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Two things: 0) Humans (and even our recent ancestors) eating you are a very recent thing to be concerned about, numbers-wise. By the time our numbers were enou

by fooqux 9mo ago

Two things: 0) Humans (and even our recent ancestors) eating you are a very recent thing to be concerned about, numbers-wise. By the time our numbers were enough to provide evolutionary pressure, we started farming what we wanted, which kinda breaks the process. Also. most poisons don't effect everything equally, so what might prevent a horse from eating you might taste delicious to us (like the nightshade family) or even be sought after for other reasons, like capsaicin. 1) You're succumbing to the usual evolution fallacy. Evolution doesn't want anything more than 1 and 1 want to be 2. It's just a process, and sometimes (hell maybe even often) it doesn't work in a linear fashion. Lots of "X steps back, Y steps forward", and oftentimes each of those steps can take anything from decades to centuries or more to make, and by the time it happens what was pressuring that change is gone. So many people, even when they obviously know better, like to think of evolution as intelligent. It's obviously not. But every time someone says stuff like this, it reinforces the fallacy and then we get people saying things like "if evolution is real, why come $insane_argument_against_evolution?"

malux85 9mo ago
Also way too biased to humans, the fact that they poison us could just be a biochemistry coincidence, the author is operating from a very human-centric POV (like you say in (0))
VanshPatel99 9mo ago
I would expect this way of thinking about evolution would be common but unfortunately it isn't. I feel the way we say "X animal evolved to do Y" sets the ton as if it was a active, thought out decision. Instead, it was just 1000s of mutation happened and maybe a certain kind was able to survive while other wasn't. It is more of a mathematical concept than conscious one.
- uh_uh 9mo ago
  I find it hard to believe that evolution is completely blind. The search space that it can explore via mutations is astronomically large. Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years doesn't really save the argument as it takes some specimen years to develop and get feedback on their fitness. It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips". I'm not trying to suggest woo here, but there has to be some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat.
  - lotsofpulp 9mo ago
    That mechanism is a set of genes failing to procreate.
    - yes_man 9mo ago
      Epigenetics can arguably be an example of what the comment means by narrowing the search space. You can have heritable changes to gene expression that are not part of your genome, but are a result of feedback from the environment (and not random mutations, viability of which natural selection will judge over future generations)
  - DonHopkins 9mo ago
    As a general rule of thumb: truth = claim.replace(/I'm not (.*?), but (.*)/, "I'm $1."); Then again this is a discussion about "Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations" so maybe woo is appropriate, and you should embrace it.
    - FunHearing3443 9mo ago
      Is there a way their question could have been phrased that would have not drawn you to make that assumption, which seems to be an ethos attack, or are you predisposed to reply in such a way about any philosophical evolution question?
      - DonHopkins 9mo ago
        When people say /I'm not (.*?), but (.*)/, they invariably are what they're claiming they aren't. That's what that phrase means. For example, we've all heard it a million times from people defending their vote for Donald Trump. There's even a wikipedia page about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist,_but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist,_but... If you really mean $2, then just say $2, you don't have to preface it with "I'm not $1, but". That's a waste of words, beating around the bush, a rhetorical shield, that reveals that you really are $1 and you feel the need to be defensive about it. The word "but" in that context means the thing before it is false, just air escaping from the folds of your fat, and you can ignore everything before the "but". "But" is a contrastive conjunction, signaling the clause before "but" is expected, socially required, or reputationally protective, and the clause after "but" is the actual communicative payload. It means to discount or ignore $1 and evaluate the speaker by $2. Saying “I’m not $1, but $2” does not strengthen $2, it does't make $2 safer or clearer, it just signals defensiveness, and undermines credibility. Again, this is a discussion about psychedelic mushrooms, fairytale-like hallucinations, and machine elves, so woo away all you want! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO2dPIdEaR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO2dPIdEaR4
