ops, yup, fixed link.
And wouldn’t you expect those fitness defects to evolve away over time reasonably well? Seems like the kind of thing that would be a ton of individually minor distributional shifts which would have normal selection gradients over them, if you had a decent population running for a while?
Plus now they don’t have to maintain their usual set of anti-viral defenses, which probably frees up a lot of novel design options, plus some genetic space and metabolic resources? I’d mostly expect that within a year or two of large-population (say a large scale commercial bioreactor) they strongly out-compete normal bacteria.
Mostly like the post, but;
strikes me as missing the fact that small donors can spend much more cognition evaluating per unit dollar and are less heavily optimized against, so there are many high EV opportunities which can ~only be picked up by small-scale donors. Especially within-network donations to support projects that are too early stage or speculative to pass grantmaker bars.