Re: human evolution and artificial birth

From: hal@finney.org
Date: Wed Jun 28 2000 - 16:39:02 MDT


It seems that there will be a problem with the adoption of artificial
wombs and other changes to the natural conception/birth process, because
we won't know for a long time if there are bad effects. This would slow
down the adoption rate.

First you do it with animals, and if that seems to work, you try it
on a few people. Wait at least a decade, maybe more like 20 years,
and make sure the children are OK and can reproduce OK.

Now that it seems to work, you can try it on somewhat larger numbers of
people, and make sure that there are no rare side effects and problems.
And so on, with gradually increasing numbers every 20 years or so.

It's not the kind of thing that can be adopted en masse in just a decade
or two. It sounds like it would take centuries before you could have
widespread changeover.

Hal



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