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> You always feel like you are trying to trick the system into doing something it was not designed for. This is one of the hallmarks of human civilization. Yo

> You always feel like you are trying to trick the system into doing something it was not designed for. This is one of the hallmarks of human civilization. Your hands were designed for throwing a stone at the eye of a mammoth. But you can play the violin with them! Yes; it is totally awkward and anti-natural for your hands, obviously not their intended purpose... but so beautiful!

rland 4y ago
I see what you're saying, but the violin was designed for human hands.
netizen-936824 4y ago
Nothing in nature was necessarily "designed"
- cosmojg 4y ago
  Sculpted like a riverbed.
- politician 4y ago
  Proponents of the anthropic principal disagree. Nevertheless, it's irrelevant to this thread.
  - netizen-936824 4y ago
    No, its definitely relevant. Hands were not designed with any specific function in mind. There was not evolutionary pressure to "throw rocks at the eye of a mammoth" Did orangutans evolve hands to throw rocks at mammoths? No, they did not The parent comment is making ridiculous claims without evidence https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-do-orangutans-eat.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-do-orangutans-eat.h...
    - samatman 4y ago
      You've smoothly shot right past solid ground (evolution doesn't design things) to a fairly wild claim (rock-throwing apes didn't experience evolutionary pressure to get better at throwing rocks). Orangutans aren't humans, so what are you saying, apes which don't throw rocks to kill their prey don't... throw rocks to kill their prey?
      - netizen-936824 4y ago
        Perhaps my example is poor, but it shows that hands are not coupled to predation I'm specifically talking about the evolution of hands, humans are not the only organism with hands.
        ohwellhere 4y ago
        This seems accurate to me. Like complex brains are evolutionarily fit because they can solve lots of disparate problems, hands are evolutionarily fit because they can do lots of disparate things. Of course, we do also then design violins for our specific dexterity.
        samatman 4y ago
        The poster didn't say "hands", they said "your hands". Your human hands, which co-evolved with throwing things, we have abundant paleontological evidence of this and you may read as many papers on the subject as you would care to.
        netizen-936824 4y ago
        Got links to any of those papers?
        samatman 4y ago
        Are you vegan? Just curious.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    > Proponents of the anthropic principal disagree. Nevertheless, it's irrelevant to this thread. The anthropic principle does not imply designed, it implies suited for.
- tomrod 4y ago
  I'd go so far to say that linguistically nature is the antithesis of artificial (made by hands). Avoiding silly theological tropes, evolution is often mistakenly referred to as a designer when it's just an emergent property of competing, replicating agents. People don't normally bother with precision though, so we are where we are.
  - bernulli 4y ago
    I always like to see it the other way around, it eliminates entities that are not a good fit, and the remainder is what drives adaptation. Of course, people could argue that's just like Michelangelo [1], and we're back at 'designed'. [1] “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”
    - ohwellhere 4y ago
      > it eliminates entities But evolution doesn't eliminate entities. Low fitness entities are eliminated by hunger, or predators, or lower reproductive rates. The marble on the other hand is eliminated by Michelangelo. There's a linguistic confusion where because evolution is a noun, we think we can treat it as a subject. But in the person/place/thing/idea delineation, it is an idea. Not only does it not design, not only does it not eliminate: "it" doesn't do anything!
      - nautilius 4y ago
        Of course 'evolution' is not an actor, it's just the overall pattern we give a name to. And the pattern we observe is that low fitness entities are eliminated. That plus variation yields adaptation.
        bernulli 4y ago
        Well, yeah.
    - jgwil2 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dev_tty01 4y ago
