Lifeboat Foundation

Humans are exterminating animal and plant species so quickly that nature’s built-in defence mechanism, evolution, cannot keep up. An Aarhus-led research team calculated that if current conservation efforts are not improved, so many mammal species will become extinct during the next five decades that nature will need 3 to 5 million years to recover.

There have been five upheavals over the past 450 million years when the environment has changed so dramatically that the majority of Earth’s plant and animal species became extinct. After each mass extinction, evolution has slowly filled in the gaps with new species.

The sixth mass extinction is happening now, but this time, the extinctions are not being caused by natural disasters; they are the work of humans. A team of researchers from Aarhus University and the University of Gothenburg has calculated that the extinctions are moving too rapidly for evolution to keep up.

Continue reading “Mammals cannot evolve fast enough to escape current extinction crisis” »

“Once such superhumans appear, there are going to be significant political problems with the unimproved humans, who won’t be able to compete,” suggests the late physicist and author Stephen Hawking in The Sunday Times. “Presumably, they will die out, or become unimportant. Instead, there will be a race of self-designing beings who are improving themselves at an ever-increasing rate. If the human race manages to redesign itself, it will probably spread out and colonize other planets and stars.”

Hawking has caused an uproar by suggesting a new race of superhumans could develop from wealthy people choosing to edit their DNA. “There is no time to wait for Darwinian evolution to make us more intelligent and better natured. But we are now entering a new phase of what might be called self-designed evolution, in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA. We have now mapped DNA, which means we have read “the book of life”, so we can start writing in corrections.”

Hawking, who died in March, presented the possibility that genetic engineering could create a new species of superhuman that could destroy the rest of humanity. The essays, published in the Sunday Times, were written in preparation for a book that will be published on Tuesday.

Continue reading “Stephen Hawking Predicted Race of ‘Superhumans’ –‘There Will be a Race of Self-Designing Beings’” »

By using the power of evolution to solve practical problems, three researchers opened new avenues to chemical discovery.

Only time will tell what new forms life will take.

Joyce seeks to understand life by trying to generate simple living systems in the lab. In doing so, he and other synthetic biologists bring new kinds of life into being. Every attempt to synthesize novel life forms points to the fact that there are still more, perhaps infinite, possibilities for how life could be. Synthetic biologists could change the way life evolves, or its capacity to evolve at all. Their work raises new questions about a definition of life based on evolution. How to categorize life that is redesigned, the product of a break in the chain of evolutionary descent?

An origin story for synthetic biology goes like this: in 1997, Drew Endy, one of the founders of synthetic biology and now a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University in California, was trying to create a computational model of the simplest life form he could find: the bacteriophage T7, a virus that infects E coli bacteria. A crystalline head atop spindly legs, it looks like a landing capsule touching down on the Moon as it grabs onto its bacterial host. The bacteriophage is so simple that by some definitions it is not even alive. (Like all viruses, it depends on the molecular machinery of its host cell to replicate.) Bacteriophage T7 has only 56 genes, and Endy thought it might be possible to create a model that accounted for every part of the phage and how those parts worked together: a perfect representation that would predict how the phage would change if any one of its genes were moved or deleted.

Continue reading “If We Made Life in a Lab, Would We Understand It Differently?” »

Scientists have discovered a new family of molecules that work together to precisely remove unwanted DNA during reproduction in single-celled, freshwater organisms called ciliates.

The discovery of these new molecules has profound implications for our understanding of the mechanism of gene removal (or ‘excision’) and rearrangement which plays a crucial role in the development and evolution of many species. The findings are published in eLife.

Transposons are pieces of DNA that move around in the genome, transported by enzymes called transposases that bind to them. As transposons jump around during evolution, host organisms can acquire the genes they carry and use them to gain new functions in a process known as domestication.

This video is the first in a two-part series discussing big data. In this video, we’ll be discussing the importance of data and the role, it has played in advancing humankind as well as the exponential rate of growth of data.

[0:29–4:19] — Starting off we’ll look at, how data has been used as a tool from the origins of human evolution, starting at the hunter-gatherer age and leading up to the present information age.

[4:19–7:48] — Following that we’ll discuss, the many statistics demonstrating the exponential rate of growth and future growth of data.

Continue reading “The Exponential Growth of Data” »

Christopher Benek “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” — Abraham Kuyper Christopher Benek Steve Nichols May I ask then — why are you in this group? Steve Nichols “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” I suspect Christian transhumanists of trying to infiltrate and subvert the wider radical futurist movement (evidenced by such quotes as above). I am here to provide balance and sanity. Christopher Benek Why Steve you don’t need to suspect it — I’ll affirm it. As a matter of fact it is part of the reason why I co-founded the CTA — to reclaim and redeem that which was what was falsely appropriated to begin with, that which is all of humanity’s divine vocation — not just as some “radical” group’s road to isolationist technological tyranny. In fairness though, I don’t think that Micah or I have ever denied that fact. And hey we welcome any accountability that you want to provide as long as that goes both ways. In short all we ask is that folks here genuinely and lovingly seek to play nice with others. Steve Nichols Christopher Benek having been involved with trans /posthuman movement since the 1980’s, Christians have hardly featured other than times such as when the Pope (no less) and other vocal Christians have condemned trans/ posthumans. You can hardly “reclaim” that of which Christianity was never a part, and in fact has mostly been (and remains on the whole) in opposition to. Since you welcome accountability, what authority do you have (other than tall tales in the bible) to claim determination of “all of humanity’s divine vocation”? I appreciate that I am a guest here, and always try to be polite. Christopher Benek Steve Nichols See assumptions on terminology is where we differ — I have contended — for quite some time now — “that the “trans” part of transhumanim doesn’t mean “post” but instead “across — the scope of what it might mean to be made human” which i think we are on the very front end of understanding. In that regard — all of the historic parts of the church — particularly those elements that were missionary in origin were taking, creating and using tech to help people throughout the world. In fact, the “tall tales” as you put it of the Bible (which by the way obviously weren’t written to be taken literally in all places — when Jesus says “I am the door” he doesn’t mean that literally) constantly talks about how God was instructing humans how to fashion and use tech to protect and improve relationships. I think that is a good guidepost for our future as well. Tech is deep in Christian history and its only since the false narratives of the like of the “New Atheists” (as if an actual atheist even exists) that anyone has questioned that… Yes, Christians don’t put tech (or anything) before God — but that doesn’t mean we don’t acknowledge its crucial importance as a hermeneutical and practical device for understanding and actually being human.” Since Benek reposts copies of his own discussions with Zoltan (and maybe others) on CTA list, he can have no objections to me reproducing his comments here.

A study published in Molecular Biology Evolution provides new insight into why humans are able to live as long as we do identifying a handful of genes that were so strongly conserved millions of years ago, that they continue to influence our lifespans today…

A study published in Molecular Biology Evolution provides new insight into why humans are able to live as long as we do identifying a handful of genes that were so strongly conserved millions of years ago, that they continue to influence our lifespans today…