7 ms·

I don't understand why any "why" question in evolutionary biology is ever satisfied with a "survival of the fittest" truism. Any evolutionary explanation you gi

• trgn 2y ago
  women go to the bathroom together because if you squat to pee in the tall grass of the savannah you need somebody to lookout for predators
• sedatk 2y ago
  Wasps and bees have different ecological constraints with different risks involved. There is no contradiction here. They evolved as the fittest in their own constraint set. If bees weren’t fit enough, they would have gone extinct and replaced by bees with non-barbed stingers. There is no magic that makes them survive. Evolution doesn’t have any goals or agenda. That’s why whales still have vestigial hip bones despite having no hips whatsoever. Because it’s not a significant parameter in their survival. Same with barbed stingers of bees.
  • jstanley 2y ago
    I think this is a perfect example of what your parent comment is talking about, being: > unprovable, unfalsifiable, and have the same circular logic as bad religion. You said: > There is no contradiction here. They evolved as the fittest in their own constraint set. If bees weren’t fit enough, they would have gone extinct and replaced by bees with non-barbed stingers. There is no magic that makes them survive. Sure, there's no contradiction, but this is totally circular reasoning that could be used to prove anything. The connection graph between "They survive because they're the fittest" and "They must be the fittest because they survive" is just a circle disconnected from all other knowledge. Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality.[0] But with this circular understanding of natural selection, you could be given a description of absolutely any conceivable configuration of organism and your response would be the same: "they must be the fittest, because they survive, because only the fittest survive" and you haven't gained any understanding at all. There will never be a contradiction, because the argument is disconnected from any larger system of reasoning that could plausibly contradict it. "Hey, there is a random monkey in the Amazon that has 3 hoops on its head and a big hole through its abdomen, isn't that weird? Why are they like that?" "Ah, the hoops and the holes are required for Fitness. Only the Fittest survive, you know. So if they have 3 hoops on their heads and big holes in their abdomens, that is what makes them Fittest. Amen." "Why aren't other monkeys like that then?" "Other monkeys don't need hoops and holes for Fitness. Otherwise they too would have hoops and holes. :)" A better understanding of natural selection would be confused about the hoops and the holes, and that confusion would correlate with either the random monkey species actually not existing, or the model being wrong. As regards the bees: there probably is a reason that dying when stinging confers Fitness. But we should find out what that reason is, rather than state "Fitness because Survival" and feel like we've answered the question. [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-strength-as-a-rationalist https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-stren...
    • Retric 2y ago
      > totally circular reasoning that could be used to prove anything. No, you can attack the reasoning by looking into actual costs. It seems like it can explain anything because we don’t constantly see examples where it’s false. Looking at the costs to bees you see what percentage of them die from attacking mammal flesh and yep it’s a tiny rounding error. Hypothetically, in a world without constraints mice could have a 100 foot long teeth, but we don’t live in a world without constraints.
      • xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
        > Hypothetically, in a world without constraints mice could have a 100 foot long teeth Oh boy, today's the day you learn something new about rodents.
        • stavros 2y ago
          What, the fact that their teeth can grow so long that they'll circle around and stab their brains?
    • kevinventullo 2y ago
      My understanding from the article and the general theory of Superorganisms is that it’s not exactly true that “dying when stinging confers fitness”. Rather, dying when stinging is just not a huge penalty when you’re talking about non-reproducing members of a colony. So, while it may be a good thing for bees to evolve the ability to survive stinging, the selective pressure is not as large as one might intuitively expect. Maybe a better title for the post would be something like, “Isn’t it weird that bees die when they sting? Shouldn’t they have evolved away from that?”
      • thaumasiotes 2y ago
        Well, there's a larger problem in the post. The primary reason that a bee dies when it stings you is that you kill the bee. A bee stinging an inanimate hunk of meat is unlikely to die. But they can die, and yeah, a big part of the reason why is that dying isn't as large of a cost for bees as you might expect from a human perspective. And looping back, another part is that given the very high risk of being intentionally killed when stinging an enemy who you want to sting, improving the much smaller rate of accidental death isn't really worth much. But even though it isn't worth much, it's worth something, and work has been done on the project.
