Consider the category of spandrel. A spandrel is something that results from the process of evolution, but itself carries no evolutionary benefit, and may even carry a detriment. Nipples are sometimes an adaptation (when present in women) but sometimes a spandrel (when present in men). Similarly, morality is sometimes adaptive and sometimes a spandrel.
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Now, we have the prospect of stopping natural selection forever and designing our own future. The spandrel has the possibility of devouring natural selection – the optimizing God that created it. Designing societies, redesigning ourselves biologically, augmenting ourselves, defeating death and illness, and creating a world in which our highest values – truth, beauty, and the good – the ones so often thwarted by natural selection and necessity, reign. Both technological, ethical, and political achievements and revolutions will be necessary for this, but if we succeed, the spandrel will emerge as the new governing principle of our bit of the universe.
Here is a related post.
Nehaveigur 
2 responses to “We’re Free”
[…] Yesterday’s post was an extensive quote from another blog arguing that we’re free, to a large degree, to choose what humanity looks like in the long term. When we talk imagine what society 100 years from now may be like, we’re too often either just extrapolating from what it is like now, or we imagine a dystopia inspired by our past. We’re far from having imagined all the different way in which humanity may evolve. […]
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[…] we’re theoretically free, there is some empirical evidence that we’re not in practice. I don’t know if the […]
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