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Speeding up Evolution
DaytonCIM writes ""We can rebuild him. Make him stronger... faster..." Slate.com has a great article on next generation gene research that promises to build "Supermen" or "Superwomen" out of us all. Insulin-like Growth Factor genes to make us stronger without ever visiting a weight room. EPO to generate more red blood cells and enable us to run "forever." Engineered human "Blood" to speed up evolution, so that we become less susceptible to disease and injury."
I love reading about this stuff, but I can't help but think it's going to benefit my unborn grandkids a lot more than it will ever help me. I wish cryogenicists would freeze LIVING people so I can come back in a couple centuries. That would be cool.
Of course, according to Star Trek, the Eugenics wars took place during the 1990s, so these supermen must already be among us. I'm sure that when the footage is de-classified, we'll all enjoy a bunch of fascinating documentaries on how these scientists already did their stuff back in the 70s....
Last time I checked Superman was in a wheelchair, and Supergirl had been cancelled by the WB.
In the year 2000, genetic enhancements will make everyone look super beautiful, the downside being everyone will look exactly like one another. Ahhh... Don't you love conan obrien?
" Steroids raise cancer risk, promote impotence, and cause mood changes."
Yeah but the muscles pull the chicks!
...and when we change all our DNA to be coded a certain way, we'll find some strange illness that affects what would have been 0.02% of the opulation now threatens to wipe out mankind.
Do we go to sign up for research on this? I'd go for 'enhancement'.
Some of the stuff makes me uneasy, but there's a cost to everything.
He can code large masses of programs with a single keystroke, Absorb boxes of pizza with nary a thought, never shaves for days on end! It's... Internet boy!.. Genetically modified so that... oh.. wait.. we already have people like that...
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Seriously, this stuff is cool.
I'm holding out for the adamantium skeleton, though...
__________
[Big Brick Wall]
oh great, everyone lives longer (or forever), the planet becomes over-crowded, and we haven't invented interstellar travel.
Can anyone else see where this is going?
Seems the article can not be read in Mozilla, at least not without cookies.
Mozilla 1.0
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020623 Debian/1.0.0-0.woody.1
Bodybuilding for Couch Potatoes...
Now geeks everywhere will all be able to carry a 24 inch CRT under each arm from one side of the building to the other ;-). Seriously, though, this could be a bad thing. If you just wake up one day, and you are super-strong, you are gonna screw stuff up. Maybe you'll break someone's hand (ala a Star Trek The Next Generation episode when some guy takes over Data's body), or you are just going to generally screw up your super-muscles. You'll probably still never exercise, and end up pulling your super-strong muscles (which will probably hurt more, because there is more mass).
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
I thought you meant Ximian Evolution. Now speeding up that Evolution would be special :)
I never thought I'd see the day when only two of these were spam, and the others were actual opportunities of a lifetime.
"Make your penis 3 inches longer."
"Grow Muscle Mass without exercise."
"Horny cheerleaders wet 4 u"
"Run virtually forever without breaking a sweat."
Good luck to the SPAM Assassin folks if I can't tell the difference.
Isn't this the sort of thing that the Nazis were working on back during World War II?
Quality or Quantity, don't tell me they're the same.
Speeding up evolution means lots of mutations and lots of death of everything not better. Mucking around with the genome is not evolution, it's just mucking around with the genome. Blah...
...Linus Torvalds said,
"And don't EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than
what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a
feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence _much_ too much credit."
So if after all the hype dies down and it does some "unforseen" things, will the condition be known as Leonitis, or will you just be Leon(d)?
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
Great, now all the old folks will leech my social security momey fovever. As if social security wasn't screwed already.
a) manifold movements are cyclical
b) extinction cycles are cyclical
A + B means large, slow, asteroids are pretty much funnelled in this way on a regular basis. I wonder if NEAR is looking at this as a way to predict odds of getting hit during a certain century.
Maybe I should just go back to bed.
-- B
If those damn aliens had a decent QA team I wouldn't need any enhancements.
I mean really, you get an injection of this stuff, just sit around for couple weeks, and you get buffed up?
I predict masses of musclebound geeks by 2005...
Can they make a radioactive spider bite me so I can walk on walls?
The following statement is false.
The previous statement is true.
Welcome to my world.
My other Beowulf cluster is... er...
where a lab creates the perfect humans...yet after a reaction with a common flu (i think?), their antibodies cause all sorts of havoc, mainly causing the labs staff to age very rapidly... Unless the FDA approves this anytime soon though, I'm not too worried about it.
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
Injury encourages the chance of survival by making us (and other animals) fear of being injured. It prevents you from skydriving, thus you're not gonna die because of your parachute malfunctions, for example.
And if you disagree, you will be killed by those with implanted guass rifles. This will happen. "Ethicists" and "moralists" better make wills.
Soon, I'll be so far ahead of the rest of humanity I'll be able to read /. stories an average of 10 to 20 minutes before the rest of you surrender-monkeys.
I can think of one enhancement most men would go for. Unfortunately, eventually it's just too long and women are afraid of it.
I tried it and went back to mutt. I do agree that evolution should be sped up, though. It was a little on the slow side, as I recall.
Reminds me of the movie Gattaca. Scary.
Nothing from nowhere I'm no one at all
when you accidentally evolve the cancer dna in your own blood and make some kind of super cancer that kills us all? huh? what then?
BURN THE SCIENTISTS!
My ass.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
killev.
Best script ever. Bring on the IMAP rewrite.
What a let down, here i was thinking i'd be able to download my email faster.
They spent so much time pondering if they could. They never stopped to consider if they should.
This could get out of hand, but I'm an optimist. Let's just be careful, and explore.
Anybody ever stop and think "Hey, evolution takes place over a very long period of time...perhaps we shouldn't fuck with it?" Nope. Everyone seems to think that all we need to do is make everyone the ideal. Well, if you do that: A: It is no longer any sort of ideal, an ideal is supposed to provide a goal, a motivation to be a better person, or to train harder, etc. B: Whose ideal are we working toward? Hitler's? An aryan nation of blonde haired, blue eyed automatons whose only goal in life is to serve to the best of his/her abilities (which will be greatly amplified by the techniques spoken of above, and more)? C: Whose to say that it will be him/her? Maybe it will be an asexual being, since the genes can just be created. If we can make the genes in a lab, why should anyone be grown (yes, grown-not born, grown) with genitals or a sex drive? --- Think about it, if variety is the spice of life, and we continue on the path we have chosen, the future will be quite bland...
~ Change what you can, Accept what you can't Carpe Diem Baby!!!
My neighbor's kid has some syndrome where because of some genetic hiccup the kid has no upper body strength. No, I not saying the kid's a wimp, I'm saying he can't swallow or breathe on his own.
