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People (geeks often) attribute efficiency to evolution's designs. The process really produces just barely good-enough for given environmental pressures/problem

People (geeks often) attribute efficiency to evolution's designs. The process really produces just barely good-enough for given environmental pressures/problem domain. Nature is the queen of avoiding pre-optimization and YAGNI.

tw1010 9y ago
Which begs the question, since humans have been able to dominate their ecology and competitors to such a massive degree, why didn't our evolution stagnate a long long time ago? The answer, as far as I have read, seems to be that for humans, competition within the species (for sexual opportunities, position in the dominance hierarchy, etc) has been the primary driving force pushing our brains to evolve to the size it is today. A few sources that support this thesis are the books, "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny", "The Elephant in the Brain", as well as this paper: https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/57178/SpecPub_001.pdf https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/5717...
- nikanj 9y ago
  This is attributing emotion to things that have none, but regardless: Species don’t compete, genes do. My genes want to beat your genes, were you another human (in-species), a bonobo (in same-ish morphological niche) or a rat (another modern urban dweller).
  - bartread 9y ago
    > This is attributing emotion to things that have none Ummm, fair enough. But then you say... > My genes want to beat your genes Your genes don't want anything. They have no desires. No emotions. They're just molecules. Long, complex polymers, granted, but just molecules, nonetheless.
    - autokad 9y ago
      they are instructions. those instructions say compete in what ever round about way they decide on doing it. the ones that don't say compete die out.
- eesmith 9y ago
  Evolution doesn't "stagnate". Ever. Humans are still evolving. Probably faster than ever. See http://www.pnas.org/content/104/52/20753.long http://www.pnas.org/content/104/52/20753.long . What does "a long long time ago" mean to you? It's only 65M years since mammals underwent the massive adaptive radiation after the K–T extinction. It's only 50,000 years since the human population started to greatly increase. (See previous reference.) You need to be very careful in looking for references which support your thesis. You'll not find good counterarguments that way. Be very cautious about any reference which emphasizes "dominance hierarchy" in humans, especially when based looking towards chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) as a model for understanding how early humans interacted. Only more recently have we been looking at bonobos (Pan paniscus), which are evolutionarily equally distant from us. The thing is, bonobos have rather different behaviors than chimpanzees, including in how they deal with dominance. Unfortunately, a lot of wide-spread cultural beliefs on this topic are wrong, or at least much more controversial than can be used as the basis for any good understanding. See for example "alpha male" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_(ethology)#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_(ethology)#Controversy and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ti86veZBjU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ti86veZBjU . I would advise you to look for books by people who work in, or very closely to, anthropology, archeology, and genetics. And stay away from evolutionary psychologists, most of whom in my experience have a flawed understanding of evolution. As an example of a warning flag, your last link, a book from 1990 is pre-genome, and talks much more about chimps than bonobos. You might be interested in "Why are there so many explanations for primate brain evolution?" at http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/372/1727/20160244 http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/372/1727/2016... . They argue that the Social Brain Hypothesis (SBH) has the strongest support: > SBH is an explicitly two-step process: an ecological problem is solved socially (i.e. as a cooperative process) and a big brain is needed to allow the requisite level of sociality to do this. The group created by big brains is not an end in itself (a mistake made by many attempts to compare between alternative hypotheses: e.g. [18,103]), but rather the means to an ecological end. It is important not to mistake this view for group selection: it does not involve the differential survival or extinction of groups. Rather, it is a group-level or group-augmentation explanation (sensu [104]), such that individuals living in larger social units have higher fitness than those living in smaller ones. The only mention of "dominance" in that publication is in the title of a citation to a paper from 1980.
blowski 9y ago
If I could have a team of millions of developers spending centuries building applications then I too could work out the leanest possible implementation. Nature makes a lot of pull requests, but has a great peer review system that prevents bad design entering the core of the system.
autokad 9y ago
nature produces the optimal animals for survival, and its not limited to the current form the animal is in. (I'll get to that later). think of this as a machine learning problem, you want to have regularization penalties from over-fitting the environment, because it will inevitably change. the author makes some absurd comments. "There doesn't seem to be any fundamental reason why an animal couldn't evolve which makes steel, for example. It would get its raw material like we do, from iron ore." how does the author expect our bodies to produce heat in the thousands of degrees to burn out the impurities in iron and infuse carbon in its super heated state? i dont buy their argument that our bodies can make anything just because its building stuff at the molecular level. humans survived a lot of extinction level events, a lot of global famine. even if we could do the former, we might have gone extinct if we had extraordinary dietary requirements of iron. and what ever animal we evolved from would have also had to deal with that, and they experienced even larger extinction level events. i was thinking about why the dinosaurs had such small brains. other animals and reptiles living today existed in the same period, and they had larger brains, so I thought the dinosaur brains were small by design, why? i think because being big was adventitious, and being egg layers, only so much air can travel through a membrane. some eggs were as large as 2 feet long, probably not a lot of air getting into the whole system, so a hulking brain is a waste. even if they had small eggs, they needed the ability to evolve / or activate genes to grow big when allowed to do so.

