"The lesson is that Mother Nature know best. Or alternately, TANSTAAFL: 'there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.' Trade-offs are endemic in evolutionary biology. Often, if you use a drug or surgery to optimize something, you will discover penalties elsewhere. . . .
"In 'The Wisdom of Nature: An Evolutionary Heuristic for Human Enhancement' 12 (Human Enhancement 2008), Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg put this principle as a question or challenge, 'evolutionary optimality challenge' (EOC):
"If the proposed intervention would result in an enhancement, why have we not already evolved to be that way?"
The answer to the evolutionary optimality challenge (EOC) comes from any properly taught Biology 101 course: evolution is not a teleological process, and it neither seeks nor is driven by "enhancement," but results in haphazard adaptations of ancestral systems through stochastic survival of genes.
I will make the counterclaim here that it is by no means clear (and it is certainly not conclusively shown by any of the examples in the interesting submitted article) that anything that can properly be called "optimizing" of human beings or of humanity as a whole necessarily results in a "penalty."
The staggering additions to human well being (and to the number of living Homo sapiens individuals) as a result of cultural innovations around the globe look to be mostly gain with remarkably little pain. I can eat foods that are grown in environments I have never visited, use this Internet device to communicate with all of you, fly to places far away without sprouting wings, and learn the thoughts of deep thinkers who are long dead. The progress of humankind in the last few thousand years has been a story of casting off natural constraints.
I may have to use the full Hacker News editing time period for comments to "optimize" this reply some more after I spend some time with my family, so please don't penalize me yet for the brevity of this reply. Before someone builds a chain of conclusions based on a supposed natural law, to reach other conclusions, it is first necessary logically to demonstrate the truth of the claimed natural law. "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarkes_three_laws
Thanks for bringing up this topic of discussion.
First edit: I see another comment mentions group selection. That is not a widely accepted idea (as contrasted with kin selection) in evolutionary theory. See three recent posts (there are more where those came from) from Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True website:
24 June 2102 "The Demise of Group Selection"
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/06/24/the-demis...
26 June 2012 "Did human social behavior evolve via group selection? E. O. Wilson defends that view in the NYT"
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/did-human...
28 June 2012 "I (and others) comment on Steve Pinker’s discussion of group selection"
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/i-and-oth...
Oh, and since we are talking about human intelligence as a big part of the discussion here, I should mention the Wikipedia user bibliography "Intelligence Citations,"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...
a reference pathfinder that will always need more editing, as there is continually new research on this topic, but which already gathers many of the best monographs on the subject and some good review articles in one place.
Second edit: pjscott's thoughtful reply asks,
I don't think you've actually disagreed with the article. Did you read the 'Loopholes' section?
I've reread the article again, now that you've asked, and I think what I see here is a certain degree of rhetorical incoherence. I wouldn't compose an article this way if I wanted to make a tight argument, but perhaps the author desires to "essay," and try out ideas, and is still making up his own mind.
Anyway, based on the author's yeah-buts in some of the examples given after the "Loopholes" section of the article, and on the artitle's title, and on the first wave of comments received here on Hacker News, I have to take a stand and strenuously disagree with the idea that there is any "evolutionary optimality challenge (EOC)" to be met by human beings endeavoring to improve themselves, to improve human society, or to improve the world in general. There is plenty of scope for further optimization of individual human beings and of the human condition.