Evolving into a culture of totalitarian rationalism like the Vulcan, would require irrational parties to be at an evolutionary disadvantage. That rules out any modern democracy from ever doing it, since discriminating anyone acting on instinct or feelings won't ever get a majority vote.
I wonder if we are "beyond the basics of evolution and selfish genes" now in terms of human intelligence, technology, society and soon: AI. For example once a species can edit it's own genes, you get to a point where maybe the genes "competing" and "being selfish" becomes meaningless, and some other defining "replication force" takes over as the dominate shaping of future life.
We might get to "the selfish data"? Genes being a special case.
Narh, when it comes to breeding, we humans tend to be quite predicable. Outliers definitely exist, but they generally don't procreate as much as people who just feel the urge and go for it. In order to shape evolution you'd need to make what would essentially begin as an edge case and make sure it's such an advantage that it reduces the likelyhood of others having more children than you.
True, and this is why ants and cockroaches are more
“evolved“ than humans. (although is it the being or the gene?) But humans can conceive bigger goals: we could genetically engineer new beings, and replace natural gestation with something else. These are untenable ideas but in 100 yrs ethics might change and the temptation to change how we and things evolve would be there.
