Yes, as a true scientist that is the correct answer, and here lies the problem: This non-denial gives this idea all the credibility it needs to run off as pseudo science. And once again the following holds:
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. --Bertrand Russell
But if you, as a grandparent, can ensure the survival of your children and grandchildren, then mutations which elongate life make sense again, especially for species that rely on learned behaviour more than instincts.
As for cancer, I still assume that the cancer rate is coupled with the general mutation rate. If your species becomes too perfect in copying it's genes then it might be cancer-proof. But that also means that no changes occur in the germ line - you just became a static species! That mean you will probably die out because everyone else around you still evolves (the Red Queen's race). To summarize: Cancer and evolution have the same molecular basis! I wonder how this stabilized in living fossils....
Or wait until evolution does its work (I know she hates to be anthropomorphized). While males come from a controlled lab environment, the fact that they are fed a special diet to outcompete wild, fertile males could be enough to create a selection pressure which produces a new type of female that avoids these lab-males.
Yes, I think Google Corp. will be the savior of us all! Not! Re-reading my comment, I actually wrote "Not that this would improve the currently horrible privacy situation.", vulgo: worsen.
It's always darkest just before it gets pitch black.
But I do thing the biG was smart, I hope it catches on like the M$ did! =) (btw, how did we spell IBM back then?)
Maybe. This kind of P2P social networking could take off if a certain biG company took up this idea ran with it. Not that this would improve the currently horrible privacy situation. But for bells and whistles they could piggyback another P2P technology on top if it (for your pictures and family videos!), and auto-harvest/safe your data from facebook.
If these wall plugs are fast enough, they could provide CPU time and crawl the net in the meantime while someone else pays the electricity bill. And if all your internet traffic goes through it as well... I think i better stop giving them ideas.
P.S.: How decentralized can this Wave thing actually run, it seemed like an interesting concept.
Ah, slashdot. I make one dream-eyed, hopeful, but ultimately naive (I admit) comment and everyone jumps on it. I originally only wanted to comment on the "how to fix it?" question but thought a bit of optimism to prefix that might not harm:)
On to this comment which irks me:
[..]contaminating the gene pool [..] Instinct brought us here [..] fix the diseased, but doing that messes with evolution [..] In today's society, the weakest, less intelligent and poorly educated reproduce more than the rest of us [..] make sure they don't reproduce. [..] It's either that, or face our own destruction a few centuries
What the fuck?! And I mean this in a truly perplexed if slightly disgusted way. Humans are animals, true, but we are the first animals which can transcend that fact. You think that since we come from the mud, we will always stay there. Not much higher than Bacteria there.
It won't be long and not just treating, but even curing genetic disorders will be possible, i.e. directly fixing them in the germline. Evolution is a really bad method to improve a design unless you are totally lost and don't know where to start. And not only messy, but often cruel to the unwilling participants.
So on the long run, fuck evolution and our messy DNA, humans are now defined by the sentience which emerged, not by the biological substrate which for now still binds us. We can very well carry our own weight in the future. And before you ask, I am not a follower of the Singularity Ersatz religion, just not a downright pessimist.
P.S.: Obligatory xkcd about the movie you mentioned and the fatal cultural impact it has: http://xkcd.com/603/
Also, I am not sure "LOL-Americans!"-comments are helping much with fixing healthcare or your foul mood and complexes. Better brag about how your own healthcare system rocks than throw insults.
I think even the most coldhearted persons must admit that your genetic makeup is something you cannot influence and which a caring society should insure you from. I don't see much of a problem there, especially since you can point at everyone and ask them with a sharp eye: "Are you sure you don't carry some expensive genetic screwup which can only be fixed by a $250,000 individual cure?"
Plus, even then is there much we -can- do if we figure out something is genetic?
Well, if you can derive how e.g. a protein folded wrong you might be able to find a drug which fixes that by attaching to that protein and shutting it down.
A more megalomaniac idea would be gene therapy: Inserting a retrovirus with a second strand of DNA into the cell.
That DNA could code for a correct protein sequence. Or, if the original protein sequence is harmful and needs to be suppressed, it could code for interfering RNA, i.e. RNA which intercepts the DNA's RNA and thus disables protein translation. Ah, wetware hacking!
