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> You can't conclude that. Evolution is noisy and random. You're correct that you can't conclude that evolution is perfection/optimized, but it's also not corr
by freedomben 3y ago
> You can't conclude that. Evolution is noisy and random.
You're correct that you can't conclude that evolution is perfection/optimized, but it's also not correct to say it is random. The genetic variation is random, but natural selection is very much not random[1][2].
[1]: https://evolution.berkeley.edu/misconceptions-about-natural-selection-and-adaptation/but-its-not-random-either/ https://evolution.berkeley.edu/misconceptions-about-natural-...
[2]: See Number 7. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/faq/cat01.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/faq/cat01.html
- vcg3rd 3y agoRegardless, it doesn't have agency and isn't clever. Personally I belive in a Designer, but since middle school I've been bewildered by the way evolution is almost always presented, outside of rigorous scientific literature, as if there is agency, intelligence and intent behind it. I don't have a problem with that, but materialists don't have that luxury and use language in bad faith when do it.
- philosopher1234 3y agoEvolution in humans, from an atheist perspective, is consistent with the idea of a designer: humans are the designer. Sexual selection in humans is a psychological phenomenon, and it’s subject to all of our most hifalutin ideas. You have an opinion about what “god” wants and express it through sexual selection, thus influencing our collective evolution in that direction.
- stuaxo 3y agoBut why do they want what they want, and how much agency is there really anyway ?
- TeMPOraL 3y agoAlso ironically, by the time we became able to conceive of and communicate about such ideas, natural evolution has long stopped being the driving force behind how humans and human groups look and grow and evolve.
- RoyalHenOil 3y agoEvolution is still very much a driving force in humanity. Every time a couple struggles to get pregnant, every time birth control fails and results in an unplanned pregnancy, every time someone decides to be child-free, every time someone dies young, etc., etc., humanity evolves toward one genotype over another. If anything, I would argue that human evolution has accelerated in the last few decades (at least in wealthy nations where people have a lot of control over their reproduction and enormous choice in who they marry, if they marry at all).
- throwway120385 3y agoIt's hard to explain an animistic force of nature to another human without using words that imply agency. It feels like our language and our ways of thinking are hard-wired to see everything through that lens because we have agency. It's like a fish trying to imagine what it's like to be outside of water.
- 48864w6ui 3y agoBruce Lee's injunction "be like water" probably means don't overcomplicate with agency and opposed consciousnesses, just evolve the lagrangian (towards victory). (Speak not of the relevant XKCD)
- Yeul 3y agoDidn't Darwin write a book that did just that?
- Qwertious 3y agoYes, but reciting the entire book mid-conversation isn't a realistic option.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jononomo 3y agoSo you believe in a "force" that creates life?
- oasisaimlessly 3y agoPastor says that the four fundamental forces are necessary and sufficient to create life.
- renewiltord 3y agoDude, that's just the language. "Water wants to flow downhill". It's a model, man. Everyone learns this pretty quickly. I don't get how this position is so popular on HN/Reddit. The language is giving you tools to model the world. "The water doesn't want anything. It's just the laws of gravity." Intelligence comes from being able to efficiently compress highly predictive models. Any computational mechanism that is unable to do this is a low-grade intelligence. If you need the whole thing spelled out carefully for you, you're NGMI.
- manthedudeguy 3y ago[dead]
- graemep 3y agoYou can say "water flows downhill" instead. Why not say things in the more accurate way.
- gumby 3y agoYou might enjoy Dennett’s “The Intentional Stance” for some enlightening exploration of this metaphor, e.g. “The thermostat tries to keep the temperature between 67 and 69” not only makes sense but is a useful way to think of it even when we don’t believe the thermostat has agency.
- jononomo 3y agoThe thermostat was ultimately designed by a mind that has objectives. That is why it tries to control the temperature.
- freedomben 3y agoWhat about the ocean? The ocean also "tries" to keep the temperature steady.
- rexer 3y agoThat one doesn’t quite work for me. A thermostat has a purpose: keep a temperature. An ocean doesn’t really have a purpose.
- TehShrike 3y agoI've observed this as well. People who believe in evolution can't seem to stop themselves from using "intelligent design" language to anthropomorphize evolution.
- prerok 3y agoI agree with the sentiment. I also heard of some books that say stupid things like humans have not yet reached the maximum of human evolution. Of course we have not reached the end of our evolution. That will exist only when we are all extinct. As for the direction... that is something else. Maybe we will evolve into higher intelligence, but as the Dick's story "The Golden man" or "Idiocracy" show, is the intelligence really the driving force of today?
- mulmen 3y ago> is the intelligence really the driving force of today? Yes, certainly. More than anything intelligence differentiates us as a species.
