There can be better or worse adapted to conditions but I’m not sure one can speak of a higher or lower level of evolution. If there are higher or lower planes of existence, we have yet to find them as such.

If there’s a God, that would throw all plans into chaos from our point of view, as we would be operating within a higher order unknown to our instruments and not detectable by technological developments.

If there is a God and it created us and is in fact the all powerful creator of the universe, we have little choice but to await events. If he’s somewhat lesser a being, needing some new species to use as tools to replace us, we have options:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41391

The theology and metaphysics in that, IIRC from decades ago, are terrible. But it’s the right attitude under comparable circumstances.

To your last, yeah, I don’t want to go full Peace Authority except for AI rather than nukes, but I am disturbed by any posture that just assumes AI is our successor by default and we can do nothing to oppose, control, or shape. That’s like laying down and thinking of England.

Does “history” or “evolution” matter to GOD?

And there’s no way to put the semiconductor genie back in the bottle without going full Uncle Ted. Or a Younger Dryas sequel event, like, pronto.

Just saying.

I figure it’s worth the shot. If they’re going to replace us, they should have to do the work.

Perhaps that is now unrealistic in many ways, but if we never get things like FTL travel and communication, I might get something like that future anyway.”

Me too but I don’t believe it. Key point in the “Known Space” future of Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven computers of sufficient power to be sentient when programed as AI’s go crazy. We don’t know that to be true and it’s more likely that the future will be that the bacteria and other lower life forms made/preceded us and we made/preceded the computers which in turn ascend to prominence over us just like we do the lower animals. Our only role in history is to be the founders of digital life forms.

“Accelorado” by Charles Stross is a sci-fi book that tells the story of this as it happens. Good read and it’s free online.

Length of time to see results wouldn’t bother me- I think somewhere above I suggested that would be a feature, not a bug, especially from a social and political point of view.

Getting the wrong outcomes, in general, for a particular political program, or for a specific environmental situation, are much better concerns. Or reducing the adaptability of the species as a whole.

On the dog example- I know too little to say. Whenever I read anything about this, the criticism seems to be against breeders deliberately aiming to produce particular aesthetic features, despite the [sooner or later] foreseeable or even known fitness costs [bulldogs, pugs, etc.] That seems to very strongly reinforce the criticism that eugenics can be deliberately taken down blind alleys to achieve distorted preferential goals. On the other hand it pretty well demonstrates, if that was the problem, that they actually could breed true for what they wanted.

Deep down, I’m not entirely opposed to any of the developments we are seeing that, for me, form a bundle that could in aggregate be called increasingly our direct control of nature, and increasing our direct control of ourselves. Everyone doesn’t see them all of a piece, but for me that lumps together:

1. Selective breeding [plants and animals, millennia now; and humans, less deliberately across the board, less carefully and less well]

2. Cloning [plants, centuries if not millennia, citrus sort of an example, including subspecies variations that never existed in nature before]

3. Direct genetic manipulation/subtraction/augmentation [comparatively, brand spanking new even in agriculture and I am not blind to its potential terrors in humanity]

[Apropos of this, I have found that there are those who are terrified of GMO foods that have not heard of how much we have done with selective breeding over the millennia, and those who pooh pooh such concerns who have no concept that there might be a difference between selective breeding and direct gene manipulation, unless and until one brings up the human example. Then the distinction becomes clearer, albeit they have some kinship.]

4. Augmentation with technology [ancient, as befits a species that uses tools better than any other known; but possibly entering on terrifying and hopeful new eras of self-directing tools and direct human augmentation with technology].

Today, it seems as though #4 comes in for the least criticism and the most widespread support, and the most widespread assumption of inevitability as well.

I don’t much care for any of them, and hope for a future in which mainline humanity lasts much longer and proves able to master challenges it faces.

But of them, I see them in descending order from most terrifying and most posthuman as: 4231.

All of them pose the possibility of abuse and of mistake that could put us on one or another path to extinction, either in full or in favour of a successor of our creation. If that were to be my fate, better a genetically enhanced human than an android. The former would be an heir, the latter just a replacement. And that would be true even if both existed, and the former held us in contempt and the latter worshipped our memory.

I find it an ongoing matter of interest that so many find the one terrifying and the other hopeful, rather than vice versa.

Your last paragraph is exactly what I was getting at. The unforeseen consequences, or even the foreseen but ignored consequences will be adverse, possibly thalidomide level adverse.

Like I said, we THINK gene “A” is related to something, but maybe it turns out it is not, or even if it is, that it is even more essential for something else.

We can’t even get selective breeding even marginally right in dogs, so how arrogant is it to start using CRISPR?

