7 ms·

Life may be getting better at evolving

69 points by sonabinu 10y ago

M_Grey 10y ago
"The big challenge for Watson's hypothesis is whether any empirical evidence for it can be found in nature" Bit of a sticking point, and what follows is less than convincing. This feels like the biological equivalent of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology; a neat idea, that seems to be pretty disconnected from reality.
onychomys 10y ago
tl;dr - Computer scientist discovers that selection happens at the organismal level, bringing his understanding of the subject to very nearly what a third year undergrad has.
- grzm 10y ago
  Substantive criticism is always useful, though snarky tldrs generally lack the substance. What points in particular do you find egregious?
amelius 10y ago
I think that with all the medical aids (for instance, glasses), life may actually get worse at evolving. Unless, of course, you consider those aids as part of the system.
- LeanderK 10y ago
  i have also thought about that, but i think they are perfectly valid parts of the system. For example thanks to vaccines etc. we accelerated immunity drastically. Diseases also spread faster, but until now have been winning quite easily. And we haven't really started to directly improve ourselves. If you look at this from the perspective of evolution (where 1000 years are not a lot) it seems we are very, very close to achieving this. I would guess this will accelerate Adaptation by some magnitudes.
- hasenj 10y ago
  I think the same applies to eating. Since we can eat, we don't have to produce energy using sunlight like plants do. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
  - trentmb 10y ago
    Considering there are plants that also eat, it can't be too bad.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    A plant has to collect sunshine for a whole season to produce a couple of fruiting bodies that you can eat in minutes. I'd say heterotrophy wins.
    - badosu 10y ago
      Well, if you think that a plant only produces fruits for animals to spread seeds...
      - adrianN 10y ago
        The ultimate evolutionary strategy: by tasty to a lifeform that has discovered agriculture.
- bitJericho 10y ago
  Of course those aids are part of the system. We would not have evolved to use tools if it was not advantageous. Hopefully it stays advantageous!
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- laythea 10y ago
  There are arguments both ways, but I disagree with others here - namely, that these, and therefore anything created by humanity, can be considered part of the system. For example, you could then go on to say that medicines also form part of the system since we invented them. But then the conclusion of such a discussion would not involve our natural & unconscious attributes (in this case, our natural ability to fight of disease), which surely are the things that more define us (evolutionary) than individual acts (eg. Invent a medicine). I say define us more, due to this: If 2 babies are born identical, with identical potential for/intelligence, and 1 of them does not end up being nurtured etc, then even those 2 humans are completely different individuals at age 50, at age 0, it would be reasonable to say that they are evolutionary identical (however, it would open to debate if those two 50 year old individuals could be called evolutionary equal). The "act" in this case would be "nurturing that intelligence". So in my opinion, there is such a thing as "peak humanity". The point at which we make life so easy for ourselves, that we start to erode the very evolutionary qualities that define us, evolutionary speaking. Case in point - me sitting typing at a computer 8hrs+ per day, rather than out hunting for food. This has had catastrophic negative effects on my health and who knows if any of that was passed down to my sons sons sons sons....I (and they) will never know because evolution works on scale we cannot fathom. And even if we could capture the delta, we have no means of measuring it.
- 3pt14159 10y ago
  It's the opposite, actually. With less selective pressure on good eyesight the selective pressure on having nice hair or a charming manner is more pronounced. Same reason why all the fish at the bottom of the ocean are blind.
- pklausler 10y ago
  I know of only one species that wears glasses.
- bmuon 10y ago
  You seem to be talking about humans, not life in general. Human evolution still happens, but selection is not based on adaptability but on societal rules. And then we're going to start messing with our own genes and things will get more complicated.
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  I think the part that the other replies miss so far is that you can treat genes as a form of information transfer, and that we've taken information transfer through cultural means to a completely different level. And that this has two effects: 1: It removes the need for saving a lot of information in the gene. I remember reading as a kid that in many ways mammals have a vastly simplified genome compared to amphibians. Why? Because we only need to encode enzymes that work for a small range of temperatures, whereas amphibians need to be much more adaptable. I think human culture could have a similar simplification effect on our genome. 2: Our evolution is no longer bound to our genes We can adapt faster than genetic mutation, and you could consider that cultural adaptability a form evolvability as well. We're basically the first "general purpose" species! 3: Being a social species (a fundamental part of being cultural) encourages diversification Imagine a sports event where there are five completely different types of individual sports being played. Now let's say peak performance is defined as how good you can get by spending 100% of your training time on it, and that the Pareto Principle applies in the sense that you can reach 80% of peak performance in one sport by spending 20% of your training time on it. Not an unrealistic scenario, right? People also join in teams of ten. Now imagine two ways of how those teams are graded: the first sums up the average performance of the team per sport, the second sums up the best individual performance per sport. In the first case, the optimal strategy is having allrounders. In the second case, the optimal strategy (assuming nobody gets injuries) is to have one specialist per sport. What I'm saying is that being social species means our selection pressure leans towards the second situation: we collaborate, so any group is as best, as its best individual specialists working together. Meaning human groups have selection pressure towards specialisation, and thus diversification.
- mrfusion 10y ago
  I see things like glasses as making the fitness landscape smaller. This means there are less dimensions evolution has to solve for to produce better organisms. (Or like you said, it's part of the system)
blueprint 10y ago