  If you consider a "design" to result from a process where someone sketches out a plan, builds it, and it works first time. I've designed a lot of systems, and it is clearly an iterative process. Balancing tradeoffs, figuring out the essentials, build prototypes, test, etc. If you are patient and diligent a solution emerges. That sounds a lot like evolution, so in my mind everything in nature has been designed by the collective intelligence of an iterative process that rewards useful optimizations.
  - netizen-936824 4y ago
    I think that's a reasonable perspective to take, although I would argue that there is no clear goal in evolution besides survival and reproduction
    - Jenk 4y ago
      There is no plan in evolution. That's the point. It's a reactionary phenomenon. If it had a plan, it would be a proactive phenomenon. Evolution is happenstance.
    - rocqua 4y ago
      The nice thing about a goal, is that one goal begets other sub-goals. Or rather, a goal begets a strategy, and a strategy begets sub-goals. Beautifully at some point these sub-goals start being optimized for. A few steps of this is how I believe humans went from the sub goal "Survive, eat, reproduce" to "Make art, understand life, explore the world". The cool thing is that I think this extends beyond humans to tools. Because at some point humans had a sub-goal of "hit thing hard" they made a hammer. And this hammer has a goal (or a purpose) which is "hit things hard". This purpose can be traced back, through human sub-goals, to the final goal of evolution: "reproduce". Note that I am not saying that the point of a hammer is to produce more hammer. But the point of a hammer is (very indirectly) to allow a human to reproduce. Interestingly there is a weird game of telephone that can happen, where the sub-goals are imperfect for achieving the final goal. I would argue that this is (part of) why humans can be truly selfless. Take a soldier going to a battle he considers unwinnable but going out of a sense of duty / fear of ridicule. This will not help him reproduce, since the battle is unwinnable it will not help his progeny reproduce either. From the 'ultimate' goal, this is an irrational step. But there are sub-goals at play. Things like "be honorable", "do your duty". This idea that a sub-goal can subvert the 'ultimate' goal is very beautiful to me. It means that evolution is not some tyranny that sets our purpose in life. Instead evolution brought 'purpose' into the world. And then some stochastic process put you and me on into the universe with some, vaguely related, sense of purpose. But we have our own purpose. Sure our purpose was 'created by' the ultimate purpose of evolution. But our purpose is not subordinate to the ultimate purpose of evolution. A human life can have so much more value that just "continue the genetic line and have children". I find that freeing.
platz 4y ago
> This is one of the hallmarks of human civilization. This is one of the hallmarks of evolution. How do you think wings evolved? By repurposing an appendage that was already had a purpose other than flight.
- NegativeLatency 4y ago
  We didn’t evolve to play instruments though, we adapted and created them to suit our existing physical form
izhak 4y ago
I would disagree. You can play the violin firstly because the violin was designed so that it could produce beautiful sounds under _human_hands_. This way, not another.
- falcor84 4y ago
  It seems you are actually in agreement with the underlying argument. Humans were able to use their body, originally developed for hunting large prey, to design, build and play violins.
  - toolsexist 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
croes 4y ago
Nope, we use stones because we can lift and throw it with our hands, not the other way around.
isitmadeofglass 4y ago
Our hands were not designed, and they have no “intended purpose”. We have hands because throughout the extremely long line of evolutionary adaptations the individuals that had them ended up surviving and procreating, and so we ended up having them. This is not true of a violin, which is of cause the product of intelligent design and is designed to fit our hands, no Awkwardness intended. Though naturally there are constraints dictated by the physics of the sound generation.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Your hands were designed for throwing a stone at the eye of a mammoth. No, they weren't designed at all. And utility in fine as well as gross manipulation of the type you describe is clearly part of what they were selected (not designed) for. > But you can play the violin with them Violins, unlike human hands, were designed, and specifically for people with human hands to use. They aren't just something existing outside of humans in nature that hands happen to work with. So, it's not at all surprising that they can be used with human hands.

