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I don't agree with this analogy though. Who's to say if life evolved on earth all over again, we'd end up in the exact same place? Sure, some of the same adap
by tps5 10y ago
I don't agree with this analogy though. Who's to say if life evolved on earth all over again, we'd end up in the exact same place? Sure, some of the same adaptations would re-emerge. But some might not. And there might be extraneous mutations that had no effect on fitness at all but drastically changed the appearance of some subset of species. If we assume true randomness is involved then we assume evolution itself is going to deliver non-deterministic results, don't we?
To put it in terms of genetic algorithms, we could run through N generations M different times and get different results each time.
To me that makes it seem like saying "randomness is an important aspect of evolution" isn't so far from the mark.
- gipp 10y agoWe absolutely wouldn't end up in the same place, simply because the state space of possible organisms and environments is astronomically larger than the space of possible dice rolls (his metaphor isn't perfect and I'm already straining it here). But we would be almost guaranteed to end up with organisms that have similar levels of complexity. Again, randomness is an important part of evolution, but there are also necessary deterministic aspects of it that make the "blind watchmaker" type arguments that started this discussion irrelevant.
- PetoU 10y agoaccording to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_biological_complexity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_biological_comp... Complexity argument is not valid. It's debatable at least. AFAIK it's part of the bigger discussion whether evolution has direction.
- sirclueless 10y agoThe basic argument made by the "random chance" commenter was not that evolution is a random process, but that it favors organisms with complex and interdependent gene expression, because this increases the rate at which random mutations cause differentiation.