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"...why have our bodies, and those of other animals, evolved so as to make the particular structural materials that they do make, and not to make others, especi

"...why have our bodies, and those of other animals, evolved so as to make the particular structural materials that they do make, and not to make others, especially metals..." Because that's what's good enough to get through the crucible of successful genome transmission? Evolution doesn't have an end goal; every "improvement" came about by random changes, either in the genome or in the environment, which yielded a reproductive advantage to some new gene or genes. I'm not sure if the author intended it but this seems to fall into the common fallacy of believing that evolution is an active process guiding organism toward some optimal state. Organisms don't evolve "to do" anything. They end up there. Contemporary genomes are what's left after everything else has died. Not the conquerors of mountains.

toasterlovin 9y ago
Evolution is one of the hardest things to actually fully integrate into a mental model. There are so many subtleties that just do not interact well with our tendency to ascribe motivation to stuff.
- hotsauceror 9y ago
  It seems fairly intuitive to me. Think of a bunch of marbles falling through a series of nets. Changes in a particular marble, or in a particular net, might let the marble fall through. Marbles that fall through one net get to try again with the next net. Evolution just means comparing marbles that collect in each net. There's a million answers to the question "how can a marble get through this net", and the nets don't care if anything gets through at all.
  - toasterlovin 9y ago
    FWIW, I don't think the analogy you described is what many people would describe as "fairly intuitive", though I think it's a reasonable one. Still, it relies on harnessing our spatial reasoning and I don't think most people are good at visualizing or reasoning about billions of marbles being sifted through billions of nets (in the case of simpler organisms) or even millions of marbles being sifted through ~7,000 nets (in the specific case of humans).

toasterlovin 9y ago

Evolution is one of the hardest things to actually fully integrate into a mental model. There are so many subtleties that just do not interact well with our tendency to ascribe motivation to stuff.

hotsauceror 9y ago
It seems fairly intuitive to me. Think of a bunch of marbles falling through a series of nets. Changes in a particular marble, or in a particular net, might let the marble fall through. Marbles that fall through one net get to try again with the next net. Evolution just means comparing marbles that collect in each net. There's a million answers to the question "how can a marble get through this net", and the nets don't care if anything gets through at all.
- toasterlovin 9y ago
  FWIW, I don't think the analogy you described is what many people would describe as "fairly intuitive", though I think it's a reasonable one. Still, it relies on harnessing our spatial reasoning and I don't think most people are good at visualizing or reasoning about billions of marbles being sifted through billions of nets (in the case of simpler organisms) or even millions of marbles being sifted through ~7,000 nets (in the specific case of humans).