Apparently, the current thinking is that through gene therapy there's at least a possibilty the kid could be cured, ('cept there's a moratorium on gene therapy).
So, being super people is I guess all well and good, for me I'd just like to see this kid not have to eat through a tube.
science is lazy, because it's profit driven. given a problem, once a solution is found, unless there are other easy ways to solve the problem, most places wait out until the patents have expired and simply copy.
look at modern medicine.
given this, why wouldn't there only be 3-5 different major dna codings?
Many systems in the human body are simply not designed for extremely long lives. The heart beats only so many times before wearing out (as an aside almost all animals have the same number of lifetime heart beats regardless of size, environment etc except humans have about 3X as many), the genetic repair mechanisms are only so good at fighting off mutations such as cancer, and the one that needs to be solved for there to even be a chance for extremely long lives in tolemer capping (when cells devide the genes are seperated by DNA polymerase which unravels them in sections and continues until it reaches the tolemere caps, but each time they are slightly damaged, if the tolomers are not reinforced this eventually leads to the genes unravelling and the cell either self destructing or becoming cancerous, in mouse trials a simple physical cap extended the average lifespan by almost 3X)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Muscle mass automagically atrophies when not in use, so I don't see how someone can "grow" muscle like they would grow hair.
Obviously, there are serious moral and biological questions that have yet to be answered about all this. And unfortunately, these types of people usually have too optimistic view of the near-future. I mean, where are the flying-cars and annual visits to the moon?
I'm all for creating new organs out of stems cells, if its needed for life. I know many good people would have lived longer if all they needed was an organ transplant.
Science is good, but you have to keep it in check with average human prosperity. Its like the "Prime Directive," you have to follow it or theres drastic consequences you can never forsee. You wouldn't give a monkey a gun if you knew he could understand the consequences of using it. Same thing applies here in an obscewred point.
I like cynthiathetotalwhorebag@yahoo.com
In the software world we would call this vaporware. However when scientists get futuristic and show minimal results with some mice its visionary for some reason. This story should have been published 10 years from now with some viable results. This article is nothing more than an advertisement wrapped in an article probably set up by the R&D department of whoever is funding this mess. Give me a break. What's next a story about hover cars and teleportation? Enhancement studies have been consistently failing in the military for years. It always seems the same: (1) find out chemical X is depleted by activity Y. (2) Find a synthetic way of making chemical X. (3) Give loads and loads of X to person conducting activity Y. (4) Wonder why it gives them migranes, results in Air Force pilots dropping bombs on civilians, and causes permanent brain damage or cancer. A friend that worked at an aeromedical research lab had stories of permanent neurological damage caused through sleep retarding drugs and other performance enhancers. Such stories are all over the military enhancement research from failed LSD experiments to caffeine as performance enhancers. Vaporware says I.
More people are killed by sheep each year than by skydiving, and yet we still have shepards...
Banaaaana!
So if you play a Devo single in reverse is it Evoloution? I have to try that with 'We are Devo'
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
... my girlfriend does, she's working on a Ph.D. in skeletal muscle physiology. I cede my keyboard.
-------
While IGF-1 does wonderful things in mice, don't look for it at your local store or spam e-mail. Whatever people are selling in the spam shops isn't IGF-1, or anything remotely related to it. The real stuff is approximately $25 000 (US) per gram, which will treat 25 mice for a month, or one human for a day.
The problem with gene therapy is that it isn't available "now or soon", as stated in the article. The problem is that when the gene is injected, only a very small percentage of the muscle cells will express it. This means that delivery of the gene is very inefficient.
Adding onto this, there will be an immune response to the gene or the vector delivering the gene. This means that it won't hang around very long.
Next, there is a massive area to deliver to (all your skeletal muscle). And no efficient mechanism by which to accomplish this.
Basically, gene therapy is far from being a reality, let alone a mass market one that you could afford. To worry about gene doping at any Olympics in the forseable future is exceedingly premature.
The reason you can alter genes in mice is that their eggs can be manipulated in vitro . The manipulated eggs are artificially fertilized and injected into a pseudo-pregnant female. And while with this approach, only one cell has to be targetted, it still takes many many many months to create a transgenic mouse that expresses the proper genotype. Once that's done, you have to breed them - that's a lot of ass work for post-docs and PhD students.
Nanotechnology and genetic-engineering allow Homo sapiens to discard the legacy-wetware of our evolutionary past. Post-humans will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world.
The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they served the inclusive fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They can be replaced by a radically different sort of neural architecture. Life-long happiness of an intensity now physiologically unimaginable can become the genetically-preprogrammed norm of mental health. A sketch is offered of when, and why, this major evolutionary transition in the history of life is likely to occur. Possible objections, both practical and moral, are raised and then rebutted.
Today's images of opiate-addled junkies, and the lever-pressing frenzies of intra-cranially self-stimulating rats, are deceptive. Such stereotypes stigmatise, and falsely discredit, the only remedy for the world's horrors and everyday discontents that is biologically realistic. For it is misleading to contrast social and intellectual development with perpetual happiness. There need be no such trade-off. States of "dopamine-overdrive" can actually enhance exploratory and goal-directed activity. Hyper-dopaminergic states can also increase the range and diversity of actions an organism finds rewarding. So our descendants may live in a civilisation of well-motivated "high-achievers", animated by gradients of bliss. Their productivity may far eclipse our own.
Two hundred years ago, before the development of potent synthetic pain-killers or surgical anaesthetics, the notion that "physical" pain could be banished from most people's lives would have seemed no less bizarre. Most of us in the urban-industrial West now take its daily absence for granted. The prospect that what we describe as "mental" pain, too, could one day be superseded is equally counter-intuitive. The technical option of its abolition turns its deliberate retention into an issue of political policy and ethical choice.
That's the killer application that genetic engineering solely needed. oh yeah.
Doesn't the name Khan Noonien Singh and Eugenics Wars come to mind?
-------- Cluster bombing from B-52s is very, very accurate -- the bombs always hit the ground.
It's already happened. Look at the Klitschko brothers. Do you honestly think those two behemoths weren't inspired by Rocky?
Not to mention the cost of genetic manipulation. Restriction enzymes are expensive (like more expensive than gold or weapons grade plutionium gramme for gramme). One might envisage a speciation event, where the super rich who can afford these things become Homo sapiens ssp. arrogantetloadeditius whilst the rest of us mere mortals stay Homo sapiens. More likely the rich go extinct, except for the progeny they sire from extra-test tube liasons which hide in the normal human gene pool. However, here it seems likely that the rich people's Y chromosome would be passed on into the normal population at an equal frequency to the X chromosome rather than at half the frequency as normal Population genetics off the top of your head is fun!