That is the mean thing here, the vaccination system can support a certain number of freeloaders, so on an individual level these do not select themselves out of the genepoop. They can rest their hands and still reap the benefits from those who actually take the really really small risk of complications stemming from an inoculation. Risk of catching and dying from an infection c*X%, risk of vaccination complications Y%. But after a vaccination quota of Z% the c modifying the X% outweights the Y% - so you are an egoist and don't go, perfectly logical!
Classical game theory, the Tragedy of the Commons subtype to be precise. The fact that rational individuals all acting in their own self interest (which you can show mathematically) can ruin it for everyone is a very good for cause for government to step in and fix this if the egoism becomes too prevalent.
Now, back to Darwin, on a larger level this can of course endanger an entire species, but also drive selection towards a new species which has the rules of cooperation, i.e. altruism, written into their genes, voilá, social animals!
And, this is where this material really would really fit into the Ringworld canon, <spoiler> the puppeteers toppled the Ringworld civilisation ([d]evolved humanesque Pak which seems scarily advanced to them) by introducing a "superconductor plague", i.e. some microscopic lifeform that ate this superconductor. Seems actually possible now with such an organic material which could probably be anaerobically metabolised.</spoiler>
The dome could no longer accommodate the demands of research activities taking place there, however, and each year the structure sunk deeper into the ice it was built on. Blowing snow that collected on top of it had to be removed and hauled away, burning up precious fuel and crew time during the short austral summer. The international treaty that governs human activities in Antarctica requires that buildings and equipment no longer in use be removed and the site remediated whenever possible, necessitating the dome's deconstruction and removal.
I can understand the last two points (snow covering it, and no littering in Antarctica), but did the structure stay there for 30 years and only now the sinking into the snow becomes a problem? Given the panels are so light, they could have dis- and reassembled them when needed. Maybe made up to soften the accountants sharp pencil of "too expensive!"
you are implying that a virus competely changes your entire genetic make up. and this is simply not the case. it changes cellular dna to instructs those infected cells to mass produce new hiv. You wont be growing wings anytime soon.
Transposons would like to disagree! These make up upto 50% of the human genome (only 2% are actual Genes)! They are essentially viruses trapped in your cell, they can still duplicate, but they lost their ability to leave the cell. Selfish Genes essentially. Luckily most of them are inactive by now.
It is believed that the us Eutheria, i.e. mammals with a placenta, gained the ability to have one common circulatory system for two different organisms by using viral DNA to keep the immune system from going nuts about this.
The megalomaniac idea would be gene therapy: Inserting another retrovirus with a second strand of DNA into the cell which then fabricates interfering RNA, i.e. RNA which intercepts the other virus' DNA. And that gene can only be activated via some external promoter. And then add a method for apoptosis (cell suicide) that triggers upon binding RNAi (if not all cells are infected).
I'm not making any bets how long it will be before this can become reality. Also, I smell Digital Life Management opportunities!
... which we don't sterilize properly or which picks up life earth has scattered around the solar system. Then this type of life, which has a hundreds of millions of years head start, kills all the native life. But that might explain the Star Trek nose-ridge aliens.
I would really want to leave another planet with no interesting life alone so see what other molecular bases support life.
The studies I have seen put American and European survival rates at about the same level, with normally a slight advantage to the Americans [..]
Yes, I read about the "inexplicable" advantage wrt. cancer as well. Since currently everything seems to gravitate around the Healthcare debate I found the claim that this was due to the government funded National Cancer Institute centers which provide excellent treatment.
Sorry, but I think this is just feel-good nonsense, lets hire some experienced teachers! - well, and they just grow on trees? Obviously not, so should school districts cannibalize each other competing for the few good teachers? The result will be that the richer counties will gobbling up all the good teachers, widening the gap.
And you need some bureaucracy - specialization is not just for insects! Someone just has to do the paperwork, see which methods work or not, pay better performing teachers more and eventually make the hard decisions about firing that charismatic yet incompetent teacher. This is needed so that teachers can concentrate on the kids instead of playing nasty political games on the school level.
There is no evidence that paying more will produce better teachers.
Indeed, the international PISA study found out just that. What might help is adopting teaching concepts from countries who did better than the US (which are 2/3rd of developed/OECD countries). It's not like this kind of problem didn't show up before anywhere else.
And just firing bad teachers is not nearly enough if their replacements are only marginally better. Applying the natural selection principle here is terribly wasteful. I assume one aspect will be a vastly improved teacher education which does the job of selecting good and bad ones, preventing the latter from doing much harm in the field.
