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A bio professor of mine said something that stuck with me: “life doesn’t work perfectly, it just works.” It has to work well enough to… work… and reproduce. Th

by api 5y ago

A bio professor of mine said something that stuck with me: “life doesn’t work perfectly, it just works.” It has to work well enough to… work… and reproduce. That’s it. It’s not “survival of the fittest.” It’s “survival of a randomized subset of the fit.” There’s even a set of thermodynamic arguments to the effect that systems are unlikely to exceed such minimum requirements for a given threshold. For example, if we are visited by interstellar travelers they are likely to be the absolute dumbest and most dysfunctional possible examples of beings capable of interstellar travel since anything more is a less likely thermodynamic state. So much for Star Trek toga wearing utopian aliens.

cutemonster 5y ago
> if we are visited by interstellar travelers they are likely to be the absolute dumbest and most dysfunctional possible examples of beings capable of interstellar travel Otoh, they would be aware about that, and they might have spent some time improving how genes (or what they have) and evolutionary selection works for them, so that, say, their species with time becomes brighter and brighter than what's actually needed. If they wanted to do that.
- api 5y ago
  How do you improve your genes? Removing obvious deleterious disease mutations is easy, but as soon as you try to “go where there are no roads” you hit the same combinatorial challenge as evolution. Also more intelligence does not equal better ideas. The world is full of crazy or amoral people with apparently very high IQs. Your average flat Earther probably has an above average IQ. Improvement is a war against entropy and n^n^n^… combinatorics any way you slice it.
  - cutemonster 5y ago
    > How do you improve your genes? Slowly across hundreds and thousands of generations. By adding evolutionary pressure, for what they want -- it'd be up to those space traveling aliens to decide -- they can change their species, generations into the future. > Improvement is a war against entropy ... Reasoning in that way, the humans would not have gotten brighter than the chimpanzee monkeys. There's been evolutionary pressure for the humans to get brighter, and it would be possible for you (I mean the humans), or the space travelers, to add artificial ev. pressure. Anyway never mind all this, maybe talking about space travelers and the humans and their genes isn't the best way to spend the day. Have a nice day btw

by api 5y ago

cutemonster 5y ago

> if we are visited by interstellar travelers they are likely to be the absolute dumbest and most dysfunctional possible examples of beings capable of interstellar travel Otoh, they would be aware about that, and they might have spent some time improving how genes (or what they have) and evolutionary selection works for them, so that, say, their species with time becomes brighter and brighter than what's actually needed. If they wanted to do that.

api 5y ago
How do you improve your genes? Removing obvious deleterious disease mutations is easy, but as soon as you try to “go where there are no roads” you hit the same combinatorial challenge as evolution. Also more intelligence does not equal better ideas. The world is full of crazy or amoral people with apparently very high IQs. Your average flat Earther probably has an above average IQ. Improvement is a war against entropy and n^n^n^… combinatorics any way you slice it.
- cutemonster 5y ago
  > How do you improve your genes? Slowly across hundreds and thousands of generations. By adding evolutionary pressure, for what they want -- it'd be up to those space traveling aliens to decide -- they can change their species, generations into the future. > Improvement is a war against entropy ... Reasoning in that way, the humans would not have gotten brighter than the chimpanzee monkeys. There's been evolutionary pressure for the humans to get brighter, and it would be possible for you (I mean the humans), or the space travelers, to add artificial ev. pressure. Anyway never mind all this, maybe talking about space travelers and the humans and their genes isn't the best way to spend the day. Have a nice day btw