• RangerScience 2y ago
  Survival of the fittest is the flawed quote, usually used by those with supremacist conceptual frameworks (that there can be an objective “better”, etc). This shows up a lot in fiction, where the quote is used as justification for cruelty, atrocities, and the like. IMHO, the much better quote is: > It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change. See https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/people/about-darwin/six-things-darwin-never-said/evolution-misquotation https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/people/about-darwin/six-thin...
  • HPsquared 2y ago
    I'm very tickled by the lack of attention to detail here. The article does present that quote, yes, but it's preceded by the sentence: "None of the fake soundbites is more insidious than the first:" i.e. it's a fake quote
  • ch4s3 2y ago
    > It is the one that is most adaptable to change That is what fit means.
  • mixmastamyk 2y ago
    It is not only the best adapted class that survives, aka the "fittest." They only need to be good enough to survive and reproduce. In other words, the principle should be stated as "survival of the good enough." I know it doesn't roll off the tongue as well, but is more accurate. Perhaps, survival of the fit. (period)
• notRobot 2y ago
  Here's an explanation of how this works: All creatures are very complicated. Thus reproduction doesn't produce perfect clones, "mutations" take place. This is largely because there are so many different ways to derive one individual out of two individuals' complex genitic material. This is all a feature. This is why individuals have unique characteristics. Think about how different humans are from each other, even though we're all humans. This same thing applies to all creatures. Every individual is different. Those who have "disabilities" (disadvantages in their context) are less likely to survive. So those with advantageous traits survive and pass their traits on through reproduction, making those specific traits more prevalent. The answer to "why didn't x evolve to do y?" is usually just that that specific mutation might have never occurred or caught on randomly. This is also why different species do different things differently. It's all random mutations. Some were beneficial in their context and environment so those who had them were more likely to survive and pass those traits along. It's not that "the objective of life is to survive" in a spiritual sense, it's that life randomly happens and some of it survives and it makes more life like itself. In some ways, I suppose the purpose of life is to create more life. Systems that replicate themselves successfully survive. We call these "life". It's really a linguistics thing. Hope some of this makes sense. I enjoyed thinking about this.
  • _1tem 2y ago
    If your answer is "it's a random mutation" then that settles the "why" question permanently. Why all this idle speculation about bee's stingers, then? It was a random mutation, and it survived, done.
    • notRobot 2y ago
      It was random, and it survived. Every single part of an organism goes through a recombination/mutation process countless times, the stinger evolved to be what it is today over a very long time and it's cool to study why it ended up the way it did. Tells us about their environment and history and evolutionary pressures, survival is a result of the random traits being successful in their context in specific ways.
• stouset 2y ago
  > Why do species survive? Because they did, and because the objective of life is to survive. But why? In evolutionary biology, that definitionally is the ultimate answer. One species survived, another didn’t. Sometimes that’s because the adaptation helped them outcompete, sometimes it’s because they were already competitive and this preexisting disadvantage from an earlier round didn’t hurt enough to matter. We can try to find intuitive explanations past that which feel satisfying but it’s always going to be a rough approximation. Let’s use chess as an analogy. Allow an engine to analyze a position and tell us the best path forward. But why did it choose that line? We can (and do) come up with explanations that help us fit a move into our understanding of the game: moving this pawn allows that knight to occupy a better spot where it can exert its influence on the rest of the board, or whatever. But that’s merely a convenient simplification for our gut understanding. It’s not really the actual answer. The ultimate “why” is “because it produces the best possible eventual outcome no matter the response”.
• johndhi 2y ago
  Love this comment. It highlights a major misunderstanding of biology that many people who didn't study it in depth have: that every, or most features of living beings do not have an "evolutionary explanation." T-rex arms aren't short so they can open flowers - they just happen to be small because that's the type of creature that happened to survive after a lot of changes.