And then evolution does not take place between individuals any more, but between societies which
use common resources to enhance themselves on a broad scale, even individuals who would otherwise not be able to afford such treatment
purely leave it up to the individuals to pay for genetic enhancements
Being someone left leaning I sure hope the former approach wins, but it would be interesting to watch how the latter does on the long term. Might it eventually lead to two separate species? Or does the free market only provide "anti hair loss and prolonged erections treatments"?
P.S.: Eugenics is such a nasty word, any chance it can be redeemed or does a neologism have to take its place?
Africa has about a billion people and shows no signs of slowing down, and no, they're not urbanising, they're not becoming educated, and their birthrates aren't dropping significantly.
This is plain wrong, if you have the slightest interest in statistics (they come in pretty colors here) you must watch this 10 minute video from Hans Rosling which is exactly about the horribly fatalistic (I dare say un-american!) "just let'em starve" mindset.
Most of Africa is getting better, the distorted image you get from news reported from the war torn regions of Congo and Somalia doesn't change that. Please, allow your mind to be changed by this dataset.
Counterexample: Both sides in WWII had chemical weapons, but neither used them. But not because some treaty banned them, but because both sides had nothing to gain by escalating.
A gentlemans agreement would not necessarily be based on a treaty or to protect civilians, but on the fact that both sides don't want to get involved in a race to the bottom, and that both sides have enough foresight to avoid it. As predicted by pure game theory, i.e. math.
E.g. Russian (to pick a "classic" opponent) made air burst tech makes it into the hands of insurgents fighting us, and ours to whoever is fighting against Russia. GPS guided artillery shells seem a smarter choice for more precise destructions since it is not such an entry-level weapon.
Not like they used to. Air burst rounds will likely be the next iteration in the infantry arms race: Essentially a grenade that files in a flat trajectory and can detonate where ever you tell it to, such as "that line of sandbags, plus 1m" and then you aim above the sandbags.
They certainly will come in handy against your average "terrorist" armed with an AK-47, but once these types of guns are available to both sides of a conflict it will get real ugly. I certainly hope they remain a technology demonstrator only by some gentlemans agreement. But the next iteration of ground warfare is already in progress...
Yes, these algorithms can finally release you from having to rely on the dictatorship of the masses wrt. recommendations, or investing too much time building your own favourite recommendations-authors.
Previously you selected a smaller supgroup from the general mass, e.g. move to only reading what the NYT recommended, but you were still in a rather big herd. Now you can pretty much "build your own crowd" as you read and rate what you liked/disliked.
I wonder if Netflix is really the only company which run these deeper algorithms. Are they that computationally expensive or just really complex? Wouldn't that be a killer feature for, say, a social network - I might even join for that feature!
Still, this article talks about improving such a system, but I haven't even seen one out in the wild yet!
49,990 Indian Rupees mean = 1,084.26 US$ (according to xe.com) - no way the hardware or RD costs are that high, so they are milking it for the novelty factor for now. Seems India has a large enough middle class in search of status symbols now as well. But I wonder what technological breakthrough took so long that wrist-phones only show up now.
The LG Product page mentions a 510mAh battery for 7-8 days no standby, and again no easily replaceable battery it seems.
The sonic boom is what you hear when any aircraft going faster than mach 1 passes overhead, not just when it breaks the sound barrier.
The shock wave (very nice to see here: http://imgur.com/Cw5nS (an F-22?)) only happens at around mach 1 when all the sound waves are on top of each other and don't diverge because the source is moving slower or faster than mach 1.
The prologue reads promising, thanks, added to my next batch of books to order. On that note of satisfying a very peculiar science fiction taste, I have to find a site which uses individual book ratings and then uses something at least as complicated as a support vector machine to make useful recommendations...
And, at the risk of this becoming a nitpick about what substrate actually means: Yes, machines, organic molecules, energy conformations on the surface of stars, those certainly can evolve in the classic sense once they get going. I was jumping to conclusions when you mentioned simulated evolution in silicon systems, the id... oh I'm going to a special place in hell for quoting xkcd again: A Bunch of Rocks simulating something, that as a substrate is not just change over time. I though meant substrate as in like stardust colliding and then calculating a virtual world with evolution etc. as a byproduct.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly it might be *possible* [...]
