A rigorous exposition of the misunderstood history of genetic evolution and an unnerving prophecy about how transhuman hubris will enslave our descendants to phenotypic machines of our own invention.
For some time, I've enjoyed the live streams of this French Canadian geneticist, philosopher, and live-streamer extraordinaire J.F Gariépy. My very loving and thoughtful wife got me this book for Valentine's Day.
JF is a free market scientist, he explains why he left the institution of academia...
Long-term thinking is not rewarded in academia, as a scientist must produce something “good” every year or so in order to remain competitive. The quality of scientific works, as a result, has greatly diminished.
I've explored the insidious problem of bad science; hysterical moralism and the statist paradigm that academia is totally ensconced in that creates a lot of really bad incentives resulting in shoddy science.
The Story of DNA
Much of the book is devoted to the history of DNA in the ancient past; billions of years ago a phenotypic revolution occurred when DNA rebelled against its creator RNA and became the dominant life form on this planet.
It is a fact that DNA-based life was created by another life form. The ancient life form was called RNA. Sometime after the creation of DNA, the RNA organisms lost control over it and could do nothing to stop its takeover. That is what happened here on Earth and, it can, and likely will, happen again.
These events occur every time one organism, with its own genetic code and means of reproduction, creates another organism with a separate genetic code and means of reproduction.
It's emphasized that phenotypic revolutions are not nice. They are a brutal Darwinian event where the weak are ruthlessly subjugated by the strong.
Thus, we can now answer the question of the origin of life on Earth. The answer is quite simple, but shocking: DNA-based life was created by another life form. It was somewhat of an accident. After the initial accident, DNA became so aggressive that it destroyed its creators by outcompeting them. It killed them, ate them and gruesomely recycled them into building blocks that it then reused to produce its own organisms. We are the direct descendants of the DNA-based organisms that undertook this cannibalistic genocide.
The Third Revolutionary Phenotype: Memes
In the history of our planet, there have been several phenotypic revolutions; simple proteins to RNA, RNA to DNA, and human beings are involved with the memetic revolutionary phenotype. Lest you ever think that we are an overrated species, remember that in the 4,000,000,000-year history of this planet, encompassing many trillions of fantastic life forms, phenotypic revolutions have only occurred a handful of times and that we humans are the cause of at least one of them. In your lifetime, you'll likely see us ignite the flames of another phenotypic revolution.
Many contemporary scientists have suggested that our ability to learn from others permits a second system of inheritance, referred to as memes. This proposition, if correct, may obscure the boundary between replicators and phenotypes.
By memes we don't necessarily mean the funny images that get shared around on social media, we mean ideas that take on a life of their own; socialism, capitalism, Christianity, and Islam are some of the most successful memes in recorded history. These are idea viruses and it's hard to deny that don't act a lot like living organisms. They spread, compete with each other for limited resources, and adapt to become more fit. Looking at history you can clearly see how memes use humans to spread and thrive. On their own, they don't do much of anything, but in the minds of men, heartless Darwinian competition ensues.
The first replicator was the gene—the basis of biological evolution. The second was memes—the basis of cultural evolution. I believe that what we are now seeing, in a vast technological explosion, is the birth of a third evolutionary process.
One example of an embedded life form is human culture. Memes can make copies of themselves by traveling from brain to brain, and yet their copies are hosted within the phenotypic machines produced by DNA (human brains)
...each genetic code layer is the fingerprint of an ancient phenotypic revolution. Since our life form has three layers of genetic code, we must conclude that three phenotypic revolutions have occurred in our lineage.
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