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I don't like the anthropomorphization of evolution. It's a bad angle to view the subject >If evolution is “searching” for that function by natural selection...
by lucio 10y ago
I don't like the anthropomorphization of evolution. It's a bad angle to view the subject
>If evolution is “searching” for that function by natural selection...
Evolution is "doing" nothing. It has no particular purpose and it is not "searching" for the particular life forms of this planet. The true shaper of the life-forms we know is death. Death (by resource starvation) is the knife cutting the uncontrolled growth of life, uncontrolled growth in number and variations.
- judahmeek 10y agoI agree. The difficulty people, including myself, have of realizing that evolution is actually a impersonal, negative process (resource starvation and the culling of the unfit) rather than a sentient, positive process is astounding.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoI'd say it's simple when you actually "step through" a few steps of a simplified simulation. On paper or in your head, picture a few critters reproducing and dying, with random feature changes occuring every reproduction step and with chance of death being directly tied to those features. Step a few generations and you can clearly see that what really drives the evolutionary process is the criterion you chose to determine which critters die and which survive. But yeah, I know most people have problem grokking processes like these. School definitely doesn't teach it - not in a proper, abstract, "algorithmic" way. Only with stories about butterflies and dinosaurs. I know I finally grokked evolution somewhere in my mid 20-s, after a) reading enough Less Wrong articles, and b) simulating it in my head, pretty much in the way I described above.