Yes, as a true scientist that is the correct answer, and here lies the problem: This non-denial gives this idea all the credibility it needs to run off as pseudo science. And once again the following holds:
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. --Bertrand Russell
But if you, as a grandparent, can ensure the survival of your children and grandchildren, then mutations which elongate life make sense again, especially for species that rely on learned behaviour more than instincts.
As for cancer, I still assume that the cancer rate is coupled with the general mutation rate. If your species becomes too perfect in copying it's genes then it might be cancer-proof. But that also means that no changes occur in the germ line - you just became a static species! That mean you will probably die out because everyone else around you still evolves (the Red Queen's race). To summarize: Cancer and evolution have the same molecular basis! I wonder how this stabilized in living fossils....
Or wait until evolution does its work (I know she hates to be anthropomorphized). While males come from a controlled lab environment, the fact that they are fed a special diet to outcompete wild, fertile males could be enough to create a selection pressure which produces a new type of female that avoids these lab-males.
Yes, I think Google Corp. will be the savior of us all! Not! Re-reading my comment, I actually wrote "Not that this would improve the currently horrible privacy situation.", vulgo: worsen.
It's always darkest just before it gets pitch black.
But I do thing the biG was smart, I hope it catches on like the M$ did! =) (btw, how did we spell IBM back then?)
Maybe. This kind of P2P social networking could take off if a certain biG company took up this idea ran with it. Not that this would improve the currently horrible privacy situation. But for bells and whistles they could piggyback another P2P technology on top if it (for your pictures and family videos!), and auto-harvest/safe your data from facebook.
If these wall plugs are fast enough, they could provide CPU time and crawl the net in the meantime while someone else pays the electricity bill. And if all your internet traffic goes through it as well...
I think i better stop giving them ideas.
P.S.: How decentralized can this Wave thing actually run, it seemed like an interesting concept.
Ah, slashdot. I make one dream-eyed, hopeful, but ultimately naive (I admit) comment and everyone jumps on it. I originally only wanted to comment on the "how to fix it?" question but thought a bit of optimism to prefix that might not harm :)
On to this comment which irks me:
[..]contaminating the gene pool [..] Instinct brought us here [..] fix the diseased, but doing that messes with evolution [..] In today's society, the weakest, less intelligent and poorly educated reproduce more than the rest of us [..] make sure they don't reproduce. [..] It's either that, or face our own destruction a few centuries
What the fuck?! And I mean this in a truly perplexed if slightly disgusted way. Humans are animals, true, but we are the first animals which can transcend that fact. You think that since we come from the mud, we will always stay there. Not much higher than Bacteria there.
It won't be long and not just treating, but even curing genetic disorders will be possible, i.e. directly fixing them in the germline. Evolution is a really bad method to improve a design unless you are totally lost and don't know where to start. And not only messy, but often cruel to the unwilling participants.
So on the long run, fuck evolution and our messy DNA, humans are now defined by the sentience which emerged, not by the biological substrate which for now still binds us. We can very well carry our own weight in the future. And before you ask, I am not a follower of the Singularity Ersatz religion, just not a downright pessimist.
P.S.: Obligatory xkcd about the movie you mentioned and the fatal cultural impact it has: http://xkcd.com/603/
[..] Americant.
You spelled A-merry-cunt wrong?
Also, I am not sure "LOL-Americans!"-comments are helping much with fixing healthcare or your foul mood and complexes. Better brag about how your own healthcare system rocks than throw insults.
genetic discrimination
I think even the most coldhearted persons must admit that your genetic makeup is something you cannot influence and which a caring society should insure you from. I don't see much of a problem there, especially since you can point at everyone and ask them with a sharp eye: "Are you sure you don't carry some expensive genetic screwup which can only be fixed by a $250,000 individual cure?"
Plus, even then is there much we -can- do if we figure out something is genetic?
Well, if you can derive how e.g. a protein folded wrong you might be able to find a drug which fixes that by attaching to that protein and shutting it down.
A more megalomaniac idea would be gene therapy: Inserting a retrovirus with a second strand of DNA into the cell.
That DNA could code for a correct protein sequence. Or, if the original protein sequence is harmful and needs to be suppressed, it could code for interfering RNA, i.e. RNA which intercepts the DNA's RNA and thus disables protein translation. Ah, wetware hacking!