--
http://www.superbad.com
"...we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." B.Spears 2003
Let me start out by saying, I've lost a contact lens, so I apoligize for the spelling in advance. I'm having a hard time seeing. That said......
The Cold War wasn't the only arms race going on. There's one that exits every day inside each one of it us. It's a race between various pathogens and our immune system. Oddly enough, DNA plays a HUGE role in the functioning of the immune system as a whole.
Did you realize that the reason that African-Americans have sickle cell anemia is that it is an evolved immune response? In order to develop the disease, you must inherit 2 recessive "defective" genes. But if you have only 1 "defective" gene and one "normal" gene, you are immune to malaria. Malaria is a mosquito borne disease that kills more than a million people a year in Africa. My point with is that genes that seem to be "bad" to us, might only seem "bad" because we don't have the whole story.
We've spent either thousands or millions of years, depending on your point of view, on this planet with our pathogens. They change us and we change them. We know that this happens because we can sit in a labratory and observe it. Antibiotic resistant strains are a prime example of this. I happen to call it evolution. Just as wolves thin the deer herds, making them faster, smarter, and stronger, so must the wolves become faster, smarter and stonger to continue to catch the deer. When you consider the amount of time that we humans have spent living with our various bacteria, parasites, etc. , it's logical to me that is happing with us on a microscopic scale.
Genes are very complicated things because they encode all sorts of information about how you function an unbelievably basic level. There are genes that encode the proteins that make up the cell wall. There are genes that encode the proteins that make up the receptor sites in cell wall. And guess what, mine don't look or work like yours! So I'm near sighted. My whole family is near sighted. My whole family also lives to be a 100 and it's a nice healthly 100, too. I suspect that there is some correlation since the ones that aren't near sighted died in their late 80's and early 90's.
The tinkering with plants hasn't gone as well as most of the public has been lead to believe. They figured out how to make cotton that didn't need to be dyed. It grew as red or blue. Well, they released it. People planted it and now they are being sued. Their neighbors are getting all kinds of odd color combinations in what was supposed to be their white cotton. There's also a "pest resistant" corn. Now that the corn flea beetle and corn worm can't eat corn, what will they be going to go after next? Or, worse yet, will they evolve in to a superpest that can eat the "pest resistant" plants? If they can eat the "pest resistant" corn, will they be able to eat the other "pest resistant " crops we're getting ready to release. We've created other "superpests" and a whole host of other problems with our use of chemicals because we really didn't understand the ramifications of what we were tinkering with - DDT, DES, MRSA, STSS, and a whole alphabet soup of acronyms. These are just the ones I can name off the top of my head.
This is a really really good example of "Just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD". They don't understand what the side effects to the environment are with a simple thing like colored cotton. They sure aren't going to understand the full ramifications of making changes to humans any time in this century. Anybody that thinks that is a good idea, should probably get some IQ points spliced in to the DNS sequence.
Queen BHDGary secures my bank
Makes me wonder why this is considered so freaky cool, but everybody considers steroid users to be cheats.
My Kingdom for some consistency... 8-)
e3 :: blogging the wireless freenet
Normally I'm not a fan of modding down, but how did this get modded as funny?
Now... having a show that's so bad that the WB would cancel it is funny, but I don't personally find the fact that christopher reeve is in a wheelchair to be at all humourous.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Sorry, but "faster, bigger, better, stronger" is not what evolution aims for. Mice, deer, worms, and rabbits somehow all managed to survive. And the saber tooth tiger, mammoth, and lots of other big, strong, and ferocious species have died out. Even for crocodiles, most of them get eaten before reaching adulthood. Evolution creates more of what survives, and small wimpy creatures that have a lot of sex are at least as successful as ferocious hunters. Furthermore, bigger muscles and other traits that we may think of desirable usually come along with quite a few problems, otherwise we'd already have them.
Evolution designed man to fit into the ecosystem, to be able to hunt food to survive and mate (several times, hopefully) before dying. The demands evolution works to satisfy would be entirely different from the demands geneticists would work to satisfy, and, because engineering wouldn't be cheap, it would be more sensible for them to research and think rather than just guess random shit until something good happens.
I planned on inserting something witty here but never got around to it.
The more news I read about genetic research, the more sure I am that the future promised by Gattaca will come true. I don't really mind genetic research but what really scares me is the possibility of a division this might create. I mean there is this rich western world where people will be able to afford the benifits of this kind of research, where children wud be born with longer lives, more intelligent etc. , which in turn would make them even richer and then there is this poor world where ppl can't afford basic healthcare, leave alone genetic research, where thousands die from malaria every year and they would keep getting poorer. I am not very sure if I am for such research.
What's under yellowstone?
With regards to nanotube Field Effect Transistors, as the gap is bridged, more electrons flow over using that bridge. It is the easiest route, and with enough Voltage, the jump get's easier, yet the gap gets larger.. And so you have a shift, a switch, whatever it is called.. But when we reduce the scale to the size of nanometers, we are getting closer to the disintegration of the walls. From here on in we are playing in the world of the small, yet powerful. One could speculate that this layer of abstraction will mimic the least, the underlying layer. The area where the fundamental properties start to change. Now we are starting to play with things that can hurt us? We will play. Abstraction
And let it be a lesson to us all.
One morning Susan Crawford of Kittery, Maine, woke up with a painful need to urinate. At first she thought she had diarrhea , but when she stood up out of bed, she realized that it was urinary pain. It was very similar to the feeling of having diarrhea , just out the wrong hole.
She wobbled to the toilet and upon sitting on it, her vagina erupted into the most horrific messy farting noise anyone has ever heard. In paralyzing pain, Ms. Crawford continued to push and squirt out of her vagina for the next few minutes a burning tide of wretch and filth while she gripped the sides of the toilet, white-knuckled. She was screaming wildly, and the neighbors called the police.
When medics arrived they found Ms. Crawford unconscious lying on the floor of her bathroom wearing nothing but her bath robe. Running down her leg was a stream of brown and green syrup . The medic had to transfer her to a stretcher, so he grabbed her left leg which was bent crossing her other leg, to straighten her out; she was lying there all twisted up. When he lifted her left leg to straighten her body out, he exposed her vagina , at which point a creature, no larger than the tip of a finger, wormed its way out of her genitals and landed on the floor with a wet popping sound. Shocked, the medic stared at the creature that was lying on the tile bathroom floor in a casing of mucus. It was a tiny mud shrimp -- it sat there on the cold floor gasping for water while flipping itself back and forth. The horrified medic turned to the toilet as he felt nausea setting in. When he put his face down into the toilet to puke, what he saw was so horrific that to this day he cannot look into a toilet without convulsing.
The entire toilet bowl was boiling with baby brown mud shrimp flipping and splashing at a furious pace.
