Why would a civilization's biotechnology be far behind all its other technology?

Question

In the setting of a novella I am just beginning to write, computing and engineering are significantly ahead of our world, but biotechnology lags massively behind:

They have very efficient brain-computer interfaces and brain-controlled artificial limbs that are almost as good as the real thing, although as of the beginning of the story neither of these are widely used for nonmedical purposes. A midrange smartphone might have 16 gigabytes of RAM. A significant percentage of energy is produced by liquid fluoride thorium reactors, some of which are no bigger than a large car, and most space missions use rotating detonation rocket engines. Despite this, though, their biotechnology is extremely poor by the standards of 2020s humanity; It takes them months and the equivalent of thousands of dollars to sequence a person's genome, and their only means of modifying genes are expensive and likely to fail.

My question, then, is why is this? What reason could there be for a civilization's biotechnology to lag so far behind their computing and engineering, especially when better computing should only make the process of sequencing genomes easier?

For context, the society the story is set in is extremely multicultural and has a large atheist population and a strong separation of church and state, so any solution relying on cultural and/or religious taboos must explain why this is so universal as to encompass all major cultures and/or religions.

I could just vaguely say it just happened to turn out that way, but I'd like to avoid that if possible.

Answer 1

                              🎶 Different DNA 🎶

                                              (They don't understand you)

                  You're from a whole 'nother world

                                                                A different dimension...

Instead of making them worse at solving the problem, make the problem harder to solve.

More complex genome

In our world, the timeline of genome sequencing looks roughly like this (with many steps cut out):

1976:The first genome we sequenced was Bacteriophage MS2, with 1 chromosome and 3,569 base pairs, and only RNA.

1995: Twenty years later, we sequence Haemophilus influenza, with 1 chromosome and 1.8 million base pairs.

1995 We sequence the first animal, the Nematode, with 11-12 chromosomes and 100 million base pairs.

2003: (starting in 2001) Humans are fully sequenced, with 23 chromosomes and 3.2 billion base pairs.

2018: It took another decade and a half to nail wheat. That's right, one of the main staple foods of the world wasn't sequenced until four years ago. It has 16 billion base pairs, and 42 chromosomes (6 copies of 7).

Sequencing wheat took the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium 14 years, and to quote Kellye Eversole, who lead the project, “[It was a] miracle that we finished." Wheat is a pain in the ass for a number of reasons, including being a triple hybrid. Read more on that here, if you're curious.

And where there's wheat, there's flour. Wait, I mean, flower. As in, Paris japonica, with 149 billion base pairs.

Ten times that of wheat, 50 times more than humans. An amoeba, Polychaos dubium, allegedly has 670 billion base pairs (jury's still out).

So take a page out of these flowery, glutenous books. Make your genomes a nightmare to sequence. Duplicate chromosomes. Wheat is a hybrid of three species? Make your humanoids a hybrid of five. We know 150 billion base pairs is possible, so start there and work your way up if you want to get ambitious. How about 1 trillion?

To make it even harder if you want, at the cost of some plausibility, take away some stepping stones. Declare that there's no animal with less than a billion base pairs. That it's hard to scrounge up a bacteria with less than a million. That even your viruses don't really stray below 500,000.

And make all those genomes convoluted as well. We got off easy with our genome. Make it hard. Make them work for it. In your world, scientists living on a permanent moon base with a population measured in hundreds celebrate sequencing the first multi-celled eukaryote in 2050.

Answer 2

Your world isn't really all that behind in terms of biotechnology, so You don't need a huge push. Advanced cyborg components are already VERY sophisticated biotech (more advanced than today) so the answer can be as simple as priorities.

A Few (less) Good Men:

Your society has always put a higher value on information, since the days when ancient libraries WEREN'T burned for religious reasons. But if you took away a very small number of biology experts, and instead had their careers directed to the material sciences, then genetics could easily be behind the times. Something as simple as Mendel NOT doing his studies in genetics for a couple of centuries would put back much of biology by a large degree.

Secular Humanism as Faith:

Lack of religion leads people to yearn for a moral compass. A strong advocacy for universal ethical standards is codified, and experimentation on humans and animals is banned very early. Research involving experimental surgery and animal cruelty has a chilling effect, leading to delays in the study of medicine. The only exception to this is in the development of artificial limbs for the military hospitals (to aid amputees).

