6 ms·

Evolution is guided by whatever selection process is present. For most species that's the environment they find themselves in. For some, like cows, corn, banana

by rictic 6y ago

Evolution is guided by whatever selection process is present. For most species that's the environment they find themselves in. For some, like cows, corn, bananas, etc their human domesticators play a major role.

yters 6y ago
the question is "how does evolution work so well to create the appearance of design?" dawkins answer is unguided mutation and natural selection. so, a guided computer simulation fails to demonstrate his point. darwin does the same bait and switch in his origin of species, presenting animal breeding as an example of the power of natural selection
- reidjs 6y ago
  Unguided in the sense there's not an omnipresent being that decides who lives and who dies, but environmental pressures that select for certain features over others. You're right that this is a better example of 'artificial selection' like in race horses & dogs.
  - yters 6y ago
    that seems to beg the question then if we only get good simulated results with guidance, then that implies we get good biological results due to some sort of directedness it seems dawkins example undermines his argument
    - vaidhy 6y ago
      You are making two different points here. Natural selection is guidance, but guidance without any will or preconceived notion of good and bad. In this super simple simulated experience, you provide the guidance and depending on your guidance, you can get what fits your world. The second point is around form following function and you are inverting cause and effect. So, under natural selection, certain functions are selected for, and as form follows functions, those forms procreate and proliferate. In this simple simulated world, you choose directly for form (there is no function to choose for) and forms that are pleasing to you will procreate and proliferate. If you like whorls and I like straight lines, our created worlds will be populated by different creatures. Finally, guidance does not mean direction. A boolean guidance (live or die) does not provide direction.
      - yters 6y ago
        great clarification of wording! natural selects without forethought for form, yet gets fantastical forms, yet in biomorphs that is precisely how i select, and that is how i get fantastical forms. this would seem to imply natural does indeed somehow select for form i really don't get why this doesn't undermine dawkins argumemt
        humanrebar 6y ago
        The whole argument is circular, yes. It's a metaphysical problem. One can't conclusively proove anything with physical evidence. One can use the word "natural" to mean "unguided", but that position is just begging the question. It assumes nature and its laws are inherently unguided. Why did virus A proliferate and not virus A'? Why did gene B mutate and not gene B`? Is that "random"? Well, we don't have evidence either way, do we? We can assume, I suppose.
        yters 6y ago
        what does 'random' mean, even?
        joshuak 6y ago
        Sexual selection is the term for form for form sake. Many people mistakenly take 'natural selection' and 'sexual selection' to be interchangeable terms but 'sexual selection' is the term for the mechanism that explains why you find features in some species that seem to have astatic value but not survivability value. For example peacock tails.
        yters 6y ago
        where did the aesthetic come from originally?
        joshuak 6y ago
        Say there is some actual adaptive advantage like upper body strength. Genes that cause greater upper body strength tend to survive, and because of this genes in the opposite sex that can detect upper body strength in a potential mate tend to survive. The population of individuals of the opposite sex, tend towards a preference for upper body strength. What is the limit? Well the answer is very little, while more upper body strength may have little additional value above some level there is no environmental influence that selects against it until it becomes so pronounced as to become an impairment. If there are mutations in genes of the opposite sex that prefer evidence of upper body strength it is unlikely they will be removed, while genes that disregard upper body strength will occasionally fail to distinguish good quality mates and will therefore become less prevalent. Further, the appearance of upper body strength may become so preferred that fake upper body strength is also a more successful trait at least to the degree that it doesn't impair survivability. Because of all of this, sexual selection is a mechanism in which a small astatic for actual survivability traits becomes a large exaggeration of traits that suggest survivability but may or may not actually improve survivability. In the case of the peacock tail, and birds in general it probably stems from the fact that sick birds often have dirty tails, therefor females that prefer male birds with not dirty tails (or better) are selected for.