Ms. Crawford's official death was the result of a combination of shock and severe head trauma. She stood up over the toilet in pain and when she saw what she had done, she went into shock and fell, smashing her head on the toilet and then on the floor. It is believed that on two nights before the accident she had purchased a live lobster at a fish market: While lying in her bed, she gently inserted the creature's tail into her vagina to derive pleasure, at which point, she held a lighter under the creature's face causing it to flip its tail in a violent, snapping motion.
The medics found a Lesbian porno video in the VCR and the TV was positioned on a table in front of the bed. The lobster was found in the kitchen garbage can wrapped in a paper bag. Traces of Ms. Crawford's DNA were found on the lobster along with pubic hairs that had wedged themselves between the lobster tail joints. The lobster's face was lightly burned with the same fuel used in lighters. The lobster's digestive track and colon were found to be full of mud shrimp egg casings. Doctors believe that the lobster had eaten them (they are common in the water at fish markets and are usually harmlessly boiled to death) and the lobster had crapped them out into Ms. Crawford's cunt when she was torturing it. Maine mud shrimp only take two days to gestate and Ms. Crawford was only four days away from getting her period, doctors believe that at that point of her menstrual cycle, her womb was the perfect pH balance to grow these mud shrimp. Over night the eggs had hatched and the mud shrimp began doubling in size every ten minutes. You can imagine the pain she was in when she woke up that morning and gave birth to well over 1,000 mud shrimp in her toilet.
DNA in a living system is set up to automatically repair itself. Your body does this with a set of enzymes that finds damaged DNA, and rebuilds the damaged section, building off the other strand as a template (remember the double helix).
However, there are people who either lack this enzyme, or have a genetic defect that makes this system nonfunctional... those people grow cancers like it's their job. The same thing happens to people on long-term immunosuppresive drugs (transplant patients, most notably).
Your body also has something called apoptosis, or programmed cell death. Some cells die at a certain point in human development, because they are programmed to do so... Who knows what extending their telomeres will do to normal human embryology?
Your body is hard-wired to take care of itself, and it does so pretty effectively. I can't help but wonder what kind of badness we'll create when we start monkeying with the human genome in earnest.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
uninformative and useless statement
Only a few daredevils, for example, would risk surgery to upgrade their vision from normal to extraordinary.
This is mostly because the surgery (lasic) has a potential to go horribly wrong and doesn't give much better than 20/20.
Athletes, enticed by fat contracts, Olympic medals, and fan adulation, will accept almost any health risk to steal an advantage.
yes. Believe it or not a survey of athletes I read, said that 90+% would take *any* drug to improve their performance with or without serious side-effects. The key was *not getting caught*.
Steroids and nutritional supplements-certified by home-run records and 350-pound offensive linemen-have already found their way to every major high-school sports program in the United States.
This is true. But the *only* supplement that has been shown in real clinical trials to work is creatine. ALL THE OTHERS ARE BOGUS. And steroids REALLY work. But their side-effects are really fucking bad.
Anyone who injects steroids can get very strong, but only if he lifts weights regularly
You don't *necessarily* have to lift weights for steroids to build muscle, but it helps a lot.
In recent years, doctors have been virtually dragging seniors to the weight room to get them buffed up. /.
Yes, this is because the benefit is FUCKING ENOURMOUS. take this to heart old people reading
The IGF gene is a multitasker.
Bad analogy. What they're trying to get at is that IGF genes turn on many other responses both at the genetic level and other. It turns on other genes and interacts with many pathways. It's a controler gene.
Both MGF and IGF-1 encourage muscles to grow. Yeah. just watch out for the shitty side effects.. like CANCER.
Goldspink hopes MGF could be a therapy for the sick and frail
Yes, here's the deal... Frail people, the elderly, those who are lacking in what these genes provide are the ones who will recieve the biggest benefit with the least side-effects. This is important.
The technique for inserting the gene into muscles is not complicated
Yes it bloody well is. don't lie. Right now, it's bloody complicated.
Although Goldspink's experiment resulted in Schwarzenegger mice, that doesn't mean that MGF will successfully pump up normal humans
Theres a bloody good chance of it tho. I'd lay money on it.
And as for IGF-1, it may have health risks that MGF does not
ok, let's make this clear. Don't take IGF-1. It DOES cause a lot of death-leading problems. heart failure AND cancer are just 2 of them.
Athletes are already experimenting with IGF-1
This HAS lead to deaths. It doesn't appear from the research that taking IGF-1 is safe at any level. But human trials are not done because we have laws in the U.S. against killing people for the sake of research.
On EPO:
Here is the trade-off. More bloodcells = slightly better performance & slightly increased risk of clogging your arteries. My opinion is nature worked out the proper ratio.
In fact, if you exercise regularly you will be amazed at how much you are rewarded.
You can start fucking around with your body. It can produce very large effects. But you're fucking with millions of years of evolution. You better have a good reason. There *might* be situations where it's beneficial. For example, humans evolved to fit an environment where food was a little more scarce than nowadays. That's why people are overweight. Evolution didn't get it wrong.. we changed the rules. But for a HECK of a lot of other things, evolution has found the perfect balance... don't fuck with millions of years of trial & error. That's all I have to say. Yes, if you have a genetic disease, then you're merely correcting the "error" part of "trial & error". Don't forget that without the error part there's no trial part and no improvement..
Look I'm really sorry if I've just laid drunken post on you guys. /. & gnu/Linux geek, a biochemist and a bodybuilder.
I just felt like saying something because I happen to be a few things. A
I felt like opining. Some of my opinions are based on research I've read for classes. Other parts are just speculation.
Liberty.
Since ice is crystalline, and crystals are inherently sharp, ice can easily damage any soft tissue.
There is research being done now that involves this neat little frog. The North American Wood Frog survives winter by freezing. It freezes during the cold, and actually thaws when the weather heats up. It can do this because of the excess of sugar stores in it's body.
Personally, I think that this is totally the way to go, so long as we can figure out a way to counteract the massive amounts of sugar we'd need to retain. It's all rather neat, imho. =)
and is also a man who would really like to believe he is a woman... hows the therapy going $ girl lost your mind yet!!!!
Speaking of Evolution, I really wish that Ximian would speed up theirs.
It takes it 8 minutes to exit on my PIII-500. I refuse to believe that I should need to upgrade an e-mail drone beyond that.
If there were truth in advertising, Ximian would have called it Continental Drift.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Then I get that sense of parental wonder, what are these amazing little beings going to get up to... and the prospect of them staving off aging stretches that wonder out another order of magnitude.