That is the mean thing here, the vaccination system can support a certain number of freeloaders, so on an individual level these do not select themselves out of the genepoop. They can rest their hands and still reap the benefits from those who actually take the really really small risk of complications stemming from an inoculation. Risk of catching and dying from an infection c*X%, risk of vaccination complications Y%. But after a vaccination quota of Z% the c modifying the X% outweights the Y% - so you are an egoist and don't go, perfectly logical!
Classical game theory, the Tragedy of the Commons subtype to be precise. The fact that rational individuals all acting in their own self interest (which you can show mathematically) can ruin it for everyone is a very good for cause for government to step in and fix this if the egoism becomes too prevalent.
Now, back to Darwin, on a larger level this can of course endanger an entire species, but also drive selection towards a new species which has the rules of cooperation, i.e. altruism, written into their genes, voilá, social animals!
And, this is where this material really would really fit into the Ringworld canon, <spoiler> the puppeteers toppled the Ringworld civilisation ([d]evolved humanesque Pak which seems scarily advanced to them) by introducing a "superconductor plague", i.e. some microscopic lifeform that ate this superconductor. Seems actually possible now with such an organic material which could probably be anaerobically metabolised.</spoiler>
The dome could no longer accommodate the demands of research activities taking place there, however, and each year the structure sunk deeper into the ice it was built on. Blowing snow that collected on top of it had to be removed and hauled away, burning up precious fuel and crew time during the short austral summer. The international treaty that governs human activities in Antarctica requires that buildings and equipment no longer in use be removed and the site remediated whenever possible, necessitating the dome's deconstruction and removal.
I can understand the last two points (snow covering it, and no littering in Antarctica), but did the structure stay there for 30 years and only now the sinking into the snow becomes a problem? Given the panels are so light, they could have dis- and reassembled them when needed. Maybe made up to soften the accountants sharp pencil of "too expensive!"
you are implying that a virus competely changes your entire genetic make up. and this is simply not the case. it changes cellular dna to instructs those infected cells to mass produce new hiv. You wont be growing wings anytime soon.
Transposons would like to disagree! These make up upto 50% of the human genome (only 2% are actual Genes)! They are essentially viruses trapped in your cell, they can still duplicate, but they lost their ability to leave the cell. Selfish Genes essentially. Luckily most of them are inactive by now.
It is believed that the us Eutheria, i.e. mammals with a placenta, gained the ability to have one common circulatory system for two different organisms by using viral DNA to keep the immune system from going nuts about this.
The megalomaniac idea would be gene therapy: Inserting another retrovirus with a second strand of DNA into the cell which then fabricates interfering RNA, i.e. RNA which intercepts the other virus' DNA. And that gene can only be activated via some external promoter. And then add a method for apoptosis (cell suicide) that triggers upon binding RNAi (if not all cells are infected).
I'm not making any bets how long it will be before this can become reality. Also, I smell Digital Life Management opportunities!
We send a probe?
... which we don't sterilize properly or which picks up life earth has scattered around the solar system. Then this type of life, which has a hundreds of millions of years head start, kills all the native life. But that might explain the Star Trek nose-ridge aliens.
I would really want to leave another planet with no interesting life alone so see what other molecular bases support life.
The studies I have seen put American and European survival rates at about the same level, with normally a slight advantage to the Americans [..]
Yes, I read about the "inexplicable" advantage wrt. cancer as well. Since currently everything seems to gravitate around the Healthcare debate I found the claim that this was due to the government funded National Cancer Institute centers which provide excellent treatment.
Sorry, but I think this is just feel-good nonsense, lets hire some experienced teachers! - well, and they just grow on trees? Obviously not, so should school districts cannibalize each other competing for the few good teachers? The result will be that the richer counties will gobbling up all the good teachers, widening the gap.
And you need some bureaucracy - specialization is not just for insects! Someone just has to do the paperwork, see which methods work or not, pay better performing teachers more and eventually make the hard decisions about firing that charismatic yet incompetent teacher. This is needed so that teachers can concentrate on the kids instead of playing nasty political games on the school level.
There is no evidence that paying more will produce better teachers.
Indeed, the international PISA study found out just that. What might help is adopting teaching concepts from countries who did better than the US (which are 2/3rd of developed/OECD countries). It's not like this kind of problem didn't show up before anywhere else.