Rigid Scientific Thinking:

The standards of science are set very high early in history. While this works very well for science based on rigidly predictable laws (like physics and chemistry), the field of "natural philosophy" is viewed in the same light as shamanism and witchcraft. The stigma for biology is set very high, and it takes centuries for the field to gain acceptance.

Galen is Dogma:

Early in the history of medicine, Galen (or the local world equivalent) defines the field of medicine so thoroughly that everything he said becomes unquestionable. Anyone speaking out or challenging Galen's (very good) teachings is mocked and derided. Only Galen's teaching is all practical, not scientific (for question purposes). Given little need to understand WHY these practices work, they are followed to the letter for a LONG time. Why challenge what works?

Answer 3

...plastics.

Bear with me.

Some of the critical elements needed by biotechnology are in short supply on their planet. That could either be resources needed to conduct the research, or resources that would be needed to apply the knowledge that's gained (e.g. obstacles to mass production).

My first thought is plastics, for two reasons:

1. my understanding is that Earth's plastic historically comes from petroleum left over from past geological eras;
2. I've heard that hospitals will be especially hard-hit if Earth ever runs out of plastic (lots of medical equipment must be made of plastic)

So, it seems quite easy to reduce the amount of plastic available to them: assert that the history of life on their planet is such that there is very little petroleum from which to make plastic.

I would expect that to significantly delay the discovery/invention of plastic, since, as a layperson, it seems like modern non-petroleum plastics is a late development (i.e. less convenient to discover). Scientists might have to predict plastics, and then toil for generations to reach their plastic alternative.

And then I'd expect their biotech to be slow to take off, as plastic would be in short supply for a long time, and might still be scarce depending on what they need to make their plastic alternative.

This would have other big impacts to your story world. You casually mention a few kinds of modern electronics which contain plastic. Their versions would obviously have to be made with zero plastic to be consistent with the rest of their history.

Answer 4

Bureaucracy

Some of the technology is impossible without the furthering of biotechnology. That doesn't mean it's impossible. The Bureaucracy has hit biotechnology hard, causing the whole technology to even regress to an extremely poor standard dven for 2020.

The reason? Sometimes things just get complicated. In the interest of fairness (or self gain) politics sometimes make complex and ridiculous rules. Maybe people felt left behind if they wouldn't do anything with biotechnology, or felt it unfair that others could have it. Sometimes it's just not knowing any better. As I understand the American DMV, it's a bog of Bureaucracy. Yet everyone loves their cars so much that they can't think of any other way to live. The majority of Americans can't live without a car and can't imagine any scenario were they can live without it. To suggest something like a train for cheap short/medium/long distance mass transit is next to impossible. This you can see in their train network. It is a sad affair for 2000 standards, let alone 2020.

TL:DR: Sometimes it's just unfortunate circumstances and lack of progressive thinking. This can lead to neglect and a Bureaucracy that makes the whole area even regress.

Answer 5

Strong privacy concerns and strong anti-GMO sentiments.

A person's genes are considered to be their private property. Very few people would consent to having their DNA sequenced, and even fewer would want it published.

If there are also strong concerns about genetic modification leading to unforseen and unpredictable bad effects - perhaps some early, very popular science fiction vilified it, or made it horrific - then there could be a backlash of opinion against such technology. Indeed, if some nations outlawed tampering with the genetic makeup of living things, it would become not only unethical, but also illegal.

In such circumstances, genetic-based technology would be rare. It might occur only in countries where the triggering work of fiction had never reached, and those countries might be poor (not a significant enough market for the work of fiction to be worth translating into the local language) or have other traits that wouldn't discourage genetic research, like being a dictatorship/police state.

What scientists from a free, democratic nation would want to be seen to be involving themselves with a technology seen to be used by an oppressive regime to oppress their people and make biological weapons?

Additionally, as MrDracoSpirit has suggested in a comment, perhaps one of these less ethical nations practised a form of genetic modification and/or biological warfare during a historical war.

Answer 6

All research was military.

Much of our world's research has been military. In your world that has been taken to an extreme. Prosthetics, communications, energy tech, spacecraft and weapons all were developed out of a prolonged cold war that was a lot hotter in your world than ours.

Biotech does not have the same immediate application for military purposes and so biotech research lagged behind.

