4 ms·
Evolution as optimization process has a lot of problems though. Most importantly, it's optimizing for fitness. As Richerson & Boyd memorably put it, "All animal
by bobcostas55 11y ago
Evolution as optimization process has a lot of problems though. Most importantly, it's optimizing for fitness. As Richerson & Boyd memorably put it, "All animals are under stringent selection pressure to be as stupid as they can get away with." Fitness is not necessarily something we're interested in.
Second, evolution is susceptible to getting caught in local maxima/minima. Though it's hard to argue that we could engineer ourselves to a higher peak, because we can't really see any other peaks at the moment.
- tdaltonc 11y agoThere are some obvious things to "fix" in humans if we knew how. The laryngeal nerve, the mechanics of birth, the growth rate of cartilage. Certainly it's possible to be hubristic here, but there's also just as clearly some things that need fixing.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoWe're not really in a peak or valley of any kind at the moment. If evolution pushed us to a zero-point in the derivative of any kind of imaginary fitness function, it was probably a saddle point in which some mutations fall right off and others could rise high but would require more environmental resources. But otherwise we should assume that zeroes in the derivative are uncommon, and thus we're probably not at one.
- bobcostas55 11y agoMy point is not that we're at the exact top, but that we might be near the top of a hill when there's a mountain next to it. Evolution isn't going to go down the hill to climb up the mountain, but an engineer might eventually be able to do it.