Damn those pesky terrorists
But your post raises an interesting question: is beauty an absolute or relative concept? If through some genetic manipulation everyone becomes "beautiful" (by current standards), does that then fail to be beautiful? Is beautiful beautiful because of the (pleasant) way it differs from the "norm"? Or will we be in heaven living in a world of super models?
Food for thought...
Read reviews of shopping cart software
Is there a gene that will give everyone excellent karma?
Read reviews of shopping cart software
While it's debatable, I hold that the answer to that is determined, it's clearly relative. It's subjective and conditioned. The part that is not conditioned but is genetic, that's not particularly forgiven from being relative because it's genetic... we all have unique genes. Genes expressions are also relative.
But there are lots of underlying reasons that form the subjective judgement, some are no doubt advantageous and may have been selected by evolution. So I don't have a comment on beauty being an ideal vs. being a variation from the norm. I just apreciated the question of if it was absolute vs. relative.
-pyrrho
It's high time that these guys update the Evolution. I clicked "Send" button around 30 minutes ago, and it still hasn't send the mail :-(
Macka
I'd say this:
A love that is dependent on beauty, is superficial and leads only to misery.
So why be obsessed about superficial attributes such as beauty, strength and intelligence, when love is what we seek?
When you have much love, beauty comes naturally. You even cannot have beauty, without love.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Quite a while ago now I had a subscription to Analog (A sci fi magazine featuring short stories and speculation, most of which was pretty good.) One story dealt with a time when genetic engineering was becoming the norm. People whose parents had decided against tweaking their childrens' genes were unable to compete with the faster, stronger and smarter humans whose parents had decided to go the genetic engineering route. At one point a character mentions that they are seriously considering sueing their parents for screwing up any chance they could have had to do anything other than flip burgers.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The human body is one of the most complex systems on earth. Its complexity is so mind buggling, and that parameters of the body are interrelated with a huge number of bodily functions. Therefore by tweaking one parameter of the system and claiming that it would enhance one feature of the body without having any effects on the rest of the system is rather naive. Such a tweak is most likely to have disastrous effects on othe body functions. If such a tweak was possible, evolution had long discovered it. The fact that such a tweak [which probably occurred during evolution] did not survive should make us think twice. Don't underestimate the "wisdom/intelligence" of evolution.
Since evolution doesn't have speed... or goal.
...why does an email client need to be turbocharged?
The way I see it, we've been fighting evolution since the moment we created civilization. We help our sick and prolong the lives of people who otherwise would never have a chance to procreate.
;)
Heck, 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 of us need to wear glasses these day... I wonder if most animals suffer the equivelent proportions of bad eyesight within their species?
Now I'm not against helping out the sick and weak whatsoever. Though we are animals we have the opportunity to be better than animals (note I say opportunity, it is not a freebie, gotta work for it). But I still if we are going to fight evolution, we should use whatever backdoor we can find to strengthen us as a species.
Let's just hope we don't make ourselves genetically similar enough to let a single flu bug wipe us out later
Fuzzy Knights: New RPG Strips Tuesday and Friday!:
http://www.fuzzyknights.com
After everyone dies the cloned people remain because they developed superior genes that never die.
HAHAHAHAHA! Suck it, dicknose! No mod points for you!
They think they can speed up a mail client by giving it features like blood? This is going to be even more bloated than Outlook... not good.
Only the vault-dweller can save us from this great meance. =o
I want my telepathic abilities so I can read what those damn women are thinking.. its such a bloody mission.
That may need a little elaboration, as the two touch on related areas.
Eugenics is a theory which holds that certain individuals are innately superior to others, and that the superior few are vastly outnumbered by the inferior many. If you accept these two premises, then it follows that the inferior many are sure to reproduce faster than the superior few, with the result that the characteristics of the superior individuals will be lost. Basically, a eugenicist sees the world in terms of a conflict between those with big brains and those with big dicks. In order to improve the species, therefore, a eugenicist will attempt to discourage the inferior from procreating, and encourage the superior.
The biggest problem with this theory is figuring out how to tell who's superior and who's inferior. The answer depends on how you ask the question, and on what your beliefs are about what would constitute a "superior" human being. The Nazis believed that a certain physical type was superior -- blond hair, blue eyes, extremely fair skin, what they called "Aryan". They conducted experiments attempting to further these characteristics; for example they would take a pair of brown-eyed twins, and inject chemicals into their eyes in an attempt to change the eye-color to blue. This particular study was carried out at Auschwitz by Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death.
If, on the other hand, you are an American eugenicist, what you do to separate the inferior and the superior is come up with the Intellectual Quotient Test and administer it to all schoolchildren. Those who do well are deemed fit, and allowed to do things like take college prep courses in high school. Those who are deemed unfit are only allowed to take classes in, say, technical arts, thereby preparing them for a lifetime working as drones in a factory. Also, you get laws passed in many states requiring the forced sterilization of any person below a certain IQ level who attempts to reproduce. You might also conduct studies such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments which were begun with the understanding that the subjects would be black because black men are naturally more lascivious than white men, and therefore more likely to have syphilis. These experiments were funded by Congress, continued for four decades, involved hideously painful procedures like spinal fluid taps, and worst of all the subjects were never told that they had syphilis. By the time they found out, it was far too late for any of them to seek treatment.
Eugenics is no longer an accepted theory. It depends on an arbitrary vision of what constitutes "superiority", and led to some truly barbaric practices, both in Germany and in the United States. I do not know how well the theory was received in other countries. I am, however, truly grateful that it is no longer accepted.
Genetic engineering, on the other hand, is a technique for the modification of living creatures by altering their genetic structure. It could very easily be used for eugenics, but has other more benign purposes as well.
There are two kinds of genetic engineering. One involves the modification of an existing organism. For example, take a child afflicted with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease which causes the lungs to fill with mucus, thereby making it extremely difficult to breathe. That child might be treated by inhaling a vapor of specially created viruses that insert themselves into the affected lung cells and alter their genetic code in such a way that they stop producing the mucus. This is also known as gene therapy.
The other form of genetic engineering involves modifying an organism before it starts growing. Thus you might take a fertilized egg and modify its DNA prior to its implantation in the wall of the mother's womb. Since all cells in the body ultimately derive from that egg, your modification would change the fundamental nature of the adult organism. Genetic modifications have been carried out on plants, for example to make them resistant to a particular disease, or to increase the per-acre yield of a food crop. You yourself have probably eaten such genetically modified food. It is quite common in America; less so in Europe, where there are a great many people who protest against it.
