arundelo comments on Rationality Quotes February 2012 - Less Wrong

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Comment author: arundelo 14 February 2012 06:15:52AM *  8 points [-]

Consider for a moment the first primitive amphibian that crawled up out of the sea around 400 million years ago. A contemporary biologist, had any existed, would certainly have classed this species as a rather unusual type of fish, for it would be far more closely related to certain kinds of fish than any other extant species. It is only in hindsight that we can see that it was not a fish, but the first representative of an entirely new class[41] of [vertebrates], the amphibians. But intelligence and tool-using are developments of comparable scope to the ability to breath air and move about on land. I therefore argue that human beings are not primates; we are not even mammals. Homo sapiens is a radical evolutionary phenomenon, the first representative of a new class of [vertebrates].

-- Ronald E. Merrill

(The brackets around "vertebrates" are just for a spelling correction.)

Comment author: roystgnr 14 February 2012 05:47:19PM 6 points [-]

This sounds radical but is if anything far too conservative.

Intelligence and tool using has for millennia allowed us to apply selection pressures which are much more focused than natural selection, and now also allows us to directly edit genetic material in ways which would be slower or even impossible via random mutation alone. Intelligence also allows for the generation, mutation, and replication of ideas, which end up having a much greater, much more rapidly changing impact on ourselves and our environment than the variation in our genes alone.

Those aren't changes comparable to the difference between breathing water and breathing air; they're changes comparable to the difference between non-life and life. The very idea of biological clades becomes more and more fuzzy when we make horizontal gene transfer a regular fact of life for even complex organisms, intermixing DNA from species that haven't had a common ancestor in a billion years.