Except for the whole development of science and technology apparently inevitably leading to the destruction of the balance in life's environment thing and its subsequent (temporary?) extinction. Will humans ever be able to escape this planet?
- crpatino 10y ago
  Probably not, but don't worry. Our ability to destroy the world is greatly exagerated. I don't think we will even manage to get ourselves extinct, though a great deal of needless suffering is pretty much innevitable at this point.
Houshalter 10y ago
The reverse happens as well. Consider DNA repair. Evolution requires a certain level of mutation in order to work. If a species evolves perfect DNA repair mechanisms, then it will stop evolving and eventually go extinct. However on an individual level, DNA repair is highly selected for. Any individual with lower mutation rates is much less likely to die of cancer. Much less likely to have offspring with harmful genetic disorders. After all, the vast majority of mutations are either neutral or harmful, not beneficial. So individuals with the repair gene will tend to have more successful offspring than organisms without, and the frequency of the gene will increase. Most genes that could improve evolution itself are not selected for. Individual fitness matters, not group fitness. There are other ways evolution hurts itself. For instance there is a condition in mice that lives on the male chromosome. It causes all of it's offspring to be male. So all of them also carry this condition. Thus the condition spreads itself twice as much as the competing genes. And so it quickly fixes itself in the population and then there are no more females.
- blacksmith_tb 10y ago
  D. radiodurans has evolved something close to 'perfect DNA repair mechanisms' without becoming extinct [1] I would say the heightened risk of extinction relies on the assumption that the environment will change and the organism will not be able to adapt (without mutations). But for many bacteria, that seems unlikely to occur. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans#Ionizing-radiation_resistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans#Ionizi...
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    That is very interesting. Although there are more sources of mutation than just radiation.
  - webmaven 10y ago
    We've observed in the lab that in bacteria harmful changes in the environment increase the number of mutations. Further, we've observed that in many cases the mutations tend to be in the genes that are most closely related to the change. That is, if the PH drops to the point it is causing mutations, many bacteria will tend to get those mutations in genes that are likely to increase tolerance for acidity! Now that is what I call evolved evolvability.
duncancarroll 10y ago
Neat idea. The fulltext is paywalled but one thing I'm curious about is where exactly the "strength of connectivity" would be stored within the chromosome?
js8 10y ago
A similar idea comes from Daniel Dennett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZefk4gzQt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZefk4gzQt4 If we consider cultural (memetic) evolution as a type of evolution, then the answer is YES!
sonabinu 10y ago
There is some similarity in the work by Leslie Valiant where he uses an “ecorithm” approach uses computational concepts to explore fundamental mysteries of evolution and the mind. Incidentally, he is the man behind PAC ;) https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160128-ecorithm-computers-and-life/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160128-ecorithm-computers-a...
leggomylibro 10y ago
Do you want shoggoths? Because this is how you wind up with shoggoths. Seriously though, if the trend of species 'remembering' old genes and becoming more agile in throwing them into the mix continues, could we wind up with monstrous horripilating beasts capable of directing their own morphology? Or as Lovecraft put it, "It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter."
- gliese1337 10y ago
  Probably not. At least, not in "real-time". It makes for good horror and sci-fi, but in reality the energy costs of constantly reforming yourself like that would be, shall we say, prohibitive. (Incidentally, at the risk of slight spoilers, this is an issue that is addressed, if slightly obliquely, in Michaelbrent Colling's horror novel _The Loon_.) There are plenty of organisms that have extremely free body plans that can be altered as they grow, however (notably, most plants and fungi), so it's less of a stretch to imagine a creature that could consciously direct changes in its own morphology over long periods of time- equivalent to how long it would take the new structures to grow anyway, if they were a set part of a normal animal's morphology.
- syntheticnature 10y ago
  Horripilation refers to hair bristling, or more colloquially, goose bumps. So beasts with... goose bumps?
alexose 10y ago
This "meta game" was my absolute favorite epiphany as a biology undergrad! Genomes evolve in ways that allow beneficial mutations in the future-- And genes aren't so much randomly scattered in chromosomes as much as they are grouped in ways that maximize useful insertions/deletions/frameshifts. Evolution has its hands on so many different biological processes, including itself. Nature is astounding.
- astrodust 10y ago
  Yeah, even evolution is evolving. We like to think of ourselves as highly evolved, but honestly, we're still extremely primitive compared to what life could be given another two or three billion years to play out.
  - felipemnoa 10y ago
    Unfortunately life does not have that long [1]. A billion years at best. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Future_of_the_Earth.2C_the_Solar_System_and_the_Universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Fut...
    - AstralStorm 10y ago
      Unless you mean elsewhere than on Earth. That would also put different pressures on it too.
    - astrodust 10y ago
      You're presuming that life doesn't evolve to the point where it can escape this planet and move to other ones. Even if we have a horrible nuclear war that kills all humans it will only take 100-200 million years for another highly intelligent species to come back and take over again. We've got around five kicks at the can before it's too late.
  - Arizhel 10y ago
    Or, perhaps, in 1 million years, humans will evolve to be significantly less-intelligent aquatic animals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_%28novel%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_%28novel%29
webmaven 10y ago
This was one of the key insights I got from the book "The Plausibility of Life". The authors describe several mechanisms beyond genetics, primarily developmental, that make organisms more evolvable and help improve the odds that random mutations will be at least interesting, rather than immediately fatal.

