Biodegradable packaging

impr0v

Would you consider the following to be true?

---> Each individual is no more than a vessel for their genes. Their purpose is to carry those genes for a period of time, pass them on to their children, ensure the children get as good a start as possible in order to safely carry the genes, and then expire, their purpose having been fulfilled.

Perhaps it is a biological argument more than philosophical one, though probably a pretty basic idea.

Some further aspects:

Ignoring the capacity for an individual to communicate with his or her genes, each individual organism, at a genetic level, would theoretically have no way of knowing that it is not the only strain of human gene still living. Is this the basis of our strong sense of self-preservation, and how is this compromised by psychological disorders involving self-harm? (Possibly too medical a question)

Is a condition of the safe carriage deal finding and mating with someone who's genes you consider to be better than your own? As your body senses that you may be in danger of not being able to pass on those genes, does it compromise on this condition, and continue to compromise until you could in fact weaken your genes?

Considering how many perils the genes we carry have survived over the millenia, and with 'survival of the fittest' in mind, surely we should be all the cream of the human genetic crop. Looking around couldn't one be forgiven for thinking otherwise?

Could the gene pool have the theoretical capacity to think as a unit? Given that there is obviously the potential for communication between an individual and their genes, and the obvious potential for communication between individuals. For example, if the gene pool sensed somehow, through information relayed back to it, that it was becoming diluted and weak, would it have the capacity to introduce measures at a societal level to strengthen the gene pool? Say physically, humans were becoming weak, i.e. serially obese, unfit, prone to premature death, could the gene pool push society towards a more physically focused trend when it comes to mating, could it influence each individual to seek physical perfection in their mate, and by doing so, cause endless chains of weak genes to die out due to their reduced opportunity to mate? This is obviously over and above the instinctive seeking of the most advantageous mating partner.

Straying towards almost fascist sounding ideas now, and having re-read it, forgive me if it sounds badly thought out or even arrogant, but have you any ideas on these matters?

simu

This thread seems to be more suited to the biology forum unless, maybe you want to discuss the ethics of eugenics or some such topic. I'll leave it here for a while if you want to orient your questions more towards philosophy.

From what I do know of genetics, I'd say your view of the interactions between genes and human psychology is far too simplistic but again, there are people on the biology forum better able to reply to your questions.

Capt'n Midnight

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
"A chicken is just an egg's way of making more eggs."

It's a bit like metaphysics great fun arguing the nature of substance until some physisicsts start finding sub atomic particles .... similarily genes are unthinking, and apart from major mutations that severly affect survival, most changes are random, a bit like the way surnames die out or become more popular over time (well since written records).

All you can do is argue about the significance of our knowledge of the way genes behave affects our outlook on life and ourselves. Luckily enough the uncertainty priciple gives us a little leeway in the free choice dept.

SkepticOne

You can certainly view the organism as a means of carrying information coded in the DNA. In order to replicate the DNA needs to code for the appropriate vehicle to carry that DNA and reproduce. This may mean producing a brain and so forth. Organisms with brains and the ability to communicate (such as ourselves) may then create cultures which themselves 'evolve' and pass on information. Successful cultures contain mechanisms which ensure survival. Those that don't die out. The process might be considered loosely analagous to biological evolution. I think this may be the idea behind the 'meme' (link although I have not read much of Dawkins work.

Can the gene pool be said to think? I don't think there's any theories out there that suggest that the gene pool is modified by any other means than selection of the successive generation by some process. However, once the culture is created, it could give rise to a sort of co-evolution between the culture and the individuals, both evolving to the mutual benefit of the other. It is in the interests of the culture (and the sub-cultures within) to have humans appropriate the culture and, of course, humans will only allow a culture (or sub-culture) to survive if there is some benefit to the survival of those individuals. This need not happen at a conscious level for those individuals making up a culture.

Personally, I don't think that humans have evolved much beyond the hunter gatherer stage and so I don't think we will find evidence of the above. Large scale culture is a comparatively recent invention and we would not have had time to evolve according to the needs of culture.

I do think that cultures (and organisations) are like people in some ways. Once established they seem to set about modifying themselves in order to ensure self preservation. They have interests that are not necessarily the same as the individuals making up the culture.

Getting back to the idea of the gene pool 'thinking' though not related to the above. One method in artificial intelligence called genetic algorithms involves the random modifying of a string, selecting out the the best fit to the problem at hand, duplicating the surviving strings and randomly mutating them and repeating the process in a manner analagous to biological evolution until the optimal solution is obtained.

antoinolachtnai

Well, this is certainly possible, but this is not what Darwinian evolutionary theory suggests. Evolution happens, according to the Darwinian theory by means of selection of accidental variations.

What you are saying is that there is a bigger plan to evolution, and that the genotype adjusts itself in an intelligent way in accordance with this plan. This is definitely not classical darwinism.

This could well be the case, and certainly nobody has ever proven that it isn't the case. The reason it isn't considered too seriously is that there isn't really a way to show that it is the case. I mean, how would you prove that this was actually what is happening, given the current state of knowledge about biology?

The examples you mention, weeding out physically weak genes are things that can be achieved without the genome being intelligent. It's just a question of weak strains dying out and strong strains thriving.

In the absence of a way of demonstrating a sophisticated theory like this, scientists follow the principle of parsimony and continue to depend on the simplest possible theory that can explain our observations of the world, or at least most of them.

Of course there are problems with classical evolutionary theory. It doesn't yet explain completely satisfactorily how it was that intelligent life emerged, for instance. The whole field is really only beginning to open up.

AngryBadger

I fail to see the merit in any of what has gone before this. Without trying to debunk the idea that anything is possible until proven otherwise, i'd like to point out that there is nothing conscious about evolution, as we understand it it's a mathematical principle applied to a biological system.

We all know the dogma, if it confers a survival advantage, the organism matures to reproduce, and pass the genes onto it's progeny,and so on in this manner, ultimately leading to the kind of speciation that exists today. This is not a controlled process, beyond the fact that all organism are subject to the transience of whatever environment they inhabit. Maybe I'm missing what's being proposed here, but I think it's fair to say there is no tangible evidence of a goal, or ultimatum to evolution as we see it, if there was then speciation would not exist, humans wouldn't even exist.

Consider that since we reached our current state of evolution we've become the single most destructive organism on this planet, in virtually every respect. Why would any planned evolution incorporate such a development. Moreover, a planned evolution would have no place for speciation, or certainly not speciation at the level we see it today. A plan would most likely be to develop an ideal eco-system of sorts, all organisms being interdependent, and balanced out by appropriate food chains, and predatory activities.

In any case, even if for some insane reason I were to accept that there were some kind of plan to evolution, the process it still a random one, there is no conscious interface between an organism, their genome, and their environment.

And before someone else points it out, I accede that humans, and other organisms, do exert a kind of communications with their environment by building dwellings, and such to offset the harshness of their surroundings, but that's not what's being proposed here, and ultimately we're still at the mercy of natural disaster.

SkepticOne

I agree with AngryBadger. The only plausible way that something along the lines of what impr0v is suggesting, imho, is the gene-culture co-evolution idea I mentioned earlier.

The problem is "Could the gene pool have the theoretical capacity to think as a unit? Given that there is obviously the potential for communication between an individual and their genes, and the obvious potential for communication between individuals."

There is no known mechanism for transmitting information from the environment to the genome other than having the weak members die out before passing on the genes.