  • bornfreddy 2y ago
    Maybe this explains why humans are snoring? It just wasn't / isn't evolutionary important.
    • prerok 2y ago
      Well, the explanation I heard is that snoring provided protection during sleeping to scare away predators. I don't know the source for this theory, so take it with a grain of salt :)
      • bornfreddy 2y ago
        I heard that too, but it doesn't sound likely. If I was sleeping and there was a predator passing by, I would prefer it didn't notice me... :)
      • pandemic_region 2y ago
        The fact that heavier (and thus more attractive as prey) people are more likely to snore could give credibility to your explanation.
    • newsuser 2y ago
      Most likely, yes, like the loudness of baby crying. Humans are pack animals so any predator attracted by snoring or baby cry, and deciding to check it out would be in a very very big trouble.
  • dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
    >many people who didn't study it in depth have Or are incapable of studying/reflecting in depth.
• pks016 2y ago
  What kind of explanations are you looking for? Your idea is that there should be some sort of common explanations of why. I guess because these are theories and best guess based on the evidence. There are many unknowns but that doesn't mean we should disregard what we know.
  • _1tem 2y ago
    If someone simply asked what are the advantages of bees barbed stingers over wasps non barbed ones, that would be an interesting question. But if someone asks “why” and then proceeds to give a circular logic explanation (it survived because it is fit because it survived) that is unprovable, I find that to be silly idle speculation.
    • barbazoo 2y ago
      I believe you’d have to look at the evolutionary advantage of bees with barbed stingers vs bees without barbed stingers and how one made that particular group of bees more successful than the other.
• amelius 2y ago
  The main problem I see with how some popular science journalists approach evolutionary biology is that they always think from the perspective of the individual, as opposed to the group.
• ripitout 2y ago
  Love how the top comment is "I don't see how evolution explains everything in biology". Classic HN.
• crystal_revenge 2y ago
  The "why" questions people ask about evolutionary biology are the carry over of theology into the understanding of evolution. People still need to believe there is a fundamental reason the world is the way it is. A similar theological carry over is the belief that we are better suited to the environment we evolved in. This is akin to "golden age" thinking, that the world today is somehow not right and if we return to the origin things will be better. At a fundamental level causality doesn't even really make sense in evolutionary biology. You can ask the question "what benefits do this feature provide", but you can never really say that's why they evolved. In the end you have the traits you do because, at point in the species development, they didn't make you die faster and some helped you survive better, but it's not really possible to disentangle these. Likewise people don't really understand that in evolutionary processes both the species and the environment are constantly changing. The notion that a species is "adapted for a particular environment" is somewhat nonsensical because "the environment" is never really fixed.
  • atorodius 2y ago
    > The notion that a species is "adapted for a particular environment" is somewhat nonsensical because "the environment" is never really fixed. Mever considered this. Good stuff
• wruza 2y ago
  Imagine taking your favorite fractal <formula here> and picking a random point in one of its non-trivial regions, trying to explain what happens there. Would you be better satisfied by <formula> or by specific step by step calculations that lead to that neighborhood? Either way, now imagine taking not your favorite, irregular, non-describable, non-computable, enormously complex processes-driven fractal that is the real nature, then picking a random point in one of its non-trivial regions, trying to explain what happens there. Now ask yourself the same question and what comes to mind. More short analogy would be that biology is physics with all elementary particles being different.
  • enugu 2y ago
    This is an interesting analogy, thanks. But, doesn't this match the parent comment's point? If someone asks why a particular point and not, a nearby point is on the fractal, the reply is just that complicated program generated this number and not another number. It leads to the theme of incompressibility (is there a program of smaller length which can correctly check whether a point in a given region is on the fractal). Sometimes, programs are incompressible, and at other times there is a local explanation. So, people writing on this topic should be careful to make this distinction and check if their local explanation (which is a 'compression' of the evolution process) actually classifies points into fit/unfit regions with the assumption that the points are in some common region(shared features in the environment). Compare also with explanations of historical events(list of causes for a victory but with the same causes present, there is failure in another context) and atheist - religious debates on God's grace for a particular prayer and allowing the suffering of others. If a local explanation can't distinguish events, then the global explanation has to be validated by something else.
