# Genetic Recombination > **Machine-Evolution Nexus:** [[articles/Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution|Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution]] connects this node to the substrate-independent history of heredity, selection and computational populations. **Domain:** Genetics / Inheritance / Variation **Doc Type:** Canonical Concept Node **Maturity:** Foundational ## Definition **Genetic recombination** creates new combinations of genetic material through exchange or reassortment of DNA. ## Evolutionary Nexus Joshua Lederberg's Nobel-recognized bacterial work showed that bacterial inheritance could include recombination rather than simple clonal copying. [[articles/The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley|The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley]] places this discovery upstream of his AI and exobiology work. ## Continuity Context Recombination makes descent reticulate. A descendant can inherit from multiple sources, strengthening the need to distinguish provenance from identity in merged models and reconstructed persons. ## See Also [[wiki/Joshua Lederberg|Joshua Lederberg]], [[wiki/Horizontal Gene Transfer|Horizontal Gene Transfer]], [[wiki/Descent vs Derivation|Descent vs Derivation]], [[wiki/Convergence|Convergence]] ## Relationships - **Edge source route:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] connects this topic to exact Annual Question passages promoted into the Simple Reminders archive. ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > “Bill Joy, the prominent computer scientist, argued in a Wired article last year that "the future doesn't need us" because other creatures, artificial or just post-human, are going to take over the world in the 21st century. He is worried that various technologies — particularly robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology — are soon going to be capable of generating either a self-conscious machine (something like the Internet "waking up") or one capable of self-replication (nanotechnologists inspired by the vision of Eric Drexler are currently attempting to create a nano-scaled "universal assembler"). If either of these events came to pass, it would surely introduce major changes in the planetary ecology, and humans would have to find a new role to play in such a world. But is Joy right? Do we have to worry about mad scientists producing some invention that inadvertently renders us second-class citizens to machines in the next couple of decades? (Joy is so distraught by this prospect he would have everyone stop working in these areas.)” > **— Robert Aunger**, *2002, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Question? ... Why?”* [[reminders/AI Control/Can Technology Wake up and Come Alive by Robert Aunger|Can Technology Wake up and Come Alive by Robert Aunger]] > “In his Sketch on an infant Darwin described how readily children learn from their caregivers. The inheritance of traditions, customs, and language is relatively easy to observe with the tools of a 19th Century naturalist compared to intricacies of genetic inheritance, which is still yielding fundamental secrets to the high tech tools of molecular biology. Recent work on the mechanisms underlying imitation and teaching has begun to reveal the more deeply hidden cognitive components of these processes and the results underpin Darwin's phenomenological account of tradition acquisition and evolution.” > **— Peter Richerson**, *2014, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Idea Is Ready For Retirement?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Children Inherit Traditions as Readily as Genes by Peter Richerson|Children Inherit Traditions as Readily as Genes by Peter Richerson]] > “The most difficult ideas to change are those which seem so obviously true that we can scarcely imagine otherwise until confronted with unambiguous disconfirmation. For example, even behavior geneticists had long presumed that non-genetic influences on intelligence and other human traits grow with age while genetic ones weaken. Evidence reveals the opposite for intelligence and perhaps other human traits as well: heritabilities actually increase with age. My attempt to explain the evolution of high human intelligence has also led me to question another such "obvious truth," namely, that human evolution ceased when man took control of his environment. I now suspect that precisely the opposite occurred. Here is why.” > **— Linda S. Gottfredson**, *2008, Edge Annual Question, “What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Human Evolution May Have Accelerated When We Took Control of the Environment by Linda S. Gottfredson|Human Evolution May Have Accelerated When We Took Control of the Environment by Linda S. Gottfredson]] > “Genes and their interaction networks determine the phenotype of an organism—what it looks like and how it behaves. One of the biggest problems in modern evolutionary biology is understanding the relationship between genes and phenotypes. The prevailing theory is that all animals are built from essentially the same set of regulatory genes—a genetic toolkit, and that phenotypic variation within and between species arises simply by using shared genes differently. Scientists are now generating a vast amount of genomic data from an eclectic mix of organisms. These data are telling us to put to bed the idea that all life is underlain by a common toolkit of conserved genes. Instead, we need to turn our attention to the role of genomic novelty in the evolution of phenotypic diversity and innovation.” > **— Seirian Sumner**, *2014, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Idea Is Ready For Retirement?