From: Mark Walker (mail@markalanwalker.com)
Date: Wed Jun 19 2002 - 09:50:00 MDT
----- Original Message ----- >
> Think of Algernon's Law as a constraint which acts to rule out a large set
> of intelligence enhancement techniques that, judging by the corpus of
> science fiction, would otherwise seem plausible. If you do some deep
> thinking about evolutionary anthropology and say, "Ah, here's a mutation
> that only became accessible in design space very recently, and is complex
> enough that it wouldn't necessarily have happened over the last fifty
> thousand years or so," then this is an example of the *correct* use of
> Algernon's Law - not as a cause for despair, but as a means for finding
> intelligence enhancement techniques that *avoid* Algernon's Law.
>
> As for Algernon's Law itself, it neither rules out evolution (obviously)
nor
> says anything about whether the speed of evolution is linear or
exponential.
> It just says that if you're going to postulate an intelligence
enhancement
> technique that could easily occur as a single mutation (or to which there
> seems to exist an obvious incremental path) and which would have been very
> easily possible over long periods of evolutionary time, then you may find
> that intelligence enhancement is not as easy as you think.
>
> Please remember that in much science fiction, intelligence enhancement is
> apparently as easy as changing a few jumpers on the brain's factory
> settings. It doesn't take much thinking at all to work around Algernon's
> Law - evolution really isn't all that smart and there are many things we
can
> do that are not accessible to it - but you do have to put in those few
extra
> seconds.
>
I am not sure I understand this. Is the idea basically that we should reason
that if there were really that easy changes to the brain's factory settings
then they would in all probability already be manifest in the gene pool and
expressed in our phenotype? Take an example: suppose that a single homeobox
mutation would create a human being with a much larger neocortex. I can see
reasoning that this mutation is not likely to increase evolutionary fitness,
even a few hundred years ago, but I am not sure that we can conclude that it
is not an easy means to increase intelligence. One possible explanation why
this mutation does not manifest itself is an evolutionary bottleneck not
directly linked with intelligence, namely, the size of a woman's pelvis.
That is, we might imagine that this mutation creates babies with heads too
large for the natural means of birth. Of course, a c-section might get
around this problem.
Dr. Mark Walker
Research Associate (Philosophy), Trinity College, University of Toronto
Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Evolution and Technology,
(www.transhumanist.com)
Editor-in-Chief, Transhumanity, (www.transhumanism.com)
Home page: http://www.markalanwalker.com
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