fc417fc802 9mo ago
While your objection is technically correct it can still be useful (ie simple, straightforward, etc) to phrase things in terms of a goal. Since a goal (pursued by an intelligent being) and optimization pressure (a property of a blind process) are approximately the same thing in the end. In other words, Anthropomorphization can be useful despite not being true in a literal sense. Certainly this can be misleading to the layman. The term "observer" in quantum mechanics suffers similarly.
- IanCal 9mo ago
  It’s a useful start to move away from “it’s just random” but it’s just so different it doesn’t help in many cases. It’s not approximately the same.
- PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
  No. "Optimization pressure" makes it sound as if there is a single metric for optimization, whereas there are a constantly shifting set of different metrics. Worse (or more precisely, more complex) there are frequently multiple different "solutions" for a given metric, and evolution doesn't care. Put a little differently, there is no "optimization" pressure at all: evolution is not attempting to optimize anything (*). Trying to fit anthropomorphized design onto a process that is absolutely the opposite of that in every way (no intent, multiple outcomes, no optimization) just leads people to not think clearly about this sort of thing. (*) no, not even "reproductive fitness" - rates of reproduction are subject to massive amounts of environmental "noise", to the degree that minor improvements in offspring survivability will often be invisible over anything other than the very long term. Further, the most desirable rates of reproduction will also vary over time, leading to what once may have appeared to be an improvement into a liability (and vice versa, of course).
  - tialaramex 9mo ago
    Right. It's extremely unlikely that "unable to synthesize Vitamin C" would ever have actively been selected for. But it was also unlikely to be strongly selected against in any version of humans or their near ancestors which have access to basically any common food. So, randomly this pathway is deleted in our species, but there won't be a satisfying "just so" explanation, it's just blind luck. I happen to think we should fix it, most people either don't care or believe we shouldn't.
Sharlin 9mo ago
0) What do humans have to do with it? We're not the only animals that eat mushrooms.
- RicardoLuis0 9mo ago
  that's exactly the point, the _lack of_ humans during its evolution is what it has to do with us, a mushroom may be poisonous to the species that it evolved around, while at the same time not being poisonous to humans
  - Sharlin 9mo ago
    Hmm. I'm not sure there are many mushrooms poisonous to other mammals but not to us. We have almost exactly the same biochemistry after all.
hinkley 9mo ago
Survival of the fittest is also a wrong way to think about evolution that leads many people to make assumptions that are backward. Selection doesn’t pick winners, it picks losers. But bad luck also picks losers, and good luck pick winners, so things with small negative or positive effects can be swamped, and anything neutral has no pressure to be phased out at all. So if being born with blue hair turns out not to have any effect on your survival, because for instance none of your predators can see blue any better than they can see what every color your mate is, then there will continue to be blue babies at some rate. And if you or your mate have other genes that do boost your survivability, then there will be a lot of blue babies. But not on the merits of being blue. However the animals involved may just decide to involve blueness in their mate selection criteria. Because correlation. Then many generations later, if your habitat changes, or your range expands, maybe blue fur protects more or less well against UV light, or moss growing in your fur, or some new predator. Now the selection works more like people think it works. But it’s been sitting there as genetic noise for perhaps centuries or eons, waiting for a complementary gene or environmental change to create a forcing function.