69 points by sonabinu 10y ago

"The big challenge for Watson's hypothesis is whether any empirical evidence for it can be found in nature" Bit of a sticking point, and what follows is less than convincing. This feels like the biological equivalent of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology; a neat idea, that seems to be pretty disconnected from reality.

onychomys 10y ago

tl;dr - Computer scientist discovers that selection happens at the organismal level, bringing his understanding of the subject to very nearly what a third year undergrad has.

grzm 10y ago
Substantive criticism is always useful, though snarky tldrs generally lack the substance. What points in particular do you find egregious?

amelius 10y ago

I think that with all the medical aids (for instance, glasses), life may actually get worse at evolving. Unless, of course, you consider those aids as part of the system.

LeanderK 10y ago
i have also thought about that, but i think they are perfectly valid parts of the system. For example thanks to vaccines etc. we accelerated immunity drastically. Diseases also spread faster, but until now have been winning quite easily. And we haven't really started to directly improve ourselves. If you look at this from the perspective of evolution (where 1000 years are not a lot) it seems we are very, very close to achieving this. I would guess this will accelerate Adaptation by some magnitudes.
hasenj 10y ago
I think the same applies to eating. Since we can eat, we don't have to produce energy using sunlight like plants do. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
- trentmb 10y ago
  Considering there are plants that also eat, it can't be too bad.
- adrianN 10y ago
  A plant has to collect sunshine for a whole season to produce a couple of fruiting bodies that you can eat in minutes. I'd say heterotrophy wins.
  - badosu 10y ago
    Well, if you think that a plant only produces fruits for animals to spread seeds...
    - adrianN 10y ago
      The ultimate evolutionary strategy: by tasty to a lifeform that has discovered agriculture.
bitJericho 10y ago
Of course those aids are part of the system. We would not have evolved to use tools if it was not advantageous. Hopefully it stays advantageous!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
laythea 10y ago
There are arguments both ways, but I disagree with others here - namely, that these, and therefore anything created by humanity, can be considered part of the system. For example, you could then go on to say that medicines also form part of the system since we invented them. But then the conclusion of such a discussion would not involve our natural & unconscious attributes (in this case, our natural ability to fight of disease), which surely are the things that more define us (evolutionary) than individual acts (eg. Invent a medicine). I say define us more, due to this: If 2 babies are born identical, with identical potential for/intelligence, and 1 of them does not end up being nurtured etc, then even those 2 humans are completely different individuals at age 50, at age 0, it would be reasonable to say that they are evolutionary identical (however, it would open to debate if those two 50 year old individuals could be called evolutionary equal). The "act" in this case would be "nurturing that intelligence". So in my opinion, there is such a thing as "peak humanity". The point at which we make life so easy for ourselves, that we start to erode the very evolutionary qualities that define us, evolutionary speaking. Case in point - me sitting typing at a computer 8hrs+ per day, rather than out hunting for food. This has had catastrophic negative effects on my health and who knows if any of that was passed down to my sons sons sons sons....I (and they) will never know because evolution works on scale we cannot fathom. And even if we could capture the delta, we have no means of measuring it.
3pt14159 10y ago
It's the opposite, actually. With less selective pressure on good eyesight the selective pressure on having nice hair or a charming manner is more pronounced. Same reason why all the fish at the bottom of the ocean are blind.
pklausler 10y ago
I know of only one species that wears glasses.
