When discussing cognitive enhancement research as a potential EA cause area, a frequent counter-argument goes along the following lines:
"Higher cognitive performance is better. Thus, evolution already optimised for cognitive performance. Thus, it's unlikely that simple changes to brain chemistry could improve cognitive performance. Thus, cognitive enhancement research (and particularly research into nootropics) has low tractability."
I find the argument fairly weak for a number of reasons. Iodine supplementation seems to have worked great, and so does drinking coffee. But there are also some theoretical arguments. I was planning to write a short post but then I realised that Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg have already written about this.
They define three categories for how we might hope to improve on evolution's work:
- Changed tradeoffs: Evolution ‘‘designed’’ the system for operation in one type of environment, but now we wish to deploy it in a very different type of environment.
- Value discordance: There is a discrepancy between the standards by which evolution measured the quality of her work, and the standards that we wish to apply.
- Evolutionary restrictions. We have access to various tools, materials, and techniques that were unavailable to evolution.
My semi-educated guess is the arguments for either case are both weak at present. Its unknown. I'd say same for 'designer babies' and other reproductive technologies (which i hear advertized on the radio all the time--eg infertility clinics--mostly used by affluent people , and often womyn over age 40. In India they have 'baby farms'--eg people in USA hire some poor womyn in India to be a surrogate mother , so they don't have to deal with pregnancy --whcih they view as a chore--- because they want to keep their career but want a baby).