- childintime 9mo ago
  Nowadays evolution is waiting to be called "backpropagation".
didibus 9mo ago
> like to think of evolution as intelligent Evolution is more intelligent than people assume. The selection is driven by each species choices, and the more intelligent the species, the more intelligence played a role in it.
pandemic_region 9mo ago
> $insane_argument_against_evolution That looks like Perl variable syntax. Arguably the most mushroom like programming language.
- bonesss 9mo ago
  There’s more than one way to be a fungi.
tor825gl 9mo ago
If I understood correctly the argument in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins suggests that thinking about a genome as having a goal which it adapts itself to work towards, is absolutely a useful conceptual model. He makes it very clear that the genome does not actually have intentionality, but also that this is the right way to imagine how organisms might evolve, as though they did have both goals and a plan.
- uplifter 9mo ago
  In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins emphasized that the primary unit of evolution was the individual gene, not whole genomes. The genes were replicators and the genomes were just collections of replicators, and the way the selection pressure math worked out, there was too much diffusion of responsibility for whole genomes that typically evolution could not work coherently at that scale, or at least that's my best recollection of the book's main theory. Regarding intentionality being a good practical assumption, I actually don't recall Dawkins recommending that, and it seems doubtful because that can lead to all kinds of fallacious reasoning. I mostly considered Dawkins a data-based neo-darwininian, so it would surprise me that he would recommend that. Could you recall a quote or chapter from the book that bolsters your point? edit: typo
  - tor825gl 9mo ago
    > Could you recall a quote or chapter from the book that bolsters your point? Yes, the second word of the title.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - uplifter 9mo ago
      Yeah, that's not really good enough, by the author's own admission: From wikipedia: 'In the foreword to the book's 30th-anniversary edition, Dawkins said he "can readily see that [the book's title] might give an inadequate impression of its contents" and in retrospect wishes he had taken Tom Maschler's advice and titled it The Immortal Gene.[2] He laments that “Too many people read it by title only.”' [0] Furthermore, your concept that genes should be thought of as having a plan is just in stark contradiction with the Darwinian conception of natural selection, which Dawkins was largely a champion of. My own recollection was that he described how genes readily had the appearance of acting in their own best interest, but he fell short of advocating that modeling them as having intention is a useful contrivance. Evolution does not have any sense for the future, there is no planning evolved, and Dawkins understands that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
wkat4242 9mo ago
> So many people, even when they obviously know better, like to think of evolution as intelligent. It's obviously not. But every time someone says stuff like this, it reinforces the fallacy and then we get people saying things like "if evolution is real, why come $insane_argument_against_evolution?" Tbh those kinds of people are beyond convincing. And I think most of them are trolling or have fallen under the spell of other trolls. There's clearly a network effect. We don't really have a flat earther movement here in Europe and evolution deniers are insignificant. I don't think people saying these things actually think evolution is intelligent. They just use the phrase "want" to indicate the survival pressure that lead to the change propagating. But the people that don't believe in evolution are so indoctrinated it doesn't matter what words we use. Ps I do find it fascinating that a non intelligent process like evolution managed to create intelligence. Even though the state of the world often makes me doubt intelligence exists :)
squeefers 9mo ago
> By the time our numbers were enough to provide evolutionary pressure, we started farming what we wanted, which kinda breaks the process a lot of assumption in this sentence. proof needed