Answer 7

Politics

No need to imagine reasons, we had a very good example of this in the 20th century, where in the USSR, political influence and meddling managed to set the biological sciences back for quite a bit, possibly decades. All you need is the wrong person in a particular branch of science coming on top, supported either by the ruling class or ideology. This happened to a country with one of the highest levels of scientific and technological advancement at the time.

Progress in genetics and evolutionary biology in the young Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was hindered in the 1930s by the agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who believed that acquired traits are inherited, claimed that heredity can be changed by “educating” plants, and denied the existence of genes. Lysenko was supported by Communist Party elites. Lysenko termed his set of ideas and agricultural techniques “Michurinism,” after the name of the plant breeder Ivan Michurin, but they are currently known as Lysenkoism. Although Michurinism opposed biological science, Lysenko took up one academic position after another. In 1929, Nikolai Vavilov founded the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences and became its head; it directed the development of sciences underpinning plant and animal breeding in the Soviet Union. Vavilov was dismissed in 1935 and later died in prison, while Lysenko occupied his position. The triumph of Lysenkoism became complete and genetics was fully defeated in August 1948 at a session of the academy headed by Lysenko. The session was personally directed by Joseph Stalin and marked the USSR’s commitment to developing a national science, separated from the global scientific community. As a result, substantial losses occurred in Soviet agriculture, genetics, evolutionary theory, and molecular biology, and the transmission of scientific values and traditions between generations was interrupted.

Source: https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/212/1/1/6087971

Answer 8

Vacuum tubes don't work well.

To study DNA you need xrays, which need vacuum tubes. Some invasive microorganism damages most of the common seals for vacuum tubes, so it's very hard to make an electron microscope or x-rays and study DNA.

They found ways to develop computers that didn't rely on such things, but never caught up with biotechnology. They've only recently developed techniques to produce vacuums, and they're pretty spotty.

Answer 9

Here are a few reasons why I think biotechnology would lag behind.

1 Computer Technology Advanced so Fast Other Fields Stagnated

Technology in other areas such as computer technology has picked up speed so fast that there is little if any time or research devoted to other fields.

When technology grows, it does so at an exponential rate. Faster computers are able to use their better processing power to make even stronger computers than before. Perhaps, in this world, computer technology grew at such an exponential rate that it overtook all other industries. In fact, what if technology grew so fast that people are no longer needed for the process anymore.

AI is so advanced that there is no need for humans in the process anymore. The AI makes more computers and more advanced AI, so those can then make even more advanced AI.

Why would artificial intelligence care about learning more about biology when it can focus on making more powerful and intelligent versions of itself? The AI in charge of research is sentient enough that it does not care about biology. t refuses to teach the people anything about it and refuses to let anyone learn about it.

Because of this, technology has developed to only be focused on artificial design and nothing biological.

2 Greed of Certain Corporations

If you don't have a slightly malicious AI roaming about to keep people from making biotech, simply have some sort of rich corporation keeping people from doing it.

The layout of this world has all the technology development run by one or more major corporations that have a tight stranglehold on what can or cannot be produced. They specialize in making computers and other similar devices, and they view any firm that does not fall in line with their designs gets scrapped because it is viewed as competition.

Why let medical research advance when you can continue to let people pay exorbitant prices for procedures that would be super simple in our world? Sure, the computers are powerful enough that the rich people could theoretically heal themselves or get fancy prosthetics, but the poor people are never going to get their hands on that stuff. Money is a key motivator. If the rich believe they can make more money by halting the advancement of biotechnology, then they will and no one will be able to stop them.

Also, the corporations only want people to be part of their development teams. They don't want people researching something that won't profit them, so they just train people from a young age to only care about computer science. Any textbooks on biotechnology are censored or simply destroyed and anyone that tries to talk about it or research it gets silenced or at the very least paid off to not speak about their findings. That way the computer manufacturers eliminate what they see as competition and keep the best goods for themselves.

3 There was a Horrible War Using Biotechnology

In the past, biotechnology was incredibly advanced. It was used to make horrible toxins that wiped out entire cities in seconds and monsters that only deserve to exist in nightmares. The war that inspired the creation of these terrors nearly wiped out everyone, so the frightened people did their best to rebuild after everything was over, and, years later, we get to how the world is now.

