10:36:51 From Jim Schwartz to Everyone : @Dan: The crew quarters of the venerable mining ship Red Dwarf

 

10:44:19 From Kathryn Denning to Everyone : Again, this is if reproduction off Earth is really possible.... and if that's the case, it will require significant intervention. We're not talking about a natural selection / adaptation scenario at all anymore. It will all depend on what interventions etc are chosen. 

 

10:44:43 From John Traphagan to Everyone : Lucas, this is an excellent presentation and the point you are making is really important for astrobiology.  Thanks.

 

10:45:00 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : Right - it’s really cultural evolution not biological (assuming you want to think of it in evolutionary terms at all)

 

10:45:13 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : @Jim I was wondering about that...:)

 

10:45:26 From Carlos Mariscal to Everyone : Progressivism keeps trying to sneak in the back door of biology: debates over driven vs. diffusive increases in complexity, major transitions, perhaps even the names of prokaryotes/eukaryotes, etc. I wonder how much of this is 

justified and how much is cognitive bias

 

10:45:33 From Eric Hughes to Everyone : Intentional speciation is far more likely than speciation through nature drift in extraterran humanity.

 

10:45:50 From David DeGraff (he/him) to Everyone : All this is assuming there are no new people coming in.

 

10:45:59 From Kathryn Denning to Everyone : Founder effects would likely be mitigated with genetic interventions. "Natural" mate selection and reproduction is just not viable in most space scenarios. 

 

10:46:15 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : @ Carlos - me too.  However, I will add that assuming they are not justified is not a good idea, though you hear it a lot

 

10:47:01 From Eric Hughes to Everyone : There's also intentional speciation as an endpoint of rejectionst identity politics

 

10:47:04 From John Traphagan to Everyone : This idea of separating artificial and natural selection is based on a Western assumption that there is a distinction between nature and artifice.  This is neither necessarily accurate nor agreed upon across human cultures.

 

10:47:49 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : Well, yeah but there are rhetorical reasons to do natural versus artificial as well.  Chuckie D wanted to make sure people could see that it wasn’t design, but it was similar

 

10:48:39 From John Traphagan to Everyone : Right, but we have to be careful not to conflate the rhetorical aspect with representation of the physical world.

 

10:48:48 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : Fair point

 

10:48:57 From Eric Hughes to Everyone : Neil's talking about first anti-contact

 

10:49:20 From Kathryn Denning to Everyone : Cultural differences in science are certainly an age-old problem on Earth.

 

10:49:58 From Neil Manson to Everyone : Eric ..... LOL

 

10:50:20 From Carlos Mariscal to Everyone : @Kelly – right. I do think there’s trends and tendencies in evolution (although probably more McShea trends than Conway Morris ones). I mean… how could there not be?

 

10:50:48 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : @ Carlos - Good man.  You can be reasonable sometimes…:)

 

10:53:32 From Eric Hughes to Everyone : Complexity measures are far more human-analytical than ontological

 

10:57:14 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : @ Eric - perhaps yes, perhaps not.  I don’t think we are really well positioned to say with any confidence at the moment

 

10:58:45 From John Malloy to Everyone : @Eric I agree with you, and I’ll add that to be useful, any complexity measure must be strongly based on some physical system. A theoretical or arbitrary measure (Geoffrey West’s power laws on technological innovation, for example) are analytical on human systems, but not too useful to me because they’re arbitrarily based.

 

11:01:32 From Eric Hughes to Everyone : Kolmogorov complexity, based on computation, is invariant (within a constant, that is, O(1)), but it's contingent upon the symbolic representation. What's much less studied is the notion of a set of admissible symbolic systems on a physical situation

 

11:04:47 From Eric Hughes to Everyone : ... and I should add that there's a problem of infinite regress in thinking about this, because if you model "physical reality", say, as some kind of mathematical object, you've already reduced the physics to a symbolic system.

 

11:15:09 From Eric Hughes to Everyone : That illustrates my whole point: for simple probability with dice, a world where coincidences are different can't exist, not without positing even less plausible explanations.