    • wruza 2y ago
      This analogy doesn’t really answer it, it only shows that there’s no generic answer. So “fittest” basically means “the result”. It’s a definition, not explanation. But it is used instead of “the result” because we have some insights into how it was calculated, and we know that the nature simply creates {mi,bi,tri}llions of variants and then some minuscle amount has better chances to pass and mix these genes, outplaying others in this game. That’s where fittest comes from. Any attempt to explain it fully meets with a local complexity, in which only high-level questions can be answered in the same limited high-level manner. So there is some compressibility, but it’s clearly jpeg. Cause if a whole planet of distinct particles would strictly follow some rule to compress the observations into, it would be a rule of physics, not biology. E.g. why do animals fall to the ground? Due to gravity, here’s <formula>, works for all particles.
• raincole 2y ago
  I think you misunderstood what people mean by "why" in the context of evolution. For example, you ask a random person what his job is. He: I fix TVs You: Why? He: Uh, that's what keeps a roof over me and keeps my family fed? You: But clearly other humans do other jobs and still have roofs. So it's not a real "why". Your statement is falsified. > Evolutionary explanations like these for "why" things are the way they are not just pure idle speculation, but they are also often unprovable, unfalsifiable, and have the same circular logic as bad religion How DNA works at molecular level is science. How creators became what they are now is history. History usually doesn't have the same level of falsifiability as science does.
  • raincole 2y ago
    * creators -> creatures This typo somehow fits the theme in a discussion over evolution ;P
  • andreyvit 2y ago
    I think your example is perfect. What he gave you is not a complete answer to why, because, as you say, he might have been doing a number of other jobs. So why roofs specifically? Add the description of how he inherited his father’s carpenter business but whenever he visited clients, they all had leaky roof, yadayada, and that he now feels happy enough to not look for any further changes, and you get the kind of answer OP is looking for.
• kragen 2y ago
  > Any evolutionary explanation you give me is also falsified by the existence of another species with a different/opposite trait. Whatever explanation you give for a bee's barbed stinger is falsified by the wasp's non-barbed one. The explanation in the article does not reduce to a "survival of the fittest" truism and is not falsified by this example. The article explains at great length why that is, specifically referring to that example.
• _orz_ 2y ago
  I had a very similar feeling until I took a course with one of the leading researchers in the field of protein folding. Two things that he repeatedly mentioned stuck with me a lot: Evolution is not the survival of the fittest but the not-dying of the unfit. That explains why we have so many different species in the same ecological niche. The example he used was different types of grass on the same field. All of those were fit enough to not die. The second thing he always repeated was that biology only observes what does or at some point did work. That leads to a huge confirmation bias that research needs to be aware of. Two species might be very similar but just across different sides of the boundary of survival.
• throwaway519 2y ago
  Why did the spaghetti monster give bee srings barbs? Because the bees prayed for protection and got saucy about it. Is that better? Are you really looking for equivalence? Is that fit enough? Instead of spreading evolution FUD, there are many0laces you could educate yourself. S9meone with a HN acvount is more than able to seek these out. Therefore your motives for this comment seen more disingenuous.
• nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
  I have a personal theory that genetics and survival just need to be good enough. They may find other local maxima and improve things. But they don't need to be perfect in every dimension. There is room for stuff that doesn't make sense to human logic. In addition because species don't generally breed with other species you need to find those optimisations through chance within a species. And genes are not a feature list. Turn one gene on and something else may turn off. There are trade off too.
• dalmo3 2y ago
  I can't believe no one has mentioned, this is exactly the teleological fallacy. I was once very curious about evolutionary science until I realised exactly what you said. It's everywhere. Once you see it you can't unsee it. If you're going to go that route, at least have the sense to use the word "how", not, "why" and never "because". There's nothing causal in evolution.
• ErigmolCt 2y ago
  Evolution isn’t a perfect engineer