by fooqux 9mo ago

malux85 9mo ago

Also way too biased to humans, the fact that they poison us could just be a biochemistry coincidence, the author is operating from a very human-centric POV (like you say in (0))

VanshPatel99 9mo ago

I would expect this way of thinking about evolution would be common but unfortunately it isn't. I feel the way we say "X animal evolved to do Y" sets the ton as if it was a active, thought out decision. Instead, it was just 1000s of mutation happened and maybe a certain kind was able to survive while other wasn't. It is more of a mathematical concept than conscious one.

uh_uh 9mo ago
I find it hard to believe that evolution is completely blind. The search space that it can explore via mutations is astronomically large. Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years doesn't really save the argument as it takes some specimen years to develop and get feedback on their fitness. It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips". I'm not trying to suggest woo here, but there has to be some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat.
- lotsofpulp 9mo ago
  That mechanism is a set of genes failing to procreate.
  - yes_man 9mo ago
    Epigenetics can arguably be an example of what the comment means by narrowing the search space. You can have heritable changes to gene expression that are not part of your genome, but are a result of feedback from the environment (and not random mutations, viability of which natural selection will judge over future generations)
- DonHopkins 9mo ago
  As a general rule of thumb: truth = claim.replace(/I'm not (.*?), but (.*)/, "I'm $1."); Then again this is a discussion about "Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations" so maybe woo is appropriate, and you should embrace it.
  - FunHearing3443 9mo ago
    Is there a way their question could have been phrased that would have not drawn you to make that assumption, which seems to be an ethos attack, or are you predisposed to reply in such a way about any philosophical evolution question?
    - DonHopkins 9mo ago
      When people say /I'm not (.*?), but (.*)/, they invariably are what they're claiming they aren't. That's what that phrase means. For example, we've all heard it a million times from people defending their vote for Donald Trump. There's even a wikipedia page about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist,_but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist,_but... If you really mean $2, then just say $2, you don't have to preface it with "I'm not $1, but". That's a waste of words, beating around the bush, a rhetorical shield, that reveals that you really are $1 and you feel the need to be defensive about it. The word "but" in that context means the thing before it is false, just air escaping from the folds of your fat, and you can ignore everything before the "but". "But" is a contrastive conjunction, signaling the clause before "but" is expected, socially required, or reputationally protective, and the clause after "but" is the actual communicative payload. It means to discount or ignore $1 and evaluate the speaker by $2. Saying “I’m not $1, but $2” does not strengthen $2, it does't make $2 safer or clearer, it just signals defensiveness, and undermines credibility. Again, this is a discussion about psychedelic mushrooms, fairytale-like hallucinations, and machine elves, so woo away all you want! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO2dPIdEaR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO2dPIdEaR4

fc417fc802 9mo ago

While your objection is technically correct it can still be useful (ie simple, straightforward, etc) to phrase things in terms of a goal. Since a goal (pursued by an intelligent being) and optimization pressure (a property of a blind process) are approximately the same thing in the end. In other words, Anthropomorphization can be useful despite not being true in a literal sense. Certainly this can be misleading to the layman. The term "observer" in quantum mechanics suffers similarly.

IanCal 9mo ago
It’s a useful start to move away from “it’s just random” but it’s just so different it doesn’t help in many cases. It’s not approximately the same.
PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
No. "Optimization pressure" makes it sound as if there is a single metric for optimization, whereas there are a constantly shifting set of different metrics. Worse (or more precisely, more complex) there are frequently multiple different "solutions" for a given metric, and evolution doesn't care. Put a little differently, there is no "optimization" pressure at all: evolution is not attempting to optimize anything (*). Trying to fit anthropomorphized design onto a process that is absolutely the opposite of that in every way (no intent, multiple outcomes, no optimization) just leads people to not think clearly about this sort of thing. (*) no, not even "reproductive fitness" - rates of reproduction are subject to massive amounts of environmental "noise", to the degree that minor improvements in offspring survivability will often be invisible over anything other than the very long term. Further, the most desirable rates of reproduction will also vary over time, leading to what once may have appeared to be an improvement into a liability (and vice versa, of course).
- tialaramex 9mo ago
  Right. It's extremely unlikely that "unable to synthesize Vitamin C" would ever have actively been selected for. But it was also unlikely to be strongly selected against in any version of humans or their near ancestors which have access to basically any common food. So, randomly this pathway is deleted in our species, but there won't be a satisfying "just so" explanation, it's just blind luck. I happen to think we should fix it, most people either don't care or believe we shouldn't.

Sharlin 9mo ago

0) What do humans have to do with it? We're not the only animals that eat mushrooms.

RicardoLuis0 9mo ago
that's exactly the point, the _lack of_ humans during its evolution is what it has to do with us, a mushroom may be poisonous to the species that it evolved around, while at the same time not being poisonous to humans
- Sharlin 9mo ago
  Hmm. I'm not sure there are many mushrooms poisonous to other mammals but not to us. We have almost exactly the same biochemistry after all.