rland 4y ago

I see what you're saying, but the violin was designed for human hands.

netizen-936824 4y ago

Nothing in nature was necessarily "designed"

cosmojg 4y ago
Sculpted like a riverbed.
politician 4y ago
Proponents of the anthropic principal disagree. Nevertheless, it's irrelevant to this thread.
- netizen-936824 4y ago
  No, its definitely relevant. Hands were not designed with any specific function in mind. There was not evolutionary pressure to "throw rocks at the eye of a mammoth" Did orangutans evolve hands to throw rocks at mammoths? No, they did not The parent comment is making ridiculous claims without evidence https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-do-orangutans-eat.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-do-orangutans-eat.h...
  - samatman 4y ago
    You've smoothly shot right past solid ground (evolution doesn't design things) to a fairly wild claim (rock-throwing apes didn't experience evolutionary pressure to get better at throwing rocks). Orangutans aren't humans, so what are you saying, apes which don't throw rocks to kill their prey don't... throw rocks to kill their prey?
    - netizen-936824 4y ago
      Perhaps my example is poor, but it shows that hands are not coupled to predation I'm specifically talking about the evolution of hands, humans are not the only organism with hands.
      - ohwellhere 4y ago
        This seems accurate to me. Like complex brains are evolutionarily fit because they can solve lots of disparate problems, hands are evolutionarily fit because they can do lots of disparate things. Of course, we do also then design violins for our specific dexterity.
      - samatman 4y ago
        The poster didn't say "hands", they said "your hands". Your human hands, which co-evolved with throwing things, we have abundant paleontological evidence of this and you may read as many papers on the subject as you would care to.
        netizen-936824 4y ago
        Got links to any of those papers?
        samatman 4y ago
        Are you vegan? Just curious.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  > Proponents of the anthropic principal disagree. Nevertheless, it's irrelevant to this thread. The anthropic principle does not imply designed, it implies suited for.
tomrod 4y ago
I'd go so far to say that linguistically nature is the antithesis of artificial (made by hands). Avoiding silly theological tropes, evolution is often mistakenly referred to as a designer when it's just an emergent property of competing, replicating agents. People don't normally bother with precision though, so we are where we are.
- bernulli 4y ago
  I always like to see it the other way around, it eliminates entities that are not a good fit, and the remainder is what drives adaptation. Of course, people could argue that's just like Michelangelo [1], and we're back at 'designed'. [1] “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”
  - ohwellhere 4y ago
    > it eliminates entities But evolution doesn't eliminate entities. Low fitness entities are eliminated by hunger, or predators, or lower reproductive rates. The marble on the other hand is eliminated by Michelangelo. There's a linguistic confusion where because evolution is a noun, we think we can treat it as a subject. But in the person/place/thing/idea delineation, it is an idea. Not only does it not design, not only does it not eliminate: "it" doesn't do anything!
    - nautilius 4y ago
      Of course 'evolution' is not an actor, it's just the overall pattern we give a name to. And the pattern we observe is that low fitness entities are eliminated. That plus variation yields adaptation.
      - bernulli 4y ago
        Well, yeah.
  - jgwil2 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dev_tty01 4y ago
If you consider a "design" to result from a process where someone sketches out a plan, builds it, and it works first time. I've designed a lot of systems, and it is clearly an iterative process. Balancing tradeoffs, figuring out the essentials, build prototypes, test, etc. If you are patient and diligent a solution emerges. That sounds a lot like evolution, so in my mind everything in nature has been designed by the collective intelligence of an iterative process that rewards useful optimizations.
- netizen-936824 4y ago
  I think that's a reasonable perspective to take, although I would argue that there is no clear goal in evolution besides survival and reproduction
  - Jenk 4y ago
    There is no plan in evolution. That's the point. It's a reactionary phenomenon. If it had a plan, it would be a proactive phenomenon. Evolution is happenstance.
  - rocqua 4y ago
    The nice thing about a goal, is that one goal begets other sub-goals. Or rather, a goal begets a strategy, and a strategy begets sub-goals. Beautifully at some point these sub-goals start being optimized for. A few steps of this is how I believe humans went from the sub goal "Survive, eat, reproduce" to "Make art, understand life, explore the world". The cool thing is that I think this extends beyond humans to tools. Because at some point humans had a sub-goal of "hit thing hard" they made a hammer. And this hammer has a goal (or a purpose) which is "hit things hard". This purpose can be traced back, through human sub-goals, to the final goal of evolution: "reproduce". Note that I am not saying that the point of a hammer is to produce more hammer. But the point of a hammer is (very indirectly) to allow a human to reproduce. Interestingly there is a weird game of telephone that can happen, where the sub-goals are imperfect for achieving the final goal. I would argue that this is (part of) why humans can be truly selfless. Take a soldier going to a battle he considers unwinnable but going out of a sense of duty / fear of ridicule. This will not help him reproduce, since the battle is unwinnable it will not help his progeny reproduce either. From the 'ultimate' goal, this is an irrational step. But there are sub-goals at play. Things like "be honorable", "do your duty". This idea that a sub-goal can subvert the 'ultimate' goal is very beautiful to me. It means that evolution is not some tyranny that sets our purpose in life. Instead evolution brought 'purpose' into the world. And then some stochastic process put you and me on into the universe with some, vaguely related, sense of purpose. But we have our own purpose. Sure our purpose was 'created by' the ultimate purpose of evolution. But our purpose is not subordinate to the ultimate purpose of evolution. A human life can have so much more value that just "continue the genetic line and have children". I find that freeing.

platz 4y ago

> This is one of the hallmarks of human civilization. This is one of the hallmarks of evolution. How do you think wings evolved? By repurposing an appendage that was already had a purpose other than flight.

NegativeLatency 4y ago
We didn’t evolve to play instruments though, we adapted and created them to suit our existing physical form

izhak 4y ago

I would disagree. You can play the violin firstly because the violin was designed so that it could produce beautiful sounds under _human_hands_. This way, not another.

falcor84 4y ago
It seems you are actually in agreement with the underlying argument. Humans were able to use their body, originally developed for hunting large prey, to design, build and play violins.
- toolsexist 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

croes 4y ago

Nope, we use stones because we can lift and throw it with our hands, not the other way around.

isitmadeofglass 4y ago

Our hands were not designed, and they have no “intended purpose”. We have hands because throughout the extremely long line of evolutionary adaptations the individuals that had them ended up surviving and procreating, and so we ended up having them. This is not true of a violin, which is of cause the product of intelligent design and is designed to fit our hands, no Awkwardness intended. Though naturally there are constraints dictated by the physics of the sound generation.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> Your hands were designed for throwing a stone at the eye of a mammoth. No, they weren't designed at all. And utility in fine as well as gross manipulation of the type you describe is clearly part of what they were selected (not designed) for. > But you can play the violin with them Violins, unlike human hands, were designed, and specifically for people with human hands to use. They aren't just something existing outside of humans in nature that hands happen to work with. So, it's not at all surprising that they can be used with human hands.