Genetic engineering is a field which has enormous potential for good -- the elimination of genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis. If two people are aware that their child might suffer from CF, they could perform an artificial insemination of an egg which had been "fixed", or avoid the disease simply by choosing an egg that wasn't affected in the first place. On the other hand, genetic engineering also has a staggering potential for abuse. A genetic engineer could not only cure diseases, but also create entirely new ones. The new disease might be used in biological warfare. It is conceivable (though currently not possible) that genetic engineering might be able to create a contagious mutagen -- a virus that would spread throughout the population, and make a particular modification within the bodies of the victims. Imagine if the Nazis had been able to create a virus that would alter the eggs and testicles of those who contracted it. They could have ensured that the next generation would be blond and blue-eyed, against the will of the parents.
Then, of course, there is the danger that we might screw up. We know a lot about genetics now, but there's even more that's not well understood. Sequencing out a full human gene doesn't mean that we understand how all the parts interact with another. There are large portions of the genome that don't seem to do anything (introns) . . . but then again maybe they do, and we just haven't figured it out quite yet. Then there's the fact that one sequence of DNA might control or contribute to three or four different finished structures. If you alter it to give a child green eyes, you might also cause the child to be bald. (That's just an example, I have no idea if the sequences controlling hair production and eye color are at all related.)
Basically, we don't know enough at this point to engage in wholesale manipulation of human genetics. We should not outlaw it -- the genie is out of the bottle, and if we tried outlawing it, the research would merely be undertaken by unethical scientists with little or no oversight. On the other hand, we should NOT perform modifications of human beings without a clear idea of what we're doing and a damn good reason to do it. Giving your kid a particular eye color is NOT a good reason for genetic engineering. Avoiding cystic fibrosis is acceptable. Engineering for more abstract qualities -- musical talent, mathematical skill, linquistic ability -- should be avoided at all costs until we have some idea what the hell we're doing. We don't even know if those qualities are controlled by genes; in the process of trying it out we might very well screw up and make some truly horrible mistakes. Note that many autistic people are also extremely good at math.
Then there are the social issues. Genetic engineering is expensive. If we're not careful, it could become a way for the wealthy to reinforce their dominance over world affairs. It is natural to want to give your child every advantage in life that you can; but doing so can simultaneously disadvantage other people's children.
In short, genetic engineering of humans is problematic. It could provide some unparalleled benefits to the human species . . . but it is also an ethical minefield, and could easily be turned to selfish or downright evil purposes.
Signed, The Hulk
You say that animals generaly have the same number of heart beats in a life time and than state that a mouse can live 3x as long by physicaly capping the DNA strands.
It does'nt add up.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
Plz.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
All those gym rats were wasting their time!
OK, yeah, the human body is not designed fro extremely long lives. The whole point of ths article is to make humans live loger. That means altering the tihings that would cause us to die so that we don't die. That would necessarily include your list of items as well. We'll just engineer more stable DNA and support systems for DNA, stronger hearts, et.
What i really want is a text frontend to evolution!
A game is only a game when it has rules and the players stick to those rules. We're already into some fierce meaninglessness in this nihilistic modern era. Totally divorced and separated from Nature, we've even lost the ability to fully understand our lost-ness.
Gene manipulation will only make the rules even more wispy and the distance between us and Nature even greater. Many may think this is our destiny--I did--to self-rig ourselves. But I know now it will be our final spastic, shuttering death. Why? Because we MASSIVELY underestimate the difficulty and complexity! Nature has been at this game for some 3 billion years, and She takes Her sweet time. And now in the blink of an eye, we think we're in command of those billions of years of wisdom and experience. Fools rush in where angels take a break. We're soooo delusional! Children playing with fire. Children soon burnt beyond all recognition, dying painfully and slowly.
--- WWSD? What Would Strider Do?
Customized enhanced homo sapiens that are pre-aged for a built-in obsolescence to keep the protoplasm vats running. Corporate America couldn't be happier.
One Man's Opinion Here:
Evolution is a powerful but imperfect engine. It's great at solving specific problems, but it comes with strange side effects, always, such as the human body's tendency to store fat. Overweight? Blame evolution for your outdated software. Compounding the problem is that evolved systems are difficult to understand, because evolution uses the whole environment to form solutions. Therefore, we won't fully understand our own genetics for a while. Our bodies are evolved with forces present that we can't even see.
Sure, it's nice to tinker. Genetic research is inevitable and really not too far off from selective breeding that we do in life and with lifestock and plants. But there's a difference between using evolution and altering genes. Altering genes does not "speed up evolution". Gene therapy changes evolved code, and we have no idea what the results might be. Fix one thing, and you get a new problem. We will end up chasing windwills in search of the "perfect" body, or we will end up with specifically suited bodies -- people who can live well in zero g; people who can run fast; people who live long.
And seriously, it's all fun and games until Khan strands you in the middle of an astroid.
KKHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!
Now where's my old vinyl collection?
n s2 525.htm
http://www.codehot.co.uk/lyrics/uvwxyz/zagereva
Not exactly. Eugenics is just a primitive way of doing genetic engineering, and in both cases you kill anything less than the best.
Darwin, and consequently Hitler, thought Eugenics was a great idea. You will still find people of that mold (White Supremacists and their counterparts from every other race and (anti-)religion).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Where I do see potential for improvement is that there are likely a large number of correctable mutations that subtly impair performance in many areas. So while we many not be able to (safely) improve the performance of our top athletes (who presumably already have most of the "good" genes for physical performance), we might be able to make those abilities more widely available. And the risk question would be more approachable, because we could study the families who already have the (hopefully) favorable polymorphism.
I should get off my computer sometimes...but evolution could use a speed up in fact. both of 'em!
cu,
Lispy
Actually, the real problem is political.
People will begin working at age 25, after completing graduate school; work until 65, when they take early retirement from social security; and then expect to collect from that "unending font of money" until they're 105.
Can anyone else see where this is going?
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Actually, we already know one thing that reliably produces a substantial increase in life span in every species that has been tested. Starve yourself! A severe calorie-restricted diet increases longevity. We may be sneering at those supermodels now, but they'll be laughing at us when we're all in our graves!
That these scientists never read the a book Callded brave new world by aldus huxly. its about what the future would be like if henry ford was percieved as jesus christ. its really good and makes you think that maybe our culture of waste and attempting to attain perfection is not on ehtat should be pursued.
i am also having doubts as to whether or not these scientists have seen a movie called GAATACA. another good look at the human races constant attempts to attain percection while, thinking they can do better than mother earth. j
ust my thoughts
It was an article on how to speed up GNOME Evolution...well...gonna buy some more ram then.
Laws vary by country. The rich are upwardly mobile and able to make trips to nations which will allow them to have the modifications they want performed on them.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I don't see any advances in biological components. Why don't they develope some nice cyberware(Neuromancer anyone?), because I can't imagine any bio enhencements that let you see in the dark.
