the Electric Monk

A question posed by Myles Axton, editor of Nature Genetics, emailed to the Monk from China:

Three days of gin snowed in in Tahoe. You play more boldly if you do not understand your position well. After teaching me how to play battleships on a chess board, the late great Bob Vaile asked me to consider the following question: Should technological safety precautions be interpreted in a static conservative framework or in a dynamic Darwinian one?

For example, is human evolution being retarded by the slowness with which we can acquire mutations? Maybe if background radiation were higher, our descendants would be fitter and able to achieve more.

Quite apart from noting that Bob was responsible for the analysis and design of failsafes for both nuclear weapons and of a nuclear reactor perched on the San Andreas fault, I doubted whether human evolution is either driven or enabled by mutation rate. And in any case, increased variation will lead to significant wastage and suffering that will need to be offset by the increased fitness of a few mutant offspring for what will be an altered and more challenging environment filled with some very quick and scary cockroaches.

–Myles Axton