[alexmat]

Hear hear, the agricultural revolution has trapped us in a Faustian bargain!

"The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA. If no more DNA copies remain, the species is extinct, just as a company without money is bankrupt. If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions."[1]

[1] https://erenow.com/common/sapiensbriefhistory/20.html

[cafard]

There is something curious about posters on a techie site lauding the superiority of the hunter-gatherer life.

[alexmat]

It may not be obvious from the context and the limited excerpt, but in the book Sapiens, the author is careful to make the point that this is not an invitation to revert to the hunter/gatherer lifestyle, in fact, we're past the point where that's a possibility. Rather we have to innovate our way out of the predicament we find ourselves in (the irony of fighting fire with fire is not lost on me). But in my mind, it makes this a perfect quote to consider on a techie site.

[notabee]

The people immersed in technology should also be the ones to best understand both its potential and its limitations. Anyone who has dealt with the unpredictability and pitfalls in maintaining human-created complex software systems should also easily intuit our limits in understanding or controlling other even more complex systems such as the planet's biosphere.

[aalleavitch]

Technology is often the solution to technology.

[TeMPOraL]

What's so curious about it? I'd expect an average techie to be able to think about this topic on their own and comprehend various perspectives.

[s-shellfish]

I imagine a lot of them are starting to have families. What resonates in background information provides a foundational structure, and often establishes direction in opinion.

[danharaj]

# of copies of DNA is just a proxy for probability of propagation.

[Radim]

Probability of propagation is just a proxy for consuming energy gradients more efficiently.

[darkmighty]

Life can be material-constrained instead of energy-constrained (I know there's E=mc^2, but this may not be technologically feasible hence irrelevant). Environmental domination is more fundamental than energy source tapping imo (you can imagine life in systems that don't even have precise energy analogues, like conway's game of life) -- that is, dominating whatever the basic resources are (space, materials, energy, etc).

[arturh]

The gene is the unit of selection.

[folli]

The current fashion is subgenes (domains): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3258039/

[phkahler]

No, the collection of genes is. There are exactly zero individual genes roaming around replicating in isolation.

[marcosdumay]

Sexual reproduction uncorrelates the selective pressures over each gene, and each small set of them (with larger sets being possible the larger a population the species has).

The gene is the unit of selection is perfectly right. It's missing a finer point in that groups of genes are unities of selection too, but it's correct.

[rjbwork]

Not according to modern understandings of gene theory. The Selfish Gene by Dawkins is perhaps the seminal work on this topic for the popular audience.

[lisper]

This is a common misconception. The collection is the unit of replication, but the gene is nonetheless the unit of selection. This argument was laid out in excruciating detail by Dawkins, but the TL;DR is that reproductive fitness can only ever be measured relative to some environment, and all the other genes in a replicative unit are (part of) the environment for a gene and its alleles.

[phkahler]

Collection, chromosome, Gene, base pair. Selection happens at all these levels.

[lisper]

Nope. Selection can only happen at the level of something that has an effect on the phenotype. That's the definition of a gene.

[danharaj]

Actually, it's chemical enviromments.

[folli]

How does a chemical environment replicate and mutate?