alignment between all the genes in an organism, but it’s not always perfect, and you do get gene drives in nature. If a gene could favor itself at the expense of the other genes in that organism (in terms of overall population frequency), it totally would.
This describes some but not all of how our values work. There are free parameters in what you do with the universe; what sets those free parameters is of basic interest. (Cf. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NqsNYsyoA2YSbb3py/fundamental-question-what-determines-a-mind-s-effects , though that statement is quite flawed as well.)
Well, it’s kinda true, right? Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (developing embryos look like worms, then fish, amphibians—they mirror the path of evolution). That’s because it’s easier for evolution to add steps at the end than to changes steps in the beginning. It happens with computers too—modern Intel and AMD chips still startup in 16 bit real mode.
In the coalition of genes that make it into a gamete, newer genes support the old genes, but not vice versa. The genes that control apoptosis (p53 etc.) are obligate mutualists—apoptosis genes support older particular genes, but older genes don’t support apoptosis genes in particular.
Right, the part about layers of more and less conserved genes is true AFAIK. (I think actually ontogeny doesn’t recapitulate phylogeny linearly, but rather there’s a kinda of hourglass structure where some mid-development checkpoints are most conserved—but I’m not remembering where I saw this—possibly in a book or paper by Rupert Riedl or Günter Wagner.)
What I’m objecting to, is viewing that as a growth of a values structure for the values of [the evolution of a species, as an agent]. That’s because that entity doesn’t really value genes at all; it doesn’t care about the payload of genes. Individual genes selfishly care about themselves as a payload, being payloaded into the gene pool of the species; each variant wants its frequency to go up. The species-evolution doesn’t care about that. I think the species-evolution is a less coherent way of imputing agency to evolution compared to selfish genes, though still interesting. But if impute values to a species-evolution, I’m not sure what you’d get, and I think it would be something like “performs well in this ecological niche”—though there would be edge cases that are harder to describe, such as long-term trends due to sexual selection or due for example to any sort of frequency-dependent effects of genes.
You may mean phylogenetic inertia.