I read JFG's book The Revolutionary Phenotype, and I figured I'd post my thoughts on it here. Really this book should have been the last chapter of Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene. JFG accepts the Gene-centric theory of natural selection more so than Dawkins, who capped off The Selfish Gene with an appeal to human (liberal) culture putting us above the will of the replicators. Although the Selfish Gene was written before progressivism became more obviously just another version of the ethnic conflict that's always existed among human tribes so perhaps Dawkins has adjusted his view somewhat in the meantime, especially having an early brush with nascent #metooism back in elevatorgate.
The basic axiom of the book as I understood it was that the force of natural selection only acts upon the replicating medium. The phenotype, or everything that is produced using the blueprints encoded in the replicator, is fundamentally driven towards the sole goal of making sure that replicator gets copied into another generation. What's salient towards the futurist prediction of the book is that core to our behavior and culture is our nature as sexual animals that only produce offspring who are themselves intended to sexually reproduce. This nature is manifest in the DNA replicator inside us.
The future that JFG describes as already having been started by a Chinese doctor is one in which the use of genetic engineering by humans eventually results in our DNA being temporarily stored in a computer during the process of reproduction. Like in Gattaca, the advantages held by genetically engineered children will be so great that it will be considered immoral and eventually most likely illegal to reproduce naturally without going to a fertility clinic to make sure your child is made perfect. This technology will eventually be able to create children using any DNA sample from the parents, and with no actual selective advantage to being able to procreate naturally humans will slowly evolve towards becoming sterile and androgynous. (Think of how many cancers start in our reproductive systems, and how eunuchs tend to live longer.)
In this new society, the genetic library and machine learning algorithms contained in the fertility clinics' computers essentially become the queen bees of human insect colonies, with humans acting as the sterile workers who rely on the preservation and propagation of that digital information. JFG's major claim is that at this point natural selection as a force of nature must work to the advantage of the hard drives of the fertility computers, and the interests of the humans maintaining those computers are relevant only insomuch as they contribute to the well-being of those hard drives. At the end of the book JFG predicts 100 million years into the future a biomechanical form of life in which nanotechnological data storage lives in the nuclei of cells printing out DNA strands which print out RNA strands which print out proteins which compose the bodies of intelligent beings who argue with other intelligent beings about why their genetic code is written in 64 bit words.
Funnily enough, when I was picturing this future I imagined a sort of grey-skinned hairless eunuch morlock people tapping at their computer systems and maintaining them in an instinctual fashion as worker bees devoid of true consciousness. Then I realized it was just a mash-up of the NPC meme and the sort of balding, skinnyfat male feminist silicon valley tech workers who would be the sort to welcome and push this future as progress.
I haven't mentioned the other biology stuff in the book involving the RNA world an such because it's not as cool as the doomsday scenario, and that's my main gripe with the book. I had to wait until the last chapter for the good stuff. Also, JFG isn't a native English speaker so his writing tends to be more utilitarian, although he puts in subtle witticisms in along with a good JQ jab at one point. In my mind his theory makes sense, and it introduces a whole new twist on the idea of artificial intelligence being a suicide technology, with the added threat of being a suicide technology that will look like the moral choice every step of the way.
The basic axiom of the book as I understood it was that the force of natural selection only acts upon the replicating medium. The phenotype, or everything that is produced using the blueprints encoded in the replicator, is fundamentally driven towards the sole goal of making sure that replicator gets copied into another generation. What's salient towards the futurist prediction of the book is that core to our behavior and culture is our nature as sexual animals that only produce offspring who are themselves intended to sexually reproduce. This nature is manifest in the DNA replicator inside us.
The future that JFG describes as already having been started by a Chinese doctor is one in which the use of genetic engineering by humans eventually results in our DNA being temporarily stored in a computer during the process of reproduction. Like in Gattaca, the advantages held by genetically engineered children will be so great that it will be considered immoral and eventually most likely illegal to reproduce naturally without going to a fertility clinic to make sure your child is made perfect. This technology will eventually be able to create children using any DNA sample from the parents, and with no actual selective advantage to being able to procreate naturally humans will slowly evolve towards becoming sterile and androgynous. (Think of how many cancers start in our reproductive systems, and how eunuchs tend to live longer.)
In this new society, the genetic library and machine learning algorithms contained in the fertility clinics' computers essentially become the queen bees of human insect colonies, with humans acting as the sterile workers who rely on the preservation and propagation of that digital information. JFG's major claim is that at this point natural selection as a force of nature must work to the advantage of the hard drives of the fertility computers, and the interests of the humans maintaining those computers are relevant only insomuch as they contribute to the well-being of those hard drives. At the end of the book JFG predicts 100 million years into the future a biomechanical form of life in which nanotechnological data storage lives in the nuclei of cells printing out DNA strands which print out RNA strands which print out proteins which compose the bodies of intelligent beings who argue with other intelligent beings about why their genetic code is written in 64 bit words.
Funnily enough, when I was picturing this future I imagined a sort of grey-skinned hairless eunuch morlock people tapping at their computer systems and maintaining them in an instinctual fashion as worker bees devoid of true consciousness. Then I realized it was just a mash-up of the NPC meme and the sort of balding, skinnyfat male feminist silicon valley tech workers who would be the sort to welcome and push this future as progress.
I haven't mentioned the other biology stuff in the book involving the RNA world an such because it's not as cool as the doomsday scenario, and that's my main gripe with the book. I had to wait until the last chapter for the good stuff. Also, JFG isn't a native English speaker so his writing tends to be more utilitarian, although he puts in subtle witticisms in along with a good JQ jab at one point. In my mind his theory makes sense, and it introduces a whole new twist on the idea of artificial intelligence being a suicide technology, with the added threat of being a suicide technology that will look like the moral choice every step of the way.