This seems a pretty frequent ideological goal of many technophilic fantasies,
to "escape" from Darwinian evolution, to no longer have a "blind watchmaker"
but human/transhuman desires and intentions to do the work of evolution.
While it may prove difficult to show why this cannot really happen when we
look at any one area, like alleviating physical suffering, and so forth (I
mean after all they look like simple bioengineering problems, right?), I
think there exists some deep, though understandable, misunderstandings about
the nature of evolution in these utopic dreams. This time the
misunderstanding arises not from creationist ideological denial of reality,
but from the misunderstanding of our individual partial role that we play in
an otherwise impersonal algorithmic process that encompasses our more partial
and self-seeming "star" role that we as individuals play in that process.
It comes down to this: The things that humans do for individual vanity, or
even for the "greater good", we NEVER figure accurately (and frequently not
even approximately) the unintended consequences of what we do, and hence
considerations of fitness may frequently run obliviously or even counter to
what an individual thinks of as "fitness" from their own perspective. For
example, we may increase the intelligence of individuals, only to discover
that they no longer have any desire to reproduce. We may alleviate physical
pain and suffering to such a degree that people become apathetic to the
plight of those who still have no relief, after all do not at least some
people enter the medical profession inspired at least in part if not in whole
by some incident(s) of suffering within their own childhood
family/environment?
In any case this does not stand as a point of defeatism in these kinds of
issues, it merely points out that while may and perhaps should improve our
condition and increase our options, we should not expect this to exempt us
from essentially blind evolutionary forces. In the case of pain, especially
since we all have fairly visceral experience of this phenomena, evolution
thrives on stress of this very sort. Eliminate this, and evolution will tend
to award those "competitors" that reintroduce this or another stressor into
the system. Perhaps in its place our great grandchildren will experience
some great anxieties that we could never understand in our current cognitive
capacities.
In any case, when we hear these sorts of technophilic gushings about
eliminating natural selection, I think we should remain more than just mildly
skeptical. For me it sort of falls in the same sort of category as
technologically achieving time-travel (backwards and forwards). We find it a
little more seductive than that, however, because in particular instances,
like eliminating all physical pain, we have already made some significant
strides and it therefore makes the issue of why not complete elimination? a
particularly more pressing one. In any case, despite any optimism on
particular issues, evolution - and here I mean the blind variety - operates
on a more impersonal and more holistic level.
-Jake
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