bmuon 10y ago
You seem to be talking about humans, not life in general. Human evolution still happens, but selection is not based on adaptability but on societal rules. And then we're going to start messing with our own genes and things will get more complicated.
vanderZwan 10y ago
I think the part that the other replies miss so far is that you can treat genes as a form of information transfer, and that we've taken information transfer through cultural means to a completely different level. And that this has two effects: 1: It removes the need for saving a lot of information in the gene. I remember reading as a kid that in many ways mammals have a vastly simplified genome compared to amphibians. Why? Because we only need to encode enzymes that work for a small range of temperatures, whereas amphibians need to be much more adaptable. I think human culture could have a similar simplification effect on our genome. 2: Our evolution is no longer bound to our genes We can adapt faster than genetic mutation, and you could consider that cultural adaptability a form evolvability as well. We're basically the first "general purpose" species! 3: Being a social species (a fundamental part of being cultural) encourages diversification Imagine a sports event where there are five completely different types of individual sports being played. Now let's say peak performance is defined as how good you can get by spending 100% of your training time on it, and that the Pareto Principle applies in the sense that you can reach 80% of peak performance in one sport by spending 20% of your training time on it. Not an unrealistic scenario, right? People also join in teams of ten. Now imagine two ways of how those teams are graded: the first sums up the average performance of the team per sport, the second sums up the best individual performance per sport. In the first case, the optimal strategy is having allrounders. In the second case, the optimal strategy (assuming nobody gets injuries) is to have one specialist per sport. What I'm saying is that being social species means our selection pressure leans towards the second situation: we collaborate, so any group is as best, as its best individual specialists working together. Meaning human groups have selection pressure towards specialisation, and thus diversification.
mrfusion 10y ago
I see things like glasses as making the fitness landscape smaller. This means there are less dimensions evolution has to solve for to produce better organisms. (Or like you said, it's part of the system)

blueprint 10y ago

Except for the whole development of science and technology apparently inevitably leading to the destruction of the balance in life's environment thing and its subsequent (temporary?) extinction. Will humans ever be able to escape this planet?

crpatino 10y ago
Probably not, but don't worry. Our ability to destroy the world is greatly exagerated. I don't think we will even manage to get ourselves extinct, though a great deal of needless suffering is pretty much innevitable at this point.

Houshalter 10y ago

The reverse happens as well. Consider DNA repair. Evolution requires a certain level of mutation in order to work. If a species evolves perfect DNA repair mechanisms, then it will stop evolving and eventually go extinct. However on an individual level, DNA repair is highly selected for. Any individual with lower mutation rates is much less likely to die of cancer. Much less likely to have offspring with harmful genetic disorders. After all, the vast majority of mutations are either neutral or harmful, not beneficial. So individuals with the repair gene will tend to have more successful offspring than organisms without, and the frequency of the gene will increase. Most genes that could improve evolution itself are not selected for. Individual fitness matters, not group fitness. There are other ways evolution hurts itself. For instance there is a condition in mice that lives on the male chromosome. It causes all of it's offspring to be male. So all of them also carry this condition. Thus the condition spreads itself twice as much as the competing genes. And so it quickly fixes itself in the population and then there are no more females.