Knowledge of biotechnology no longer exists for two reasons. On one hand, a lot of the progress was lost from the war. Leading biologists were killed by their own creations and most of their research was destroyed.

Also, the current regime refuses to let anyone learn the secrets of the war. Biotechnology is a taboo subject because it brings up the terrors of the time in the past. The regime destroys any mention of the technology that caused the war, along with any biology textbooks. Biology is no longer taught in schools, or at least only at a basic level. Kids aren't even taught what a cell is anymore. As the generations go by, it goes from willful ignorance to people being genuinely illiterate in the field of biology. Even the elites hiding this knowledge don't really get it anymore. Ask a person what DNA is and they give you a weird look. They have no clue, because that's how repressed knowledge has become.

Answer 10

A history of war

We used to have far superior biotechnology, god-like even. But the Clone War ended that: Rebels started modifying their genome and made themselves super soldiers. Bullet-resistant, stronger, faster they were unstoppable at first. The government responded in turn and upped the ante — rapid aging, vat-produced super soldiers. The Rebels followed in turn and started producing vicious killing beasts that ground the war to a stand-still. Looking to break the stalemate, the government released airborne clone-RNA destroying chemicals that, coincidently, sterilized a generation of the globe. Genetically unmodified forces were able easily overtake any lingering opposition, but at what cost? As a result, the government has taken draconian stances on any biotechnology: highly regulated, controlled, and reported they won't allow unchecked use of biotech — that includes the most basic DNA sequencing.

Answer 11

The simplest answer is the same reason why our blimp technology is so far behind other forms of travel: there was some sort of horrible disaster in the early days of working with that technology, and either government, or everyone, just decided it wasn't worth the risk to mess with it.

It could have been some sort of enhanced-function plague (no politics, please -- it's just the first thing to come to mind) or whatever you can dream up.

Answer 12

Genetics is considered a “Nazi” science.

This world used to be on a trajectory towards advanced biotech. But then one political leader, an analogue of Adolf Hitler, realized that gene sequencing could be used to help discriminate between “worthy” (“Aryan”) and “unworthy” (“inferior” races and carriers of genetic diseases) people. His regime heavily funded a human(oid) genome project, with the explicit intent of using it for a eugenics program. It does some legitimate science, but also a bunch of pseudoscience, cherry-picking data to link the Untermenschen to “less evolved” species.

To top it off, the first well-known genetically-modified organism is a biological weapon: A virus specifically designed for members of the “master race” to be immune from it while others are vulnerable. Within a few years, it kills a hundred million people.

At the conclusion of this world's equivalent of WW2, the regime's leading geneticists are executed for war crimes. Their documents are destroyed.

From then on, genetics is heavily stigmatized, associated with eugenics and genocide. Many countries outright ban gene sequencing. Universities shut down entire biology departments. The intellectual class focuses on building computers instead (hence that area of technology being further ahead). Anyone who wants to study DNA is seen as having questionable motives.

Answer 13

Religion (and it nearly happened here)

A really simple way for this to be stopped is if your religion forbids crossbreeding. This actually happened here on Earth with Christianity, but it was stopped first by profits and then by secular humanism.

The first prerequisite for biotechnology is knowing about the effects of interbreeding, crossbreeding, and heredity generally. Modern breeds of animals were developed by selectively breeding parent animals with their children to preserve and amplify desired characteristics, as well as selectively breeding with animals from other families for their characteristics. This was massively opposed at the time by the Church and by lay Christians, because this is obviously animal incest, but the results of vastly better sheep and cattle made the profits inarguable. Eventually Christians settled down and decided they could live with it.

It's not a coincidence that this happened after the Catholic Church had lost much of its power in Europe. If your world is still in the grip of an oppressive theocracy, you're going to find that your choices of what science is and isn't permitted is very seriously limited (at least if you want to live).

The next milestone of course is genetics and in particular genetic modification. This has been and is still being protested by Christian groups in the US and elsewhere.. Some object to combining genetic material from different species, a prohibition which is pretty clear in their Bible quote. Some don't mind this with animals, but object to anything involving human tissue. Some particularly object to anything at all involving human foetuses (including IVF) because they believe that a fertilised embryo has a soul and letting an embryo die is murder. All these are beliefs drawn from religious texts and not from empirical evidence, of course, but it's important to say that they are genuinely and honestly held by their adherents.

