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A can think of a few objections to that argument. First, evolution isn't 'over' for any of the species on that list, and if any of those seemingly maladaptive t
by blacksmith_tb 9y ago
A can think of a few objections to that argument. First, evolution isn't 'over' for any of the species on that list, and if any of those seemingly maladaptive traits really do cause serious problems for those species, we would expect them to be selected against (there are some cases where they are associated with other traits that are important and helpful, and so won't be tossed overboard even then). Evolution also proceeds fairly slowly, in the sense that it may take many generations for a mutation to really become a positive adaptation and not just an oddity.
- klmr 9y agoI agree, the examples aren’t the best chosen. But there are cases which are pretty well established in biology as being maladaptations. — The laryngeal nerve is the most famous of those [1] because there’s really no advantage to the way it develops, and its characteristics poses significant health problems that do affect evolutionary fitness negatively. Yet there’s no easy fix to solve its positioning through gradual mutations. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve#Evidence_of_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve#Evid...
- bckygldstn 9y agoThat nerve seems like an example of a local optimum. The way to avoid this is either to increase the mutation rate, or modify the fitness function so the intermediate states aren't so heavily penalised. We can't easily do that with real evolution but it's configurable with evolutionary algorithms, as with most machine learning algorithms. The hard part is finding those parameters.