Does the same reasoning apply to cancer treatment and antibiotics?
No, it doesn’t. Cancer and antibiotics are about creating new chemicals to combat an organism that’s evolving against you. I’m talking about evolution that merely changes the quantities of chemicals your body already knows how to make.
Your brain uses chemical signallers—this requires producing a chemical which fits into a receptor somewhere. You’re suggesting either making more of these chemicals, or something that can perhaps jam a receptor. Or something that looks like one of these chemicals. Either of these effects can evolve pretty easily—merely making more or less receptors or chemicals than you already do. I’m not suggesting a hard piece of evolution like evolving the capability to produce a new chemical with a novel effect.
Novel artificial chemicals will either affect receptors you already have, and which already fit chemicals your body can make, or won’t have a cognitive effect at all.
Look at any other part of the body. The parts are pretty well balanced. Your muscles are present in roughly the right quantities to drive limbs of a sensible size. Evolution is very good at balancing the relative quantities of things to make a good overall solution.
Evolving novel structures is hard for evolution. Balancing existing ones is easy. Your chemicals aren’t making novel structures, they’re affecting the balance. Personally I suspect evolution did a good job with that already.
(Didn’t downvote and was rather surprised to see others did.)
Does the same reasoning apply to cancer treatment and antibiotics?
I concede the weakness of both those analogies.
Evolving novel structures is hard for evolution. Balancing existing ones is easy. Your chemicals aren’t making novel structures, they’re affecting the balance.
My evolutionary heritage does not share my goals and did not occur in western civilisation in the year 2010.
Look at any other part of the body. The parts are pretty well balanced. Your muscles are present in roughly the right quantities to drive limbs of a sensible size.
And this is a good analogy to where the point of contention lays. We need exercise. Optimal physical and mental performance requires large amounts of artificially induced exercise in things like gymnasiums. Evolution didn’t share my goals and didn’t optimise for my environment.
Personally I suspect evolution did a good job with that already.
Science says you are wrong. These are testable phenomena that have been tested.
I agree with your sentence here—“Evolution didn’t share my goals, and didn’t optimise for my environment.” We are going to be seriously suboptimal at living in cities.
Here’s the problem. Most of these mutations are actually pretty easy mutations. They will occur naturally. The systems the mutations act on are also venerable—we share these systems with mice for the most part even though we haven’t had a common ancestor in absolutely ages. The inescapable conclusion is that evolution has tried most if not all of these mutations already, and threw them out. Why would that happen when intelligence has such an advantage? We don’t know—however I think we can consider it almost statistically inevitable that it must have happened on quite a few occasions.
All I’m saying is this—we don’t know why evolution threw these things out. There must be a reason, and that reason may imply that it’s not advisable for you or I to mimic the effect.
There is a flip side—maybe evolution really hasn’t optimised this correctly—selectively speaking we’re largely cavemen with a bit of farmer thrown in. Civilisation really hasn’t been around long enough to make much difference.
So in summary—I think there is evidence to suggest that you’ll be able to change your brain function to enhance measured intelligence by taking certain substances. I also think that nearly all of these changes will correspond to changes that evolution has tried and has rejected—for reasons as yet unknown. Your call.
Does the same reasoning apply to cancer treatment and antibiotics?
No, it doesn’t. Cancer and antibiotics are about creating new chemicals to combat an organism that’s evolving against you. I’m talking about evolution that merely changes the quantities of chemicals your body already knows how to make.
Your brain uses chemical signallers—this requires producing a chemical which fits into a receptor somewhere. You’re suggesting either making more of these chemicals, or something that can perhaps jam a receptor. Or something that looks like one of these chemicals. Either of these effects can evolve pretty easily—merely making more or less receptors or chemicals than you already do. I’m not suggesting a hard piece of evolution like evolving the capability to produce a new chemical with a novel effect.
Novel artificial chemicals will either affect receptors you already have, and which already fit chemicals your body can make, or won’t have a cognitive effect at all.
Look at any other part of the body. The parts are pretty well balanced. Your muscles are present in roughly the right quantities to drive limbs of a sensible size. Evolution is very good at balancing the relative quantities of things to make a good overall solution.
Evolving novel structures is hard for evolution. Balancing existing ones is easy. Your chemicals aren’t making novel structures, they’re affecting the balance. Personally I suspect evolution did a good job with that already.
(Didn’t downvote and was rather surprised to see others did.)
I concede the weakness of both those analogies.
My evolutionary heritage does not share my goals and did not occur in western civilisation in the year 2010.
And this is a good analogy to where the point of contention lays. We need exercise. Optimal physical and mental performance requires large amounts of artificially induced exercise in things like gymnasiums. Evolution didn’t share my goals and didn’t optimise for my environment.
Science says you are wrong. These are testable phenomena that have been tested.
I agree with your sentence here—“Evolution didn’t share my goals, and didn’t optimise for my environment.” We are going to be seriously suboptimal at living in cities.
There’s also no shortage of articles about improved intelligence. For example.… http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/10/smart_mice.php
Here’s the problem. Most of these mutations are actually pretty easy mutations. They will occur naturally. The systems the mutations act on are also venerable—we share these systems with mice for the most part even though we haven’t had a common ancestor in absolutely ages. The inescapable conclusion is that evolution has tried most if not all of these mutations already, and threw them out. Why would that happen when intelligence has such an advantage? We don’t know—however I think we can consider it almost statistically inevitable that it must have happened on quite a few occasions.
All I’m saying is this—we don’t know why evolution threw these things out. There must be a reason, and that reason may imply that it’s not advisable for you or I to mimic the effect.
There is a flip side—maybe evolution really hasn’t optimised this correctly—selectively speaking we’re largely cavemen with a bit of farmer thrown in. Civilisation really hasn’t been around long enough to make much difference.
So in summary—I think there is evidence to suggest that you’ll be able to change your brain function to enhance measured intelligence by taking certain substances. I also think that nearly all of these changes will correspond to changes that evolution has tried and has rejected—for reasons as yet unknown. Your call.