If you want biotechnology to be held back, it's pretty simple - all you need is for these groups to be the majority, or at least a very significant minority. These days you wouldn't get burned at the stake, but laws would prevent you starting that kind of research. And since religion crosses national boundaries, it's likely that most countries following that religion would have similar laws in that regard.

Fortunately for us, secular humanism has made these people the minority today, so we do have the biotechnology we have today. Very Fortunately in fact, because otherwise we would have no vaccines against Covid-19.

Answer 14

Reminds me a bit of Star Surgeon where all the races in the galaxy except humans have almost no medical science. It's not really explained why though.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18492

Answer 15

A combination of factors:

• High reproductive rate and less fear of death. In their culture they are so used to a fast cycle of life and death that did not put a lot of effort in developing medicine.

• Good eyesight. If they have problems, deformities, illnesses they rarely affect the eyes. Since the initial trigger for developing the lenses was missing microscopes were developed much later and their technological development took a different path.

• Some advancements were acquired by trading. They actually are not the authors of all their advancements, they got to that point thanks to trading with another civilization, it might be an extinct one or coming from another planet to buy something they missed (might be Uranium).

Answer 16

Monopolization

While your alien race was just a little ahead of our current stage of development, there were two competing factions in the field of medical science. One faction wanted to use cybernetics as the foundation of medical science, the other wanted to use biochemistry. If you lose a body part, do you grow a new one or replace it with a mechanical one. If you get cancer, do you treat it with chemo, or send a swarm of nanobots to break it apart. Do you get a new flu/covid vaccine every year or do you install an infer-red sterilization devices in your respiratory tract?

These are all judgement calls where both methods seem perfectly capable of meeting the demands of the medical industry, but in some cases cybernetics might be preferred, and in others biochemistry might be preferred... but from the perspective of the Cybertech's CEO, cybertechnology is always the preferred method. Instead of letting the best method shake out for each possible procedure, and risking the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in RnD and future market shares, Cybertech did what any reasonable megacorporation would do. The bought out thier competition.

It started off by attacking supply chains: The bought out the smaller companies that produced gene sequencing and other advanced biochemical tech. They intentionally hiked up prices, reduced quality, and discontinued products making doing any work in the field of biochemistry far more difficult. Then they started acquiring patent rights on key biochemicals so they could prevent them from being used at all forcing the biotech firms to keep halting production and going back and doing RnD to find new ways of doing old things. Then finally when the really big biochemical companies were nice and destabilized, they bought those out too.

With full control of the medical industry, Cybertech has no interest anymore in maintaining 2 means to the same end; so, they discontinue all biochemical RnD for anything that they want to achieve with cybernetics instead.

But it's not enough to just acquire these intellectual property rights, you must convince the public that biochemistry is expensive and dangerous if you want to keep new biochemistry firms from constantly popping up to challenge your dominance. So, they makes sure that gene mapping technology is still available through them instead of completely cutting it off.

If you need a genome mapped, just send it to Cybertech, and for a modest fee of many thousands of dollars, you will get your results back in a few months... sure Cybertech could offer same day sequencing for 50 bucks a pop, if they wanted too, but fast/cheap biome sequencing would encourage competition; so, they don't do that. By keeping it available, and only slightly better than what upstarts can prototype, you can keep upstarts for getting enough footing to build up to better methods than you offer.

And for "modifying genes are expensive and likely to fail", this is intentional too. They WANT people to fear gene modification; so, they make available the worst possible techs that can pass legal safety regulations. If a gene modification method you offer has a 30% failure rate and tons of side effects, but you have another method with a 5% failure rate and fewer side effects that you suppress, then the public image of gene modification is that it is unreliable and dangerous, because those are the results they see.

Answer 17

Q: "Despite this, though, their biotechnology is extremely poor by the standards of 2020s humanity; It takes them months and the equivalent of thousands of dollars to sequence a person's genome, and their only means of modifying genes are expensive and likely to fail."

Healthy people and early development of agriculture.

Some reasons for genome sequencing can be found here,

https://www.genengnews.com/insights/6-applications-for-whole-genome-sequencing/

Six medical applications of genome sequencing, one agricultural. Now suppose these six reasons are very rare and your folks don't need applied genetics in other fields either, like agriculture.

