Your Legacy: Biology or Society?

A hypothetical I've been toying with:
In some incredible and terrible contrivance of bad Science Fiction, an extra-terrestrial intelligence has decided to experiment with the next generation of two "lesser" species: humanity included. They will take the children of the first species from their parents at birth and deliver them to the second species to raise, while preventing the second species from reproducing. In this way, the biological legacy of one people will endure while their social legacy is lost and vice versa.

So which side of the exchange would you rather we be on?

I'd opt for raising the next generation with minimal hesitation. Personally, I'm not sure I feel any obligation to my genes or the genes of our species... and I'm sure that any computer at the functional level of the human brain could entertain the knowledge, belief and attitude by which I define myself. I find this mildly interesting; loyalty to my "memetics" has completely overcome loyalty to my genetics, and I feel pretty good about it.

I may have not read this right but I might have so...

Society. In terms of biological I assume you mean..well...biology. Appearance, genes, ect. Now, my reason for this is because I believe free thought is the one thing I would want to survive. I personally believe that free though, not the ability but the practice, carries on through society and not through genetics. I've heard some think differently, that is their right. So, if I boil it down to what I want to survive, appearance or culture, I say culture. Killer hypothetical though, I quite enjoyed it.

It would depend greatly on what this other species is like. I would want to know about things like the lifespan of the other species, intellectual capacity, susceptibility to disease, etc. as well as what this species' culture is like.

If I'm not able to know this information, then I would prefer to be the species which gets to continue to reproduce with the other species' culture, because we have so much war and greed and I would take the gamble that this other species would more than likely have a more peaceful culture and society, just since we are so unpeaceful. Although I suppose it could be possible that our war and greed is actually part of our nature and not our nurture... but I tend to think it's more a result of nurture.

It's an interesting idea, but I'm not at all convinced that the experiment you describe would have any real chance of working. In all likelihood, the non-human species would be sufficiently different from us that whichever one was chosen to carry on the biology would reject the society and culture of the other as incomprehensible and alien. Which would, of course, render the choice between the two entirely moot.

On the other hand, if we assume that this other species is similar enough to us that we can inherit each other's memes, the biology more or less ceases to be a distinguishing factor, and the choice is again made meaningless.


All of this implicitly assumes that our memetic "software" is tailored specifically to run on the "hardware" of the human brain, which I don't think is terribly unreasonable, but it's an assumption nonetheless.

I'm not particularly nostalgic for my genes, so I'd go with the "memetics"

although then I wouldn't be able to play the cello w/ out my special cello-playing genes.

=(