"Holy instant noodle"
more red blood cells
-> more oxygen
-> more oxidisation
-> more mutations
-> cancer
faster growth
-> more cell devisions
-> more mutations
-> cancer
faster growth
-> odd growth patterns (giantism)
-> lymphatic desieces
-> early death
People who naturaly have the 'enhancements' die young.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The supplements (creatine, steroids) used to create 350 pound linemen have the side-effect of wearing out the kidney and liver. Extending the human lifespan will still be achieved by cutting as much crap as possible out of your life, not adding more.
way too much of the Khan episode (and movie) from Star Trek? We ought not to poke around in there, methinks.
I'm not at all convinced that stronger faster humans is the path of evolution at all. It seems the natural course of evolution would be fatter slower humans with less consistant DNA across the species (as more mutating factors are introduced into our enviornment). And based on all the emails I get it seems that our species main concern is puffing up our genetalia. If there's one thing that's for certain in regards to this manner it's that normal healthy people will continue to feel dissatisfied with their bodies throughout time and the media will perpetuate this.
I'll be interested when we can transfect the gene for polite driving demeanor.
ôó
The birth-right lottery didn't exactly adjust the population, so they institued the games. Only those who hadn't already had children could enter. They gambled their two-child right against that of someone else. Only one of them would walk out, and s/he had four birth-rights. (I guess that occasionally both of them got killed, and that was what adjusted things.)
And one of the most despised duties of the ARMs of the UN was to hunt down unlicensed mothers. (They also strictly controlled technological advances. So when they encountered the Kzinti things were quite dicey for awhile.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I personally want to be a superuser/administrator of my own body. If I have to reverse engineer / hack it to do so, I will. There is no reason that I should have to work out to be strong. I shouldnt have to be born a certain way to be smart. You go ahead and keep your Dell of a body. When "Human Kernel 2.0 STABLE" comes out, I'll be first in line to download.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Sterlilization is a good idea. We don't need mentally retarded people having mentally retarded kids, it's not fair to the kids. Autistic people especially.
Seems everyone around here is so afraid of absolutely anything that might be "1984-ish" or remotely Orwellian... even to the exclusion of any possibility that they may actually be correct.
It seems that it has always been part of our primal programming to attempt turn the tide on Ma Nature from day one. I really don't think we will ever "win". We have diseases, storms, doughts, etc. for a reason. If we did not have these things there would be 25 billion people on the Earth and we would all suffer and perish.
Someone in one of these posts gave an analogy about deer and wolves. People tend to forget that we are animals too. We like to forget that we are subject to the same laws of nature as even the lowliest of animals upon the Earth.
AIDS, cancer, heart disease these are all horrible things. Truly they are, but they are necessary to the survival of all in that they thin our herd which is left oft times unchecked by anything but virus and disease. When we cure AIDS and cancer there will be something to take its place, I assure you all.
I for one do not want to live forever. I will live my days and after those are done I will rest in whichever place we go when we leave here. I sometimes wonder if scientists ponder whether or not what they do is in vain sometimes. As learned individuals you would have to realise that curing one thing is great but what will replace it? Why make the bed when you're just going to mess it up again.
The way that humans pursue scientific research with such gusto is sometimes a little scary. We can't leave things alone when we should. I think this is the case with genetic engineering. I think we will really have to fuck something up before we either stop and say "Maybe we were wrong" or kill ourselves. Hoping that humans will be responsible in these endevours is a huge risk to the planet and countless lives.
"Laugh, and the whole world laughs with you. Cry, and they still think its funny." - Mr. Boffo
Umm, I'm pretty sure eukaryotes don't use restriction enzymes per se to manipulate DNA, unless you're using the term in a very broad sense. At least back when I was an undergrad, we only called things restriction enzymes if they recognized palindromic patterns in the nucleic acid sequence, and such things have thus far been only found in prokaryotes. So in theory, if the government decided to ban specific types of bacteria on the grounds that they could be used as biological weapons, the cost of restriction enzymes could be kept artificially high indefinitely, and it could become illegal to produce them.
The ariticle is misleading, all the techniques are about modifications to an individual, not heritable changes. (Most such techniques are specifically designed to avoid changing the descendants of the recipient, as it is commonly assumed that "We shouldn't play God", or words to that effect.) Thus, it is not a case of 'Evolution', but more of Aftermarket Add-ons. "Tired of getting Tired? Upgrade now to MS Myoglobin - prefered by nine out of ten overachievers! Available in Horse, Whale, or Gorilla!"
It is exactly like steroid or drug use - if the treatment gives same benefit with less work, some people will get it. If a benefit cannot be gotten without the drug at all, there will be an even larger market. I'm sure Uncle Sam is just salivating over the possibility of making REAL super-soldiers, particularly if the effect required periodic treatment. If you don't re-enlist, you have to go back to being 'Normal'...and if the treatment cripples you in 20 years, well, sucks to be you.
This is genetic engineering not speeding up evolution which would only lead to all pathogens evolving faster to infect us.And while we are genetically engineering humans why not make them nicer to each other , that would be far better than any physical change.
Actually, the retirement age for full Social Security benefits is now 67, and has been for several years.
The bad part is that the SS "surplus", well, it's not stuffed in a mattress. The government bought government bonds with it. When it comes time to start drawing on that, they'll have to pull it out of the current population by increased borrowing. The only difference is that it will cost more (paying % to buyers of the bonds, i.e. the government itself) is added to the simple borrowing they would have done otherwise had they not built up a surplus.
It's all a massive fraud, with the "logical" thing actually worse than simply borrowing money to pay SS when the baby boomers retire.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
First fix the bug that allows an active cursor in the To, Subject and body fields all at the same time. It drives me nuts. I can never get to the one I actually want. grrrr...
Gattaca? Technologies like this are a Bad Thing. Many predict that these SuperGene technologies will become so ubiquitous that those born naturally are ostracized for their imperfections. I would much rather rely on nature than on man to manage the human gene pool. But not to get ahead of myself. The article itself is crap. They don't mention how they are going to actually get new genes inside the human body. The best modern method is to infect the gamete with a virus. Most people wouldn't be too keen on having infected children from a test-tube.
Compile it on your box w/ -O3 and your specific -march. Most binaris are either -O1 or -O2 and -march i386. I use sylpheed so i'm not exactly sure how much improvemnt that gets you but i'm sure it's pretty noticble.
While undoubtedly, all these growth factors will give benefits, like all substances, they have wonderful side effects. IGF has been linked to many types of cancer (although the mechanism is not understood) HGH will cause acromegaly and possibly (reading off the list of adverse reactions to Humatrope) leukemia, intracranial hemorrhage, and pancreatitis. And don't forget that, as mentioned in the article, the whole purpose of these factors is to promote cell division. And while cell division results in growth, it also increases the chances that some random error will occur and create an initiating mutation, eventually leading to malignancy.
