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  Erik Orrje addressed criticism #2364.

Pure genetic knowledge could colonise the galaxy, it'd take much longer than with memes.

Deutsch disagrees. Quote:

The difference between biological evolution and human creative thought is that biological evolution is inherently limited in its range. That’s because biological evolution has no foresight. It can’t see a problem and conjecture a solution.

and quote:

The bombardier beetles squirt boiling water at their enemies. You can easily see that just squirting cold water at your enemies is not totally unhelpful. Then making it a bit hotter and a bit hotter. Squirting boiling water no doubt required many adaptations to make sure the beetle didn’t boil itself while it was making this boiling water. That happened because there was a sequence of steps in between, all of which were useful. But with campfires, it’s very hard to see how that could happen.

Humans have explanatory creativity. Once you have that, you can get to the moon. You can cause asteroids which are heading towards the earth to turn around and go away. Perhaps no other planet in the universe has that power, and it has it only because of the presence of explanatory creativity on it.

#2364·Benjamin Davies revised 7 days ago