They don't need results quickly

Some nerds know how to sequence DNA.. but it will cost them days and they use optical methods and have little knowledge of advanced applications of the CGAT sequences they find, or the molecules that can be produced with these. This is because there's little interest in biochemistry details.. it's like origami, a nice puzzle. Hobby work.

Healthy

Agriculture has been perfected, it happened to start early: after 35,000 years of experience, that is 20,000 more than us humble peasants on Earth, this planet has all the fruits and healthy cuisine humans need. It happens to be quite comfortable.. there isn't much illness, the climate is perfect, sea water everywhere, no UV or other harmful radiation, no cigarettes, no booze, no gasoline, there's plenty of wind and sun for energy.. and there's sports, and Tai Chi gymnastics for the elderly.. and this is a very open-minded society of hedonists: everyone is entitled to a peaceful end, as off 66 years, 4 months and 17 days of age. People never die, without a goodbye party.

Short answer: believe it or not, these folks hardly need advanced medicine. So medicine and biochemistry lags behind.

You can always repair people

If there's an accident or some organ failed, mechanic ingenuity will step in: your people can replace most parts of the human body. The nervous system is very well known.. they may know less about molecules than 6th graders, but they are very advanced in medical devices. If you need an arm, or loose a few fingers, there will be a suitable replacement. If you need to temporarily reinforce body parts, like for offshore work, or 80+ holiday adventures in the mountains, you can hire electric limbs.

Aspirine beans

Their limited knowledge of biochemistry prevents them from researching advanced medicine, but the basics of pharmaceutics exist: like aspirine, pain killers, penicilline, various antibiotics and various other common medicin. They know vitamins are healthy.. but their secret is: they don't need to analyse or synthesize the molecules! Plants can do that for them. They know how to let plants do that, for 4000 years already. Some medicines are really old, like aspirine beans..

Answer 18

Flesh is weak (and organic)

If they are so advanced in technological fields maybe there is a general consensus on how unreliable organic things are. They have a serious lack of repetitivity, why would someone invest in a think that can work today and fail tomorrow if we could invest in a machine that will do it better.

So its not that they would not be able to secuense genoma fast if they put their minds to it, its just that noone ever though about investing a dime in it, as it was better to develop night vision glases, more eficient farms, stronger exoesqueletons, etc.

Answer 19

Biological Monoculture

Look to the benefits and flaws exposed in the banana industry. A monoculture has the advantage of spreading very quickly and in a reasonably static and safe environment would not have to keep backup DNA chains and legacy items found in most Earth organisms. It's apparent simplicity might make it commonly accepted that there is not much benefit to researching it.

In other thoughts: What is pushing the culture to evolve? Generally speaking nothing changes unless there is an advantage or at least no disadvantage. If there is no reason to evolve bio-tech as a chemical research tree then it probably wont happen. One such culture might occur when there are few or no diseases / genetic abnormalities due to past genecide or long-term eugenics policies. Why would mech-tech be used would then be the question of how it started and where the advantage comes from in the early stages.

Answer 20

They don't have RNA and DNA

Abiogenesis on their planet took a completely different path. Inheritance is encoded in a biochemical network which is many orders of complexity greater than our simple linear chain of base-pairs coding for amino-acids. Theirs, is more like the way memories are stored in a primitive brain. Or perhaps, something you could derive from mathematical graph theory, after getting a masters in that field of mathematics. It's an emergent property, not a defined one.

This makes it possible to reconcile a high level of ability to interface electronics to brains (high-level interfacing) with an extreme lack of progress in manipulation of the low-level processes of cellular(?) biology and inheritance. (Do they even have cells? Maybe, highly advanced slime moulds, or something more completely alien with a network of adaptation and inheritance spread as a network throughout the entire organisam, not replicated in billions of cells)

Its also likely that if their biochemistry works in this way, Lamarck was right on their world, and acquired characteristics are strongly inheritable. This may have steered research down different corridors which miss the whole picture. Or it may have triggered extreme conflict on the ethical front back in their middle ages or 19th Century. (Creation of optimized soldiers by child abuse and Lamarckian breeding programmes? Yuk! )

Earthnote: we are starting to discover that the trees and fungal life in a forest form some sort of network like this. Something that happens in one part of the forest, gets communicated to another, and there is adaptation, but on a long timescale measured in months or years.