  - earthboundkid 6y ago
    Has anyone done statistics on whether horses today are faster than eg in the 19th century (when records ought to be good)? Is it increasing linearly or asymptotically? Are horses running (ha) into fundamental physical problems preventing further evolution?
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      Asymptotically, I believe. There were a some people a few decades ago who tried to use training methods which had improved human running times, only to discover that horses' cardiovascular systems were not the same bottleneck that humans' had been. (bottleneck is with tendons and bones; racing breeds are already morphologically quite different from the wild types)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- yongjik 6y ago
  > "how does evolution work so well to create the appearance of design?" Evolution doesn't create the appearance of design any more than airplanes create the appearance of a gigantic bird. To an isolated Amazonian tribe, an airplane may indeed look like a giant bird, but that's only because they aren't familiar with modern aerodynamics - they cannot conceive that something that's not like a giant bird can be flying up so high, so they mentally equate airworthiness with bird-likeness.
  - yters 6y ago
    dawkins whole argument is evolution produces the appearance of design
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      See also Dennett's idea of 'competence without comprehension'.
  - earthboundkid 6y ago
    This is different though because the concept of “design” or “teleology” gets reduced to history by evolution. This undermines the idea that humans can goals either, but if you undermine the idea that humans can have goals, you’ve eliminated the basis of doing science, leading to contradiction. You can bring goals back and say well evolution/biology only has apparent goals but humans really do have goals, but that’s actually a really hard task philosophically! The bird/plane case is different because to the ignorant, they may only know of birds, but you can explain that there is a more fundamental category of “flying thing” and a plane, like a bird, fits into that category without being a bird itself. With design you have to say, well there’s design and apparent design and for some reason biology has apparent design but humans have real design. It’s a tricky problem!
- joshuak 6y ago
  I believe the intention was simply to illustrate that complexity can evolve from simplicity. It's quite a bit more difficult to build a working example that relies on actual natural selection.
  - yters 6y ago
    The problem is that complexity is not emerging. It is being injected externally through the human input, so contradicts Dawkin's argument.
    - joshuak 6y ago
      The complexity is absolutely emergent, the person selecting can easily see that selecting the same offspring every time is just as likely to produce complex results as carefully curating the offspring selection. Dawkins example is just a mediocre programmers attempt to point at the idea, there are many other more competent examples in computer science. Cellular automata such as Conway's game of life being a painfully obvious example. I get the impression you are trying not to understand so as to be able to disagree, rather than trying to understand and then disagreeing. Regardless of the motivations, working to avoid understanding has never been a winning strategy, at least in the long run.
      - yters 6y ago
        let's take conway's CA as an example in that case you only get complex functionality through human engineering if you just dump a bunch of random pixels on the screen you'll get nifty looking chaos and some simple mechanisms like gliders but to get something like game of life in the game of life, you need incredibly complex human engineering i am really trying to understand, and have purchased and am reading through dawkins book but the logic just does not seem to go through

