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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 ten
by 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 agoIt 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 agoFWIW, 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).