- prerok 3y agoI don't agree. Women, in general, don't find men attractive because of intelligence. It's other factors more like, whether their life is in order, they are fit, or the classic, if they are symmetrical. So, we are visually, materiallistically oriented. Not all, of course, but evolution works on population size, not exceptions. Exceptions only come into an overbearing effect on cataclysmic events.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoIt's not that kind of intelligence that matters. Don't think in terms of being good at chess, poetry, or multiplying numbers in your head. Think wheel, writing, domestication, agriculture, petrochemical engineering, nuclear weapons, computers, genetic engineering. Our intelligence is what allows us to acquire and improve new adaptations without having to change our own genetics. We're able to change living environments and adapt to them multiple times in a single life span, and we went from basic language to walking on the Moon much faster than evolution is able to make meaningful changes through natural selection. It takes however many million years for a species to grow fur to adapt to cold climate; it took a spear for us to adapt by stealing other animals' fur, and couple hundred years to figure out how to make synthetic ones at scale. In that time, we adapted to almost every environment on the planet. Intelligence very much is the driving force behind humanity. EDIT: and we're also beating natural selection from the other end - modern medicine allows many people to live and reproduce, who without it would've died from genetic diseases. We're very good at denying the "fitness" criteria nature uses.
- Nevermark 3y agoAs humans we do things for teleological reasons. Meaning we can say we did X in order to accomplish Y. Ascribing teleological explanations to evolution is technically wrong, since it doesn’t look ahead. However, it does something very similar. Our brains process competing options, from plausible to nonsensical, before selecting an action, partly in sequence (ideation), but also in parallel (competition processing). Evolution tries many options in parallel and sequence too. Just by actually doing them and then selecting which of those choices to keep repeating (better survival), and those to forget (extinction of genes, clusters of genes, or whole species). So over longer time periods, it acts very teleologically. A kind of reverse teleologic by hindsight. The same is true for the “brilliance” of this teleology. Evolution tries so many things, that it can solve very difficult problems in very novel ways. Is that “intelligence”? Our casual usage of intelligence isn’t defined precisely enough to say one way or another. One person would say evolution is blind, and in the short run it is. But another person might point out that evolution is anything but blind. It is an epic version of Edison’s lab, where millions or billions of false solutions are continually tried and ruled out, to find each new fitness enhancement. It relentlessly experiments and follows the “data”. On longer timescales, evolution is effectively teleological, highly creative and very intelligent. And all three aspects compound over time, just like human learning and research, because evolution doesn’t just find new features, but new abstractions and modularity. Such as flexible reusable gene systems for encoding body parts, epigenetic reuse of features in different kinds of cells for different purposes or triggered and “run” by different conditions, nervous systems, etc. Thus evolution “learned” to speed itself up over time, letting it more rapidly optimize larger more complex solutions. I.e. orders of magnitude faster creation of new novel animals, than it originally took to optimize the first cellular life, colonies of cells, etc. Watching evolutions first billion years would not have suggested that the plethora of different intelligent animals, from octopus, parrot to human, would have been remotely possible in the time it took. Evolution’s compounding meta learning created brains, our “true” teleology, and its expansion into technological and economic expressions of the pursuit of survival. All meta extensions of evolution, found by evolution.
- billforsternz 3y agoThat's amazing. Did you just type that out or did you spend a couple of years preparing it just in case?
- bee_rider 3y agoHumans anthropomorphise everything, I’m pretty sure it is how we run general intelligence software on small pack hunting tribal creature hardware: we model evolution as a clever sentient trickster and speculate about how does things.
- heresie-dabord 3y ago> natural selection is very much not random Except where punctuated by (subjective) catastrophe. But then it is not the mechanism of evolution itself that is random.
- prerok 3y agoWell, it's never random, is it? It's only random when all is equal, otherwise it's biased. That's why it works. Consider birds. There was a good article a few days back, on why only non-toothed birds survived. Until the meteor-strike, 65M years ago, all was equal and they survived along-side. Until they were the only survivors.
- heresie-dabord 3y agoThe asteroid that created the Chicxulub impact came from a rather random location but had a deterministic effect given where it struck. And here we are, with beaked birds. ^_^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
- Retric 3y agoRandom doesn’t mean all outcomes are equally likely, a coin rarely ends up on its edge. Thus evolution is often random between local optima. People’s organs don’t represent perfect left/right symmetry but there’s no particular benefit for which of the two options were chosen overall. Ie swap just which lung is smaller and you get lots of problems, but swap everything and it all works.
- graemep 3y agoLocal optima are also the reason you get things like the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which runs from the brain to the larynx going under the heart. bad enough in a human, a huge deviation in a Giraffe or a Brontosaurus.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jononomo 3y agoNatural Selection is not the interesting part, though. Natural Selection is the boring part. Obviously a working system will be selected over one that doesn't work. The interesting question is where the working system that Natural Selection was able to select came from in the first place.