Sorry for the late response! I was avoiding LW.

Here's a copy of an e-mail where I summarized the argument in TWDHN before, and suggested some directions for the paper (note that this was written before I had read the post on Moloch):

In a nutshell, the argument goes something like:

1. Evolution adapts creatures to the regularities of their environment, with organisms evolving to use those regularities to their advantage.
2. A special case of such regularities are constraints, things which an organism must adapt to even though it may be costly: for example, very cold weather forces an organism to spend a part of its energy reserves on growing a fur or other forms of insulation.
3. If a constraint disappears from the environment, evolution will gradually eliminate the costly adaptations that developed in response to it. If the Arctic Circle were to become warm, polar bears would eventually lose their fur or be outcompeted by organisms that never had a thick fur in the first place.
4. Many fundamental features of human nature are likely adaptations to various constraints: e.g. the notion of distinct individuals and personal identity may only exist because we are incapable of linking our brains directly together and merging into one vast hive mind. Conscious thought may only exist because consciousness acts as an "error handler" to deal with situations where our learned habits are incapable of doing the job right, and might become unnecessary if there was a way of pre-programming us with such good habits that they always got the job done. Etc.
5. The process of technological development acts to remove various constraints in our environment: for example, it may one day become possible to actually link minds together directly.
6. If technology does remove previous constraints from our environment, the things that we consider fundamental human values would actually become costly and unnecessary, and be gradually eliminated as organisms without those "burdens" would do better.

What I'd like to do in the paper would be to state the above argument more rigorously and clearly, provide evidence in favor of it, clarify things that I'm uncertain about (Does it make sense to distinguish constraints from just regularities in general? Should one make a distinction between constraints in the environment and constraints from what evolution can do with biological cells?), discuss various possible constraints as well as what might eliminate them and how much of an advantage that would give to entities that didn't need to take them into account, raise the possibility of some of this actually being a good thing, etc. Stuff like that. :-)

Does that argument sound sensible (rather than something that represents a total misunderstanding of evolutionary biology) and something that you'd like to work on? Thoughts on how to expand it to take Moloch into account?

Also, could you say a little more about your background and amount of experience in the field?