logoalt Hacker News

xyzzy123today at 10:25 AM2 repliesview on HN

We're not really calorie constrained anymore and most humans live in much denser environments than they used to. You would expect rate of exposure, the rate of mutation / change and the rate at which new pathogens appear to be higher than in the past.

Consequently, you wouldn't necessarily expect ancestral "defaults" to be optimal for modern environments.


Replies

isodevtoday at 12:50 PM

> you wouldn't necessarily expect ancestral "defaults" to be optimal

I like the term ancestral defaults and indeed, we've come a long way since then and our biological and environmental reality is substantially different.

There is this book series Mortal Coil by Emily Suvada which imagines a future where technology has advanced enough to allow one to tweak their genome as easily as we use apps on our phone today. It was a fascinating read.

show 1 reply
qseratoday at 12:32 PM

>We're not really calorie constrained anymore

Why do you bring this up? It seems a weird hypothesis to bring up given that the parent comment did not suggest the possibility...

show 1 reply