The Wisdom of Nature: An Evolutionary Heuristic for Human Enhancement

Abstract

Human beings are a marvel of evolved complexity. Such systems can be difficult to enhance. When we manipulate complex evolved systems, which are poorly understood, our interventions often fail or backfire. It can appear as if there is a ''wisdom of nature'' which we ignore at our peril. Sometimes the belief in nature's wisdom-and corresponding doubts about the prudence of tampering with nature, especially human nature-manifest as diffusely moral objections against enhancement. Such objections may be expressed as intuitions about the superiority of the natural or the troublesomeness of hubris, or as an evaluative bias in favor of the status quo. This chapter explores the extent to which such prudence-derived anti-enhancement sentiments are justified. We develop a heuristic, inspired by the field of evolutionary medicine, for identifying promising human enhancement interventions. The heuristic incorporates the grains of truth contained in ''nature knows best'' attitudes while providing criteria for the special cases where we have reason to believe that it is feasible for us to improve on nature.

Antenatal weight management: Diet, physical activity, and gestational weight gain in early pregnancy

“…Instead, women implicitly constructed their pregnancies as 'natural' and trusted that this 409 natural state, the result of eons of natural selection, was perfectly adapted; the 'wisdom of 410 nature' heuristic (Bostrom and Sandberg, 2008 …”

Rethinking Human Enhancement

“…They argue that nature has not given us certain traits, because it is (a) fundamentally incapable of producing them, (b) does not count on the tools and knowledge that we have to shape our own evolution and (c) simply because it takes too long to develop those traits. The second line of argument they use is that evolution has not optimised us for certain traits that would be preferred at a global scale, such as happiness (Bostrom & Sandberg, 2009b). Bostrom and Ord made a similar point in their paper about status quo bias by stating that 'there is no general reason for thinking that what evolution selects for us-inclusive fitness-coincides with what makes our lives go well individually, much less collectively ' (2006, p. 666).…”

“…But if you stay biological and don't reprogram your genes, you won't be around for very long to influence the debate (Kurzweil, 2005, p. 226 [emphasis in original]). Bostrom and Sandberg (2009b) propose the evolutionary optimality challenge (EOC), as a way of analysing why we have not yet evolved into the type of beings that transhumanist enhancement interventions will enable us to become. They argue that nature has not given us certain traits, because it is (a) fundamentally incapable of producing them, (b) does not count on the tools and knowledge that we have to shape our own evolution and (c) simply because it takes too long to develop those traits.…”

Swarm Intelligence via the Internet of Things and the Phenomenological Turn

“…At the same time, this new interconnectivity can increase and severely modify our experience of the world, not only as individuals, but also as a collective of living entities. Therefore, we can think about ways of enhancing empathic responses or engineer the feeling about a vast range of data, ignored until this new revolution [48,49].…”