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I first tweeted this in 2015 as a sarcastic dig at tribalist types. Then I think I did a QT thread (which I can't find now) taking it somewhat seriously. I'm now back to meaning it sarcastically.
Quote Tweet
Anything is possible if you're willing to not take all of humanity along for the ride.
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I'd like to construct the strongest case for a loosely humanist thesis roughly framed as "our best species evolutionary future is the one opened up by trying to take everybody along for the ride, and anything less is a vaguely eugenicist misunderstanding of evolution"
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Any pseudoscience gloss on "fitness" that allows you to infer a legible inclusion/exclusion function on the set of currently alive human beings is basically pseudoscientific bullshit. "IQ = fitness" is the most egregious example, closely followed by paleo-fitness.
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Many bullshit "chosen people" eschatologies are about figuring out the set to fit through a survival bottleneck of fixed size rather than trying to take along as many people as possible. The metaphor of Noah's ark makes this particularly compelling to the western imagination.
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Replying to
yep, and to the extent the winners of today kill the losers of today, the *future* fitness of the species becomes more fragile via shrinking of gene pool. Limiting case, only the pseudofittest couple survive as a new Adam and Eve, and die the next year.
Replying to and
Hmm, this is actually a pretty compact and rigorous proof of legibility = fragility against trying to game evolution by design. It's so obvious though, I'm wondering if someone has already worked it out in detail.
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