Good luck with winning the Olympic gold medal when your body is riddled with sarcoma and you're getting chemo and radiation.
I am hoping the latest Linux Kernel patch with speed up Evolution ;-)
Oh wrong evolution.....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"You're scientists were so concerned if they COULD they didn't stop to think if they SHOULD." - Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park.
"Think about how stupid the average person is, then realize that half of 'em are stupider than that!" - George Carlin.
did I think the article was about the performance of an email client?
Didn't they start out as 'super humans' and end up hating us 'none superhumans' and want to take over the world, cause they were better?
Yeah it was science fiction, but the point to science fiction is often to teach us lessons, and in this case the lesson is, just becuase we can do this doesn't mean we should.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Sorry, but I just despise the "playing god" line even though you're obviously pro-science and tech. How is this playing god? We're fiddling with a piece of DNA and in effect changing some lines of code. It's not like we're creating matter out of nothing or smiting the Canaanites with the ouch and the hey hey it hurts me. Yet with many scientific or technical advances we get accused of playing god. I wonder who was the first to say that statement...was it way back when Og made fire?
So what we need to do to achieve longevity if not immortality is not as simple as expressing telomerase in every cell, or preventing apoptosis. We have to somehow get the body to repair things that it currently doesn't know how to repair, like brains and hearts. This is much more than just convincing stem cells to restart replication. We have to somehow figure out feedback systems so that the growth is controlled. This first means that we have to understand how the body works in molecular detail. And as of now, what we understand, as wonderful as it is, is hugely dwarved by what we don't understand, and it doesn't help that there isn't much of an incentive for pure research.
Well given that we'll all be gorgeous at least perhaps to the some degree. I doubt that everyone will opt to look exactly the same. But we'll all be on a level playing field now, so traits like kindness and personality will definitely boost your stock. As looks are no longer really relavent, haven't you ever been to a party with a bunch of good looking people? Given that your bound to hook up with someone, and they all look the same, its nice to meet someone that you have something in coommon with, and or just get along with and enjoy their company. Intelligence I suspect as well, will wane in attracting the opposite sex, as I 'm sure we'll have IQ boosters etc too. In my opinion looks are alraedy overrated andbeing plebian, as everyone these days can be beautiful. Given enough money and skilled plastic surgeons, we can already to a degree, manufacture these super-folk who are supposed to make us normals look bad.
Is it just me, or does this remind you of the short-story posted on Salon a couple months back:
It was called 0wnz0red and it was about hacking the source code of human metabolism.
Wonderful. Can't wait to see the first rash of complaints about the genetic equivalent of a 404 or a BSOD once they start doing this.
The next generation of H-1B's are going to be even more devestating.
Table-ized A.I.
As far as I'm concerned, nothing beats a good ol fashioned workout in the gym, doing Yoga, or dancing my ass off at a rave party for 16 solid hours. "NO PAIN, NO GAIN"
"Use it or loose it" I always say....
All you need is a ship capable of sustaining 1g of acceleration for somewhere between 1 and 5 years, and when you return to earth hundreds of years will have past. I used to have a URL to a table that showed with 25 years of 1g acceleration you'd be outside the known universe, and if you round-tripped it, when you returned to your starting point, the sun will have been billions of years dead.
Scary how acceleration and relativity add up for a funky mix.
One way future going time machines would be much easier to build than perfecting cryogenics in my uneducated opinion.
-malakai
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
We've affected the evolution of everything we've come in contact with. The plants and animals we eat and kept around, those we have driven extinct. You can't buy fruit or vegetables that hasn't been bred (or in some manner modified). Anyone had a pruot lately?
We have also selectively bred ourselves through sexual selection (an amusing example is the fact that breast and penis size are way our of proportion with the rest of the animal kingdom). I can't prove it, but I suspect people have steadily become more attractive over hundreds or thousands of years.
Culture has had an amazing impact on our evolution. Although, I would not say it's been in an cognitive context. Our technology has enabled us to generate environments, food, etc to make us live longer. The way our body stores fat is out of date with our current environment. No surprise it is taboo or bad to be fat.
So why the fuss over actively, cognitively, making changes to ourselves? I for one am against it RIGHT NOW. We know so much, but know so little.
In the next 50 years I'd bet we'll have a complete or mostly complete knowledge of our entire ecosystem (including ourselves) from anatomy to ecology, ethology to sociology, evolution to memetics, etc etc. With that in mind, research should continue. However, I do not think that making improvements to our genome is wise. We do not know the impact.
Also, people are too immature. Too immature to understand or too immature to handle the tech responsibly.
I always like pondering the idea of nature on Earth several hundred years from now. Will it be a tamed natural environment we work within? I hope so. I prefer to work with rather than against.
We it will wild and out of control? Right now all wild species are under incredible selective pressure because of the demands humans have placed on those environments. Eventually they will catch up (may take millions of years). At that point in time will humans be prepared to be at the mercy of their environments again? Can we stay a step ahead?
Or will all natural populations be decimated and replaced with a designer ecosystem, custom tailored and altered for our needs. It would be well balanced, somehow controlled (evolution happens, period!) and kept in check.
Hmmm....we'll see.
badhack
The only reason to post under your account name is if you are a karma whore. Moderation totals: +1 insightful -1 insulting to /. drones
Engineered human "Blood" to speed up evolution so that we become less susceptible to disease and injury. Doesn't this actually impede some of the basic mechanisms of the classic model of evolution?
Growth of stem cells is already controlled by our own built-in systems. When you convince a batch of stem cells to grow as a particular tissue, it will only form that organ. So, if you could support it in a lab, you could set some stem cells to "heart" and you'd grow a heart, not a big lump of heart tissue.
If stem cells couldn't stop growth automatically, we'd be a continuously-growing mass of tissue instead of humans.
But I'm going to a world where people DON'T die of cystic fibrosis (inherited). Perhaps you'd like to tell me about the survival advantage of that? And tay-sachs will not exist. And parkinsons will not exist. And Huntington's disease will not exist. And the fact that the cycle-cell anemia gene protects against malaria is an example of nature groping blindly for a solution (because thats the way evolution works) - and not doing a very good job of it. Evolution is blind. We are not. Our mistakes in genetic engineering are nothing compared to some of evolution's mistakes. If you take your argument to its logical conclusion, you should also argue that we should not take medicines - because we are messing with the delicate balance of our body's environment. Well then, don't take antibiotics, but I am going to. The same goes for genetic engineering.
Supervisor: Do you think you understand the basic ideas of Quantum Mechanics?
Supervisee: Ah! Well, what do we mean by "to understand" in the context of
Quantum Mechanics?
Supervisor: You mean "No", don't you?
Supervisee: Yes.
-- Overheard at a supervision.
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