tw1010 9y ago

Which begs the question, since humans have been able to dominate their ecology and competitors to such a massive degree, why didn't our evolution stagnate a long long time ago? The answer, as far as I have read, seems to be that for humans, competition within the species (for sexual opportunities, position in the dominance hierarchy, etc) has been the primary driving force pushing our brains to evolve to the size it is today. A few sources that support this thesis are the books, "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny", "The Elephant in the Brain", as well as this paper: https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/57178/SpecPub_001.pdf https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/5717...

nikanj 9y ago
This is attributing emotion to things that have none, but regardless: Species don’t compete, genes do. My genes want to beat your genes, were you another human (in-species), a bonobo (in same-ish morphological niche) or a rat (another modern urban dweller).
- bartread 9y ago
  > This is attributing emotion to things that have none Ummm, fair enough. But then you say... > My genes want to beat your genes Your genes don't want anything. They have no desires. No emotions. They're just molecules. Long, complex polymers, granted, but just molecules, nonetheless.
  - autokad 9y ago
    they are instructions. those instructions say compete in what ever round about way they decide on doing it. the ones that don't say compete die out.
eesmith 9y ago
Evolution doesn't "stagnate". Ever. Humans are still evolving. Probably faster than ever. See http://www.pnas.org/content/104/52/20753.long http://www.pnas.org/content/104/52/20753.long . What does "a long long time ago" mean to you? It's only 65M years since mammals underwent the massive adaptive radiation after the K–T extinction. It's only 50,000 years since the human population started to greatly increase. (See previous reference.) You need to be very careful in looking for references which support your thesis. You'll not find good counterarguments that way. Be very cautious about any reference which emphasizes "dominance hierarchy" in humans, especially when based looking towards chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) as a model for understanding how early humans interacted. Only more recently have we been looking at bonobos (Pan paniscus), which are evolutionarily equally distant from us. The thing is, bonobos have rather different behaviors than chimpanzees, including in how they deal with dominance. Unfortunately, a lot of wide-spread cultural beliefs on this topic are wrong, or at least much more controversial than can be used as the basis for any good understanding. See for example "alpha male" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_(ethology)#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_(ethology)#Controversy and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ti86veZBjU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ti86veZBjU . I would advise you to look for books by people who work in, or very closely to, anthropology, archeology, and genetics. And stay away from evolutionary psychologists, most of whom in my experience have a flawed understanding of evolution. As an example of a warning flag, your last link, a book from 1990 is pre-genome, and talks much more about chimps than bonobos. You might be interested in "Why are there so many explanations for primate brain evolution?" at http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/372/1727/20160244 http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/372/1727/2016... . They argue that the Social Brain Hypothesis (SBH) has the strongest support: > SBH is an explicitly two-step process: an ecological problem is solved socially (i.e. as a cooperative process) and a big brain is needed to allow the requisite level of sociality to do this. The group created by big brains is not an end in itself (a mistake made by many attempts to compare between alternative hypotheses: e.g. [18,103]), but rather the means to an ecological end. It is important not to mistake this view for group selection: it does not involve the differential survival or extinction of groups. Rather, it is a group-level or group-augmentation explanation (sensu [104]), such that individuals living in larger social units have higher fitness than those living in smaller ones. The only mention of "dominance" in that publication is in the title of a citation to a paper from 1980.

blowski 9y ago

If I could have a team of millions of developers spending centuries building applications then I too could work out the leanest possible implementation. Nature makes a lot of pull requests, but has a great peer review system that prevents bad design entering the core of the system.

autokad 9y ago

nature produces the optimal animals for survival, and its not limited to the current form the animal is in. (I'll get to that later). think of this as a machine learning problem, you want to have regularization penalties from over-fitting the environment, because it will inevitably change. the author makes some absurd comments. "There doesn't seem to be any fundamental reason why an animal couldn't evolve which makes steel, for example. It would get its raw material like we do, from iron ore." how does the author expect our bodies to produce heat in the thousands of degrees to burn out the impurities in iron and infuse carbon in its super heated state? i dont buy their argument that our bodies can make anything just because its building stuff at the molecular level. humans survived a lot of extinction level events, a lot of global famine. even if we could do the former, we might have gone extinct if we had extraordinary dietary requirements of iron. and what ever animal we evolved from would have also had to deal with that, and they experienced even larger extinction level events. i was thinking about why the dinosaurs had such small brains. other animals and reptiles living today existed in the same period, and they had larger brains, so I thought the dinosaur brains were small by design, why? i think because being big was adventitious, and being egg layers, only so much air can travel through a membrane. some eggs were as large as 2 feet long, probably not a lot of air getting into the whole system, so a hulking brain is a waste. even if they had small eggs, they needed the ability to evolve / or activate genes to grow big when allowed to do so.