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Could you clarify/expound on this?

by zdean 13y ago

robbiep 13y ago
Perhaps the best option would be if you went out and grabbed a copy of 'Climbing mount improbable' - It will answer all your questions on this and then some
jerf 13y ago
Evolution works by incremental changes, each of which to a first approximation must be at least neutral and preferably advantageous to producing offspring. In order for evolution to get from A to B, there must be a path of incremental advantageous changes to get from here to there. It can't magically leap from one optimum to another. So you see things like the way the same basic body plan is reused endlessly in the natural world; with only incremental changes available to create the next species, you can't create a whole new body plan from scratch, even if it would be completely appropriate due to, say, transitioning from land to water. It is also completely goalless; if there is a fantastic two-gene change that a species could make, even if both are individually advantageous, there's no particular force that will cause them to occur [1]. Evolution is both very powerful, with many people underestimating it, and profoundly stupid, with many people also overestimating it. Once humans really get cracking with the gene engineering (which has proved harder than we had initially hoped, but I'm still confident we'll get there), I'm sure we'll find a plethora of relatively simple changes we can make to natural organisms that may involve changing three or four genes simultaneously where no single change is advantageous, which is a thing that evolution essentially can't do. [1]: Or at least, not yet... one bizarre-ish, "Selfish Gene" way of looking at human gene engineering is evolution evolving itself a way to make those multi-gene changes. Still not in a directed fashion, of course. But evolution will still apply to our own gene engineered creations, just possibly with a very different set of constraints, such as potentially severing the billion-year-old connection between fitness and direct biological reproduction... as I've said on HN before, you don't have to be a full-on "Rapture of the Nerds"-style Singulatarian to see that the future may get very weird....
- bernardom 13y ago
  Whoa. That blew my mind. So we're evolving in such a way to be able to make combinatorial multi-gene changes- by evolving brains big enough to be able to develop gene engineering?
  - jerf 13y ago
    Remember, it's not directed. Evolution qua evolution hasn't got a problem going to the brink, then watching humanity wipe out, then never building another intelligent species on Earth again... of course it doesn't have a problem, since it isn't a human or even a living thing that could have a problem, or indeed have anything. But observationally, humanity is currently in a place where that level of gene engineering is a decent bet, yes.
  - ams6110 13y ago
    But the jury is still out on whether that ability is a net positive for our survival in evolutionary terms. And if it isn't, well, natural selection is quite merciless.
  - jk4930 13y ago
    There's another term from the mentioned "Selfish Gene" (which is a book by the same title): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics It's a view on how ideas spread and use hosts (e.g., human brains) as carriers. They mutate, they're selected, they compete for "brain space". One funny perspective is that we're the slaves to genes and memes, both using us to survive. We're just carrying out their orders. :) (In the end it's just a way to look at information diffusion with focus on the way how ideas replicate and the condition of their success or failure over time, abstracting away from social/cultural context and other hard to grasp things.)
    - upquark 13y ago
      Wouldn't it be in the best interest of memes to never let us figure them out though? To never obtain this view of the world where memes are exposed for the parasites that they are? Maybe "theory of memetics" is a next-generation meme that took over our collective consciousness to exterminate all the other primitive memes and gain world domination :)
nialo 13y ago
The simple way to see this is that evolution is essentially just the simplest possible hill climbing algorithm (at each step, change one random gene on some fraction of organisms in a random way, keep the best set of genes for the next step). It can do amazing things, but only because it's had millions/billions of years and an entire planet to run on.

Could you clarify/expound on this?

by zdean 13y ago

Could you clarify/expound on this?

Perhaps the best option would be if you went out and grabbed a copy of 'Climbing mount improbable' - It will answer all your questions on this and then some

jerf 13y ago

Evolution works by incremental changes, each of which to a first approximation must be at least neutral and preferably advantageous to producing offspring. In order for evolution to get from A to B, there must be a path of incremental advantageous changes to get from here to there. It can't magically leap from one optimum to another. So you see things like the way the same basic body plan is reused endlessly in the natural world; with only incremental changes available to create the next species, you can't create a whole new body plan from scratch, even if it would be completely appropriate due to, say, transitioning from land to water. It is also completely goalless; if there is a fantastic two-gene change that a species could make, even if both are individually advantageous, there's no particular force that will cause them to occur [1]. Evolution is both very powerful, with many people underestimating it, and profoundly stupid, with many people also overestimating it. Once humans really get cracking with the gene engineering (which has proved harder than we had initially hoped, but I'm still confident we'll get there), I'm sure we'll find a plethora of relatively simple changes we can make to natural organisms that may involve changing three or four genes simultaneously where no single change is advantageous, which is a thing that evolution essentially can't do. [1]: Or at least, not yet... one bizarre-ish, "Selfish Gene" way of looking at human gene engineering is evolution evolving itself a way to make those multi-gene changes. Still not in a directed fashion, of course. But evolution will still apply to our own gene engineered creations, just possibly with a very different set of constraints, such as potentially severing the billion-year-old connection between fitness and direct biological reproduction... as I've said on HN before, you don't have to be a full-on "Rapture of the Nerds"-style Singulatarian to see that the future may get very weird....

bernardom 13y ago
Whoa. That blew my mind. So we're evolving in such a way to be able to make combinatorial multi-gene changes- by evolving brains big enough to be able to develop gene engineering?
- jerf 13y ago
  Remember, it's not directed. Evolution qua evolution hasn't got a problem going to the brink, then watching humanity wipe out, then never building another intelligent species on Earth again... of course it doesn't have a problem, since it isn't a human or even a living thing that could have a problem, or indeed have anything. But observationally, humanity is currently in a place where that level of gene engineering is a decent bet, yes.
- ams6110 13y ago
  But the jury is still out on whether that ability is a net positive for our survival in evolutionary terms. And if it isn't, well, natural selection is quite merciless.
- jk4930 13y ago
  There's another term from the mentioned "Selfish Gene" (which is a book by the same title): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics It's a view on how ideas spread and use hosts (e.g., human brains) as carriers. They mutate, they're selected, they compete for "brain space". One funny perspective is that we're the slaves to genes and memes, both using us to survive. We're just carrying out their orders. :) (In the end it's just a way to look at information diffusion with focus on the way how ideas replicate and the condition of their success or failure over time, abstracting away from social/cultural context and other hard to grasp things.)
  - upquark 13y ago
    Wouldn't it be in the best interest of memes to never let us figure them out though? To never obtain this view of the world where memes are exposed for the parasites that they are? Maybe "theory of memetics" is a next-generation meme that took over our collective consciousness to exterminate all the other primitive memes and gain world domination :)

nialo 13y ago

The simple way to see this is that evolution is essentially just the simplest possible hill climbing algorithm (at each step, change one random gene on some fraction of organisms in a random way, keep the best set of genes for the next step). It can do amazing things, but only because it's had millions/billions of years and an entire planet to run on.