Wonderful essay, but when you write, “There’s no Evolution Fairy who can watch the gene pool and say, “Hm, that gene seems to be spreading rapidly—I should distribute it to everyone”, aren’t you leaving out the classic evolution fairy, Cupid?
What Eliezer is saying here is that biological adaptations cannot get fixed in a population by “becoming common knowledge” and being universally adopted, the way innovations in the business and engineering world spread. Even an artificial breeding program has to work within these constraints: there’s a limit to how much reproductive skew you can supply.
Wonderful essay, but when you write, “There’s no Evolution Fairy who can watch the gene pool and say, “Hm, that gene seems to be spreading rapidly—I should distribute it to everyone”, aren’t you leaving out the classic evolution fairy, Cupid?
What Eliezer is saying here is that biological adaptations cannot get fixed in a population by “becoming common knowledge” and being universally adopted, the way innovations in the business and engineering world spread. Even an artificial breeding program has to work within these constraints: there’s a limit to how much reproductive skew you can supply.