From: Andrew Clough (aclough@mit.edu)
Date: Wed May 08 2002 - 13:30:03 MDT
>If you want to create a human of superior physical strength, you
>can take your clues from a Neanderthal skeleton. The result might
>conflict with the requirement to look good in an evening gown,
>though.
Since humans evolved in an environment where nutrition was limited, I'd
imagine our muscles aren't the most efficient biologically possible, but
instead are "bargain brand." Since getting enough to eat is hardly a
concern for most of the people thinking about genetic engineering
themselves, we could probably get a lot more power by altering ourselves so
we need to eat more, or have nutritional supplements. Of course, depending
on what they are, it might take some more work to let us digest them, but
both these changes would probably be easier than making gross changes in
anatomy like changing where on the bones the muscles are anchored (to what
Neanderthals had). Any bulking or re-anchoring would probably have
tradeoffs in flexibility, control, speed, or something else, so increasing
muscle power to volume efficiency seems like the way to go.
>Some corner of my memory says that optimizations for night vision
>or color vision, respectively, run actually counter to each other,
>so I expect some serious engineering difficulty there.
That is interesting. I know that humans can adapt to new visual modes, but
don't have any idea how this effects our ability to process images. I've
heard that soldiers who use thermographics a lot are much better able to
pick out details than untrained people, without losing their ability to see
normally. In eighth grade I had a teacher who had severe focusing
problems. He had an operation that refocused one of his eyes to long
distances, and left the other for shorter ones, forcing him to wear special
glasses for depth perception. In light of the color/night vision trade
off, and the fact that my teacher could have two vision modes (with and
without glasses) it would be real interesting to learn what sort of limits
there are to vision adaptability.
>And I have no idea how to make a human faster. In fact, I don't
>know where the bottleneck is right now. Brain processing? General
>nerve speed? The muscle fibers? Are there even any animals we can
>take a clue from? House cats are quick, but I think that doesn't
>scale with size.
Maybe we could increase nerve speed by using ions not present in our
ancestors diets? I don't know much about this either
>--
>Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de
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