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Life Evolves via a Shared Genetic Toolkit by Seirian Sumner|Life Evolves via a Shared Genetic Toolkit by Seirian Sumner]] > “Consider the tedious but tenacious argument 'genes versus environment'. I'll take a well-studied case. Indigo buntings migrate annually over long distances. To solve the problem of navigation, natural selection equipped them with the ability to construct a mental compass by studying the stars in the night sky, boy-scout fashion, during their first few months of life. The fount of this spectacular adaptation is a rich source of information that natural selection, over evolutionary time, has packed into the birds' genes—in particular, information about the rotation of the stellar constellations. Thus buntings that migrate today can use the same instincts and the same environmental regularities to fashion the same precision-built instrument as did their long-dead ancestors.” > **— Helena Cronin**, *2012, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, Or Beautiful Explanation?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Natural Selection Packed a Star Compass into Bird Genes by Helena Cronin|Natural Selection Packed a Star Compass into Bird Genes by Helena Cronin]] > “Since this experience, I have purposely engaged other well-educated defenders of the irrational, as well as numerous students at my university, in spontaneous one-on-one debates about a host of contentious biological subjects including evolution, organic farming, homeopathy, cloned animals, "chemicals" in our food, and genetic engineering. Much to my chagrin, even after politics, ideology, economics, and other cultural issues have been put aside, there is often a refusal to accept scientific implications of rational argumentation.” > **— Lee M. Silver**, *2008, Edge Annual Question, “What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Public Understanding Does Not Guarantee Agreement on Science by Lee M. Silver|Public Understanding Does Not Guarantee Agreement on Science by Lee M. Silver]] > “Many people think that genetic engineering will change everything, even our very bodies and minds. It will, eventually. Right now, however, attempts to apply new genetic knowledge are having profound effects, not on our bodies, but on how we understand our bodies. They are revealing that our central metaphor for the body is fundamentally flawed. The body is not a machine. It is something very different, a soma shaped by selection with systems unlike anything an engineer would design. Replacing the machine metaphor with a more biological view of the body will change biology in fundamental ways.” > **— Randolph Nesse**, *2009, Edge Annual Question, “What Will Change Everything?”* [[reminders/Civilization/Recognizing That the Body Is Not a Machine by Randolph Nesse|Recognizing That the Body Is Not a Machine by Randolph Nesse]] > “The Internet isn't changing the way I or anybody else thinks. We know this because we can still visit some people on Earth who don't have the Internet and they think the same way that we do. My general purpose thinking circuits are hard wired into my brain from genetic instructions honed over millions of years of natural selection. True, the brain is plastic, it responds to the way it is brought up by its user, or to the language it has been taught to speak, but its fundamental structure is not changed this way, except perhaps in extremis, maybe eight hours per day of computer games.” > **— Mark Pagel**, *2010, Edge Annual Question, “How Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think?”* [[reminders/Evolution/The Internet Cannot Rewrite Millions of Years of Brain Evolution by Mark Pagel|The Internet Cannot Rewrite Millions of Years of Brain Evolution by Mark Pagel]] > “Technically, evolution of the human species as a result of natural selection stopped when we became a social animal — when the strong began protecting the weak and when our scientific and technological advances allowed us to extend the lives of those individuals unfortunate enough to have genetic weaknesses that would have killed them. With humans, artificial selection (selective breeding) was never a serious replacement for natural selection possibility, and as a result there have been no significant changes to the human species since its societies began.” > **— Bruce Parker**, *2009, Edge Annual Question, “What Will Change Everything?”* [[reminders/Evolution/The Successor to Natural Selection in Humans by Bruce Parker|The Successor to Natural Selection in Humans by Bruce Parker]]