5 ms·

Nothing in nature was necessarily "designed"

by netizen-936824 4y ago

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.
        netizen-936824 4y ago
        No, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the topic at hand Also unsure how that's an appropriate response to a request for citations?
  - doliveira 4y ago
    I think you're assigning too much weight to the word itself. In informal settings, or even quasi-formal ones, it's not uncommon to use "designed" when we don't mean "literally designed".
    - earth_walker 4y ago
      The use of "design" in the context of the structure and capability of human bodies means precisely "literally designed" to many religious people, including many readers of HN. So I don't think it's out of place for the GP to address this.
      - netizen-936824 4y ago
        Thank you. This was exactly the point of my comment. While some readers interpret the word lightly, there are many who use it literally in the context of biology with a reference to creationism. There is no evidence for creationism
- 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.

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.
        netizen-936824 4y ago
        No, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the topic at hand Also unsure how that's an appropriate response to a request for citations?
- doliveira 4y ago
  I think you're assigning too much weight to the word itself. In informal settings, or even quasi-formal ones, it's not uncommon to use "designed" when we don't mean "literally designed".
  - earth_walker 4y ago
    The use of "design" in the context of the structure and capability of human bodies means precisely "literally designed" to many religious people, including many readers of HN. So I don't think it's out of place for the GP to address this.
    - netizen-936824 4y ago
      Thank you. This was exactly the point of my comment. While some readers interpret the word lightly, there are many who use it literally in the context of biology with a reference to creationism. There is no evidence for creationism
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.