blacksmith_tb 10y ago
D. radiodurans has evolved something close to 'perfect DNA repair mechanisms' without becoming extinct [1] I would say the heightened risk of extinction relies on the assumption that the environment will change and the organism will not be able to adapt (without mutations). But for many bacteria, that seems unlikely to occur. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans#Ionizing-radiation_resistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans#Ionizi...
- Houshalter 10y ago
  That is very interesting. Although there are more sources of mutation than just radiation.
- webmaven 10y ago
  We've observed in the lab that in bacteria harmful changes in the environment increase the number of mutations. Further, we've observed that in many cases the mutations tend to be in the genes that are most closely related to the change. That is, if the PH drops to the point it is causing mutations, many bacteria will tend to get those mutations in genes that are likely to increase tolerance for acidity! Now that is what I call evolved evolvability.

duncancarroll 10y ago

Neat idea. The fulltext is paywalled but one thing I'm curious about is where exactly the "strength of connectivity" would be stored within the chromosome?

js8 10y ago

A similar idea comes from Daniel Dennett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZefk4gzQt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZefk4gzQt4 If we consider cultural (memetic) evolution as a type of evolution, then the answer is YES!

sonabinu 10y ago

There is some similarity in the work by Leslie Valiant where he uses an “ecorithm” approach uses computational concepts to explore fundamental mysteries of evolution and the mind. Incidentally, he is the man behind PAC ;) https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160128-ecorithm-computers-and-life/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160128-ecorithm-computers-a...

leggomylibro 10y ago

Do you want shoggoths? Because this is how you wind up with shoggoths. Seriously though, if the trend of species 'remembering' old genes and becoming more agile in throwing them into the mix continues, could we wind up with monstrous horripilating beasts capable of directing their own morphology? Or as Lovecraft put it, "It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter."

gliese1337 10y ago
Probably not. At least, not in "real-time". It makes for good horror and sci-fi, but in reality the energy costs of constantly reforming yourself like that would be, shall we say, prohibitive. (Incidentally, at the risk of slight spoilers, this is an issue that is addressed, if slightly obliquely, in Michaelbrent Colling's horror novel _The Loon_.) There are plenty of organisms that have extremely free body plans that can be altered as they grow, however (notably, most plants and fungi), so it's less of a stretch to imagine a creature that could consciously direct changes in its own morphology over long periods of time- equivalent to how long it would take the new structures to grow anyway, if they were a set part of a normal animal's morphology.
syntheticnature 10y ago
Horripilation refers to hair bristling, or more colloquially, goose bumps. So beasts with... goose bumps?

alexose 10y ago

This "meta game" was my absolute favorite epiphany as a biology undergrad! Genomes evolve in ways that allow beneficial mutations in the future-- And genes aren't so much randomly scattered in chromosomes as much as they are grouped in ways that maximize useful insertions/deletions/frameshifts. Evolution has its hands on so many different biological processes, including itself. Nature is astounding.

astrodust 10y ago
Yeah, even evolution is evolving. We like to think of ourselves as highly evolved, but honestly, we're still extremely primitive compared to what life could be given another two or three billion years to play out.
- felipemnoa 10y ago
  Unfortunately life does not have that long [1]. A billion years at best. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Future_of_the_Earth.2C_the_Solar_System_and_the_Universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Fut...
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    Unless you mean elsewhere than on Earth. That would also put different pressures on it too.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    You're presuming that life doesn't evolve to the point where it can escape this planet and move to other ones. Even if we have a horrible nuclear war that kills all humans it will only take 100-200 million years for another highly intelligent species to come back and take over again. We've got around five kicks at the can before it's too late.
- Arizhel 10y ago
  Or, perhaps, in 1 million years, humans will evolve to be significantly less-intelligent aquatic animals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_%28novel%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_%28novel%29

webmaven 10y ago

This was one of the key insights I got from the book "The Plausibility of Life". The authors describe several mechanisms beyond genetics, primarily developmental, that make organisms more evolvable and help improve the odds that random mutations will be at least interesting, rather than immediately fatal.