Humanity 2.0 - overcoming our genes?

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I might think of this an extension of the reason vs. emotion topic.

One of the things I posted recently was Sam Harris's Waking Up podcast #109 where he had Bret Weinstein in a public forum and Bret was discussing a lot of his concerns about the ways social media and a lot of new technologies were opening a sort of evolutionary Pandora's box where what one might call the will of the human genome has been finding a way to get around and subvert our usual morals and ethics, or at least as we'd typically practice them when we can keep a lid on that particular influence. On one hand we've attempted to seal the influence of the genome through religious codification and then very tightly define how that will gets express - ie. picking and choosing which natural desires get fulfilled as judiciously as possible with broader altruistic concerns as our guide. We've increasingly decided that the religious texts of the world, mostly antedating late antiquity, carry a lot of baggage that isn't applicable to the current cultural playing field - for example they're loaded with prohibitions of all sorts which were far better than nothing not but, taken literally, just act as a sort of vestigial neurosis. That had to be done, ie. the associated baggage was exceeding the surrounding functionality, but we're now on the other hand we're saddled with the question of how to reorganize the public sphere and I think it's generally agreed upon that if we keep telling people that standards are whatever they personally decide this will really default to each person's battle with their own internal influences. While having each person's moral battle be completely private can work for some people they're typically not the majority and not the types of people who we'd worry about in terms of keeping the foundations of a functional civil society up and running. The really clear problem - children and young adults are super vulnerable, they're constantly getting buffeted by their environments and it takes an almost supernatural degree of self-control, without a pristine environment and an incredible amount of nurture and correction, to turn out as a clear thinking moral agent in the world. We're stuck perhaps then trying to figure out a way to come up with the right 'shoulds' to codify from on high and recommend as society-wide unifying values or rules without having those shoulds be too injurious to the Enlightenment liberal values that we both fought to establish and tend to see as superior for ameliorating human misery when compared to any other said system.

That last part I think goes to what I think is Bret's primary message about how the genome influences civic life; ie. that we absolutely don't want our genes to govern what kind of culture we have. They were honed by a survival of the fittest environment and as a result they're by and large self and at best tribe-centered, they're opportunistic, and quite often with the slightest push it seems like they border on loveless when it comes to questions of how the welfare of complete strangers should be addressed.

A lot of this makes perfect sense from a biological chemistry perspective in that chemicals don't have feelings or moral compulsions, even if we strangely find that we ourselves do. Our DNA really amounts to long chains of such chemicals. If I have to think about what's been happening in our culture since the 1970's in the media, in movies, etc. as we've had fads move through, different ideas explored artistically and musically, and add to that the political moral panics that have been increasingly of note as of lately - it seems like this is what amounts to a massive exorcism. That exorcism is really an exorcism of genetic data, ie. us grinding away out our rough edges as we try to reset or rebuild our own dials. Every major social fiasco or crisis that our culture survives seems to be a bit like a learned lesson that cements in certain consequences and answers certain questions about how to deal with particular kinds of problems and sneakier strategies that the genome employs. We've survived quite a few big clashes of this sort now and while I have to hope that our luck holds out in that respect I also realize that we never have a better fighting chance than if we get a place where everything I wrote isn't seen as some sort of esoteric contemplation or niche concern but rather street level common sense of the sort that guides how people supervise their own activity in the world, ie. the more people who can do that the safer I think humanity's future becomes.

I'm curious as to what you guys think - ie. if we're in a battle to tame our genes and make ourselves something like a race of gentle/benevolent philosophers or monks (religious or otherwise) that could collectively survive their own internal contents, create a world at peace truly worth living in, and not having an all day knock-down-drag-out with their own compulsions to either compete and win/dominate, fertilize another guy's wife, keep trading up for the richest or most alpha husband possible, or needing to assert one's half-baked vision of one-stop political panaceas on global scales - how long do you think such a project would take? Hundreds of years? Thousands? Do you think it's even possible? With any of the above mentioned answers - assuming 'our lifetimes' to be through the back end of this century, do you think we'll make any noteworthy progress?

I know it's a huge question, the answer is probably a bit 42'ish in that respect, but I'm interested in getting other people chewing on that one and seeing how they think the path forward is likely to unfold.

My own take as of right now - I think we're increasingly moving from the red to the greener portion of yellow on this. We'll survive this, perhaps uncomfortably, and I'm really guessing this work of us redesigning ourselves is still in the painful range of an exponential curve. I don't know when that exponential curve will round it's central bend however I have a feeling things will continue to be strange up until that point and the political and cultural news will probably keep getting weirder as we peel into deeper layers of our own collective psyche.

That's a rather... controversial idea, don't you think? The idea that culture could be downstream of biology. That would open up the possibility that certain populations are more prone to certain traits than others - say, Northwest Europeans being less tribal and higher trust than the rest of humanity...

Taking traits in isolation... it depends on what selective pressures they're experiencing, and how strong the pressure is. Contraception is a big one. Historically, humans have been selected to want sex, because that led to children. Now, the selective pressure is to want children, because people who don't want kids but do want sex won't have kids. This will include a lot of men who are inclined to acquire harems. If the trait is strongly genetic, and the women who participate in such harems don't want kids with such men and use contraception, then that trait won't be passed down. Give it a few centuries, and it will be a lot less prevalent in the population.

But I wouldn't consider that Humanity 2.0. I've only ever seen that term used in the context of (technological) transhumanism. I'll settle for Humanity 1.1 at the moment - the debugged human genome, with a couple of new traits added (much better gene repair to keep mutational load low and avoid cancer, and much longer telomeres to dramatically slow ageing). There's plenty of variety already to allow polygenic adaptation.

I guess I'd phrase my response to that question back like this: Aside from the handful of philosophic ideas that have really taken hold as useful, what else is there to drive us? Also, if we're constantly surprised by the kinds of strange tribal and atavistic behaviors that come out of people when the rules of society seem like they're up in the air - do we have a better predictive explanatory model that evolutionary psych is brushing under the carpet? Aside from being impolitic I'm not sure what would make it controversial, ie. it would have to be dangerously wrong for that label to stick in a meaningful way.

As far as race realism coming on the tales of that conclusion - I don't think that's an indictment of the idea as much as it's an indictment on how certain people might respond. If our culture is under strain primarily by way of anachronistic programs in our DNA and by consequence our endocrine and limbic wiring I don't think burying our heads in the sand on this one will help, and if we think such information would help Jared Taylor, Richard Spencer, et. al. it's yet another reason to also shred the merits of the directions in which they'd take those conclusions.