hinkley 9mo ago

Survival of the fittest is also a wrong way to think about evolution that leads many people to make assumptions that are backward. Selection doesn’t pick winners, it picks losers. But bad luck also picks losers, and good luck pick winners, so things with small negative or positive effects can be swamped, and anything neutral has no pressure to be phased out at all. So if being born with blue hair turns out not to have any effect on your survival, because for instance none of your predators can see blue any better than they can see what every color your mate is, then there will continue to be blue babies at some rate. And if you or your mate have other genes that do boost your survivability, then there will be a lot of blue babies. But not on the merits of being blue. However the animals involved may just decide to involve blueness in their mate selection criteria. Because correlation. Then many generations later, if your habitat changes, or your range expands, maybe blue fur protects more or less well against UV light, or moss growing in your fur, or some new predator. Now the selection works more like people think it works. But it’s been sitting there as genetic noise for perhaps centuries or eons, waiting for a complementary gene or environmental change to create a forcing function.

childintime 9mo ago
Nowadays evolution is waiting to be called "backpropagation".

didibus 9mo ago

> like to think of evolution as intelligent Evolution is more intelligent than people assume. The selection is driven by each species choices, and the more intelligent the species, the more intelligence played a role in it.

pandemic_region 9mo ago

> $insane_argument_against_evolution That looks like Perl variable syntax. Arguably the most mushroom like programming language.

bonesss 9mo ago
There’s more than one way to be a fungi.

tor825gl 9mo ago

If I understood correctly the argument in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins suggests that thinking about a genome as having a goal which it adapts itself to work towards, is absolutely a useful conceptual model. He makes it very clear that the genome does not actually have intentionality, but also that this is the right way to imagine how organisms might evolve, as though they did have both goals and a plan.

uplifter 9mo ago
In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins emphasized that the primary unit of evolution was the individual gene, not whole genomes. The genes were replicators and the genomes were just collections of replicators, and the way the selection pressure math worked out, there was too much diffusion of responsibility for whole genomes that typically evolution could not work coherently at that scale, or at least that's my best recollection of the book's main theory. Regarding intentionality being a good practical assumption, I actually don't recall Dawkins recommending that, and it seems doubtful because that can lead to all kinds of fallacious reasoning. I mostly considered Dawkins a data-based neo-darwininian, so it would surprise me that he would recommend that. Could you recall a quote or chapter from the book that bolsters your point? edit: typo
- tor825gl 9mo ago
  > Could you recall a quote or chapter from the book that bolsters your point? Yes, the second word of the title.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - uplifter 9mo ago
    Yeah, that's not really good enough, by the author's own admission: From wikipedia: 'In the foreword to the book's 30th-anniversary edition, Dawkins said he "can readily see that [the book's title] might give an inadequate impression of its contents" and in retrospect wishes he had taken Tom Maschler's advice and titled it The Immortal Gene.[2] He laments that “Too many people read it by title only.”' [0] Furthermore, your concept that genes should be thought of as having a plan is just in stark contradiction with the Darwinian conception of natural selection, which Dawkins was largely a champion of. My own recollection was that he described how genes readily had the appearance of acting in their own best interest, but he fell short of advocating that modeling them as having intention is a useful contrivance. Evolution does not have any sense for the future, there is no planning evolved, and Dawkins understands that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene

wkat4242 9mo ago

> So many people, even when they obviously know better, like to think of evolution as intelligent. It's obviously not. But every time someone says stuff like this, it reinforces the fallacy and then we get people saying things like "if evolution is real, why come $insane_argument_against_evolution?" Tbh those kinds of people are beyond convincing. And I think most of them are trolling or have fallen under the spell of other trolls. There's clearly a network effect. We don't really have a flat earther movement here in Europe and evolution deniers are insignificant. I don't think people saying these things actually think evolution is intelligent. They just use the phrase "want" to indicate the survival pressure that lead to the change propagating. But the people that don't believe in evolution are so indoctrinated it doesn't matter what words we use. Ps I do find it fascinating that a non intelligent process like evolution managed to create intelligence. Even though the state of the world often makes me doubt intelligence exists :)

squeefers 9mo ago

> By the time our numbers were enough to provide evolutionary pressure, we started farming what we wanted, which kinda breaks the process a lot of assumption in this sentence. proof needed