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Funny how discoveries like this don't surprise me at all anymore. After embracing concepts such as fractal geometry, recursion and the demand for efficiency in
by luketych 13y ago
Funny how discoveries like this don't surprise me at all anymore. After embracing concepts such as fractal geometry, recursion and the demand for efficiency in nature, it makes sense that in nature everything has evolved in a way in which every layer is a part of the next layer above it (quarks -> electrons, protons -> elements -> compounds -> amino acids -> proteins -> information -> abstract information -> ..., or binary -> hexadecimal -> assembly -> low-level code -> high-level code -> abstractions -> ...), and everything has value in more than one way. DNA, proteins, muscles, neural clusters, even programming are all based around this principle. If you were building two programs that were identical in many ways why wouldn't you abstract out the commonalities, instead of building them twice?
The brain is no exception. I think musicians, for example, are better at math because at the heart of music and at the heart of math, many of the same brain circuits are involved. It is more efficient to have one copy of these circuits and just apply them to both music and math, rather than having two copies of nearly identical circuits. Proteins have more than one use in our bodies, because if each only had only one use we would need an inefficient number of them, possibly more than what exists. Same for neurotransmitters. When nature is limited by constraints it usually finds a way to fold into a higher dimension around that constraint (such as the neocortex wrinkling to increase surface area, or DNA containing information on more than a single level, or even how grass grows over a fallen log instead of "choosing" to just grow somewhere else, or if you are into String Theory, how the universe/multiverse has folded into 11 dimensions, possibly because that was the most efficient way for our universe to exist.)
It reminds me of a river when it is initially forming down the side of a mountain. The water takes the most efficient path at any given instance from the top of the mountain to the bottom. The process is like a greedy algorithm. The water cannot foresee where it will end up, it just flows. The water won't always find the most efficient solution, but give it enough time and will find an efficient-enough solution.
- fivethree 13y agoThis is sort of a misunderstanding of evolution. It's not building to the most efficient or the greatest form of anything. It's spontaneous change that may or may not survive with no real reference to "the best."
- gizmo686 13y agoThis also seems to misunderstand evolution. You can think of evolution as a hill climbing optimization algorithm, with a complicated and constantly changing fitness metric. While it is true that any given change is random, and even 'good' changes still only succeed with some probability, over a long time period we see a series of incremental improvements. If there is an opportunity to increase efficiency it is likely that evolution would have found it, given how long the process has been running. Of course, this become less likely when we are discussing new features (the thumb is less optimized than DNA because it is so recent), and as the benefit of these optimizations becomes less. They also become less likely if their are fewer evolutionary paths that might lead to them.
- wrongc0ntinent 13y agoI think the issue here was assuming that the optimization is the best possible one. It doesn't have to be, it just needs to be good enough to still function given past and present evolutionary pressure.
- jonathansizz 13y agoNo. You're equating evolution with adaptation, and also making assumptions about beneficial mutations occurring as and when needed.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- gnaritas 13y agoNo, he got it exactly right. Evolution is not an algorithm, it doesn't optimize anything, changes are not improvements, it doesn't seek opportunities to improve efficiency.
- Double_Cast 13y agoThat's not how it works. There's no single "global optimum" that lifeforms are evolving towards; there's no final hilltop; there's no intent. This notion of "Evolutionary Teleology" is how we get things like X-Men (which I enjoy for the record, it's not like X-Men is taught in biology class). If there were some global optimum, we'd all have eyesight like Legolas and the color-pallete of a Mantis-Shrimp, instead of a blind spot in the center of our retina. Evolution just happens, and it is what it is. E.g. Natural Selection didn't "optimize" giraffes so they could reach leaves. Natural Selection is simply a way of explaining that some giraffes had long necks, some had short, and the shorter just happened to die out. Similarly, NBA players didn't "evolve" to play basketball. Some people are tall, and some are short, and the short people just didn't make the cut. "Select" != "Optimize". Evolution is better thought of as a historical accident. We're talking monkeys on a flying rock.
- jonahx 13y ago> I think musicians, for example, are better at math because at the heart of music and at the heart of math Is this true? My personal anecdotal evidence suggests the opposite -- do you have any real research to back this up?
- circlefavshape 13y agoMy wife says "yeah, musicians are great at maths, they can count to 4"