Unless you’re going for some sort of appearance-based thing, you really need a much longer timescale than we have available to us. I threw out the idea that you’d want to breed for “selflessness” as an example of the sort of thing you’d maybe want to do as a society–Breed in more people who’re going to look out for the good of all, rather than selfishness. The trouble with that is that even if you’ve got really good definitions of what you want, you’re going to need to take a long view of what the actual performance was for people with those gene complexes. And, you’re going to have to black-box it all from the observers, because if people knew that certain behaviors got more of your genes into the greater gene pool, well… Yeah. They would start behaving in ways that would make their genes get passed on more.

I don’t see a way that any of this would ever really work in a situation quite like ours. It would take something quite out of our context, like isolated populations with intermittent contacts far away from here in space and time, before someone would even see the need to play these games, or have the ability to try. The whole thing would be fascinating to observe, and I’ve got no idea what someone would even want, in that situation. I’m thinking they might not want “superman”, but just “better man”, and with their sights set low enough, they might manage to make something happen.

I am gonna lay money on the first people trying to make “better people” through either genetic engineering or an actual eugenics program f**king it up by the numbers, though. There are going to be tons of cautionary tales for posterity, once some group of idiots actually tries it.

There is no reason we couldn’t try it if we really wanted to, but doing it thru breeding wold, as Kirk explained, take a long time to get results, and the results would be crude.

We could for example, breed pairs of athletes to concentrate particular athletic traits, as a simple example. The problem is actually doing it efficiently without adverse side effects. Look at the absolutely shocking problems with pure breed dogs. We maximize the desired trait, but at the expense of all sorts of other things.

We also have to look at the failure rate of breeding. Using the dog breeding example, you don’t always get the required output, even if you select your breeding pair carefully, and are we happy to “cull” our failures?

We also run the risk of making the social Darwinist/Nazi mistake. Survival of the fittest does not mean survival of the biggest/strongest/meanest. It is rather, the survival of the one most adapted to their environment in a particular place and time. During his failed South Pole trek, Scott took an extra man because he was the largest and fittest member of the expedition. Unfortunately his larger frame required more calories to sustain, and he weakened fastest and was the first to die.

We are also far too arrogant in that we think we know about what IS the desired outcome. Even if we star using CRISPR to do our “Eugenics” we risk guessing wrong (and we really would be guessing). We can say a particular gene is associated with something, or there is evidence that it causes a certain amount of pre-disposition, but we can’t say “specific gene = specific trait/disease”.

Look at all the bullshit generated by the so called “Warrior Gene”, and how its possession made one more likely to be criminal or violent, yet plenty of people with it are perfectly civilized, because the environment is also important. It is not nature or nurture, it is nature and nurture, though to be sure, most recent research tends to put nature’s input as being greater.

Sure, we might THINK we can identify a gene that causes for example, a propensity towards criminality, and we might want to eliminate it, but what else might that gene be responsible for? For all we know, there is another gene required in combination that causes the criminality, and the same gene with another gene causes super intelligence or resistance to a yet unknown disease.

People rub their chins and quote books like Murray’s out of context to confirm their own biases, and toss around concepts like eugenics with a breathtakingly arrogant Jurassic Park level smug hubris

I’ve often had similar thoughts, in terms of “How does one go about prolonging the period of ‘virtue’ in a culture?”

And, I’ve come to similar conclusions, but I’ve also taken it a bit further. Innovation usually only comes with the death of the entrenched “old timer”. What happens when they don’t die off properly? Where would geology be, today, if the deniers of continental drift and the other things we today take as self-evident, like the source of the channeled scablands here in the Northwest US?

You would have to accept that one potential side-effect of having your grandparents and great-grandparents literally looking over your shoulder would not only be to slow down the rate of what one might term the “decay of virtue”, but to drastically slow down the uptake of innovative new ideas. For good or ill, that’s gonna be an effect of such a thing. Almost inevitably.

The other issue is, what happens when the descendants don’t listen to the voices of their elders? Say that the elders see a disaster looming, but the youth insist on their course of action… What then?

Whatever happens, it’s going to be a major sea-change in the course of things. Imagine the impact of having George Washington’s personality still around to consult and/or criticize today’s politician? Or, say someone tampers with the record files of that personality such that it convincingly parrots the ideas that today’s politicians want, rather than the true opinions of its living antecedent? Particularly if the public is used to relying on the veracity and good advice of the recorded personality?

Whole bunch of implications to all this, both good and bad.

I actually don’t want anything to happen that could qualify as a Singularity [unless defined away from its maximal possibilities or defined as already happened] or the End of History.

My fave science fiction is the kind in which mankind’s story just goes on and on in ways recognizable to us, even if using far more advanced technology and with better medical care and on a vastly larger template.

Perhaps that is now unrealistic in many ways, but if we never get things like FTL travel and communication, I might get something like that future anyway.