And just firing bad teachers is not nearly enough if their replacements are only marginally better. Applying the natural selection principle here is terribly wasteful. I assume one aspect will be a vastly improved teacher education which does the job of selecting good and bad ones, preventing the latter from doing much harm in the field.
Being someone left leaning I sure hope the former approach wins, but it would be interesting to watch how the latter does on the long term. Might it eventually lead to two separate species? Or does the free market only provide "anti hair loss and prolonged erections treatments"?
P.S.: Eugenics is such a nasty word, any chance it can be redeemed or does a neologism have to take its place?
Africa has about a billion people and shows no signs of slowing down, and no, they're not urbanising, they're not becoming educated, and their birthrates aren't dropping significantly.
This is plain wrong, if you have the slightest interest in statistics (they come in pretty colors here) you must watch this 10 minute video from Hans Rosling which is exactly about the horribly fatalistic (I dare say un-american!) "just let'em starve" mindset.
Most of Africa is getting better, the distorted image you get from news reported from the war torn regions of Congo and Somalia doesn't change that. Please, allow your mind to be changed by this dataset.
Counterexample: Both sides in WWII had chemical weapons, but neither used them. But not because some treaty banned them, but because both sides had nothing to gain by escalating.
A gentlemans agreement would not necessarily be based on a treaty or to protect civilians, but on the fact that both sides don't want to get involved in a race to the bottom, and that both sides have enough foresight to avoid it. As predicted by pure game theory, i.e. math.
E.g. Russian (to pick a "classic" opponent) made air burst tech makes it into the hands of insurgents fighting us, and ours to whoever is fighting against Russia. GPS guided artillery shells seem a smarter choice for more precise destructions since it is not such an entry-level weapon.
Not like they used to. Air burst rounds will likely be the next iteration in the infantry arms race: Essentially a grenade that files in a flat trajectory and can detonate where ever you tell it to, such as "that line of sandbags, plus 1m" and then you aim above the sandbags.
They certainly will come in handy against your average "terrorist" armed with an AK-47, but once these types of guns are available to both sides of a conflict it will get real ugly. I certainly hope they remain a technology demonstrator only by some gentlemans agreement. But the next iteration of ground warfare is already in progress...
Yes, these algorithms can finally release you from having to rely on the dictatorship of the masses wrt. recommendations, or investing too much time building your own favourite recommendations-authors.
Previously you selected a smaller supgroup from the general mass, e.g. move to only reading what the NYT recommended, but you were still in a rather big herd. Now you can pretty much "build your own crowd" as you read and rate what you liked/disliked.
I wonder if Netflix is really the only company which run these deeper algorithms. Are they that computationally expensive or just really complex? Wouldn't that be a killer feature for, say, a social network - I might even join for that feature!
Still, this article talks about improving such a system, but I haven't even seen one out in the wild yet!
49,990 Indian Rupees mean = 1,084.26 US$ (according to xe.com) - no way the hardware or RD costs are that high, so they are milking it for the novelty factor for now. Seems India has a large enough middle class in search of status symbols now as well. But I wonder what technological breakthrough took so long that wrist-phones only show up now.
The LG Product page mentions a 510mAh battery for 7-8 days no standby, and again no easily replaceable battery it seems.
You are mixing up two things here:
The sonic boom is what you hear when any aircraft going faster than mach 1 passes overhead, not just when it breaks the sound barrier.
The shock wave (very nice to see here: http://imgur.com/Cw5nS (an F-22?)) only happens at around mach 1 when all the sound waves are on top of each other and don't diverge because the source is moving slower or faster than mach 1.
The prologue reads promising, thanks, added to my next batch of books to order. On that note of satisfying a very peculiar science fiction taste, I have to find a site which uses individual book ratings and then uses something at least as complicated as a support vector machine to make useful recommendations...
And, at the risk of this becoming a nitpick about what substrate actually means: Yes, machines, organic molecules, energy conformations on the surface of stars, those certainly can evolve in the classic sense once they get going. I was jumping to conclusions when you mentioned simulated evolution in silicon systems, the id... oh I'm going to a special place in hell for quoting xkcd again: A Bunch of Rocks simulating something, that as a substrate is not just change over time. I though meant substrate as in like stardust colliding and then calculating a virtual world with evolution etc. as a byproduct.