by rictic 6y ago

yters 6y ago

the question is "how does evolution work so well to create the appearance of design?" dawkins answer is unguided mutation and natural selection. so, a guided computer simulation fails to demonstrate his point. darwin does the same bait and switch in his origin of species, presenting animal breeding as an example of the power of natural selection

reidjs 6y ago
Unguided in the sense there's not an omnipresent being that decides who lives and who dies, but environmental pressures that select for certain features over others. You're right that this is a better example of 'artificial selection' like in race horses & dogs.
- yters 6y ago
  that seems to beg the question then if we only get good simulated results with guidance, then that implies we get good biological results due to some sort of directedness it seems dawkins example undermines his argument
  - vaidhy 6y ago
    You are making two different points here. Natural selection is guidance, but guidance without any will or preconceived notion of good and bad. In this super simple simulated experience, you provide the guidance and depending on your guidance, you can get what fits your world. The second point is around form following function and you are inverting cause and effect. So, under natural selection, certain functions are selected for, and as form follows functions, those forms procreate and proliferate. In this simple simulated world, you choose directly for form (there is no function to choose for) and forms that are pleasing to you will procreate and proliferate. If you like whorls and I like straight lines, our created worlds will be populated by different creatures. Finally, guidance does not mean direction. A boolean guidance (live or die) does not provide direction.
    - yters 6y ago
      great clarification of wording! natural selects without forethought for form, yet gets fantastical forms, yet in biomorphs that is precisely how i select, and that is how i get fantastical forms. this would seem to imply natural does indeed somehow select for form i really don't get why this doesn't undermine dawkins argumemt
      - humanrebar 6y ago
        The whole argument is circular, yes. It's a metaphysical problem. One can't conclusively proove anything with physical evidence. One can use the word "natural" to mean "unguided", but that position is just begging the question. It assumes nature and its laws are inherently unguided. Why did virus A proliferate and not virus A'? Why did gene B mutate and not gene B`? Is that "random"? Well, we don't have evidence either way, do we? We can assume, I suppose.
        yters 6y ago
        what does 'random' mean, even?
      - joshuak 6y ago
        Sexual selection is the term for form for form sake. Many people mistakenly take 'natural selection' and 'sexual selection' to be interchangeable terms but 'sexual selection' is the term for the mechanism that explains why you find features in some species that seem to have astatic value but not survivability value. For example peacock tails.
        yters 6y ago
        where did the aesthetic come from originally?
        joshuak 6y ago
        Say there is some actual adaptive advantage like upper body strength. Genes that cause greater upper body strength tend to survive, and because of this genes in the opposite sex that can detect upper body strength in a potential mate tend to survive. The population of individuals of the opposite sex, tend towards a preference for upper body strength. What is the limit? Well the answer is very little, while more upper body strength may have little additional value above some level there is no environmental influence that selects against it until it becomes so pronounced as to become an impairment. If there are mutations in genes of the opposite sex that prefer evidence of upper body strength it is unlikely they will be removed, while genes that disregard upper body strength will occasionally fail to distinguish good quality mates and will therefore become less prevalent. Further, the appearance of upper body strength may become so preferred that fake upper body strength is also a more successful trait at least to the degree that it doesn't impair survivability. Because of all of this, sexual selection is a mechanism in which a small astatic for actual survivability traits becomes a large exaggeration of traits that suggest survivability but may or may not actually improve survivability. In the case of the peacock tail, and birds in general it probably stems from the fact that sick birds often have dirty tails, therefor females that prefer male birds with not dirty tails (or better) are selected for.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  Has anyone done statistics on whether horses today are faster than eg in the 19th century (when records ought to be good)? Is it increasing linearly or asymptotically? Are horses running (ha) into fundamental physical problems preventing further evolution?
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Asymptotically, I believe. There were a some people a few decades ago who tried to use training methods which had improved human running times, only to discover that horses' cardiovascular systems were not the same bottleneck that humans' had been. (bottleneck is with tendons and bones; racing breeds are already morphologically quite different from the wild types)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
yongjik 6y ago
> "how does evolution work so well to create the appearance of design?" Evolution doesn't create the appearance of design any more than airplanes create the appearance of a gigantic bird. To an isolated Amazonian tribe, an airplane may indeed look like a giant bird, but that's only because they aren't familiar with modern aerodynamics - they cannot conceive that something that's not like a giant bird can be flying up so high, so they mentally equate airworthiness with bird-likeness.
- yters 6y ago
  dawkins whole argument is evolution produces the appearance of design
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    See also Dennett's idea of 'competence without comprehension'.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  This is different though because the concept of “design” or “teleology” gets reduced to history by evolution. This undermines the idea that humans can goals either, but if you undermine the idea that humans can have goals, you’ve eliminated the basis of doing science, leading to contradiction. You can bring goals back and say well evolution/biology only has apparent goals but humans really do have goals, but that’s actually a really hard task philosophically! The bird/plane case is different because to the ignorant, they may only know of birds, but you can explain that there is a more fundamental category of “flying thing” and a plane, like a bird, fits into that category without being a bird itself. With design you have to say, well there’s design and apparent design and for some reason biology has apparent design but humans have real design. It’s a tricky problem!
joshuak 6y ago
I believe the intention was simply to illustrate that complexity can evolve from simplicity. It's quite a bit more difficult to build a working example that relies on actual natural selection.
- yters 6y ago
  The problem is that complexity is not emerging. It is being injected externally through the human input, so contradicts Dawkin's argument.
  - joshuak 6y ago
    The complexity is absolutely emergent, the person selecting can easily see that selecting the same offspring every time is just as likely to produce complex results as carefully curating the offspring selection. Dawkins example is just a mediocre programmers attempt to point at the idea, there are many other more competent examples in computer science. Cellular automata such as Conway's game of life being a painfully obvious example. I get the impression you are trying not to understand so as to be able to disagree, rather than trying to understand and then disagreeing. Regardless of the motivations, working to avoid understanding has never been a winning strategy, at least in the long run.
    - yters 6y ago
      let's take conway's CA as an example in that case you only get complex functionality through human engineering if you just dump a bunch of random pixels on the screen you'll get nifty looking chaos and some simple mechanisms like gliders but to get something like game of life in the game of life, you need incredibly complex human engineering i am really trying to understand, and have purchased and am reading through dawkins book but the logic just does not seem to go through