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The Strange Inevitability of Evolution

67 points by kirang1989 11y ago

pcunite 11y ago
A quote from the article: "You don’t have to be a benighted creationist ..." Can we please keep these type of articles off HN please? I don’t come here to be insulted. I have other sites for that! Sir Isaac Newton was not a simple nor stupid man and he gave honor to the Creator. Just because science has not figured God out, does not deny His existence. A whole lot of reasons for what allowed the Internet, HN, science, and technology to be where it is at today came out of a nation (silly apparently to the writer) which put "In God We Trust" on everything.
- sethrin 11y ago
  No one else is required to cater to your religious beliefs, no matter what those may be. Also, this is an article about evolutionary biology, not creationism. The part you object to is easily overlooked. I'm sure this issue is very important to you, but I believe the best move here is to simply turn the other cheek.
- Red_Tarsius 11y ago
  I think you misunderstood the article. American Creationists are believers who reject what science has figured out in favor of biblical literalism. They even built the Creationist Museum, whose exhibits depict "the coexistence of humans and non-avian dinosaurs, say that the Earth is approximately 6,000 years old, and dispute the idea that life evolved into its current forms." – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Museum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Museum
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- solipsism 11y ago
  Just because science has not figured God out, does not deny His existence. Science isn't trying to figure god out any more than it's trying to figure fairies out. Science focuses its efforts on understanding reality.
  - Rexxar 11y ago
    Just because science has not figured God out, does not deny His existence. The big question of science is "How ... ?" The big question of religion is "Why ... ?" The two solve different problems and could coexist without so many animosity on each side.
    - shasta 11y ago
      The big question of science is "Why...?" The big question of religion is "Who...?"
      - Rexxar 11y ago
        I disagree here. For example, relativity and quantum mechanics explain how our world behave but we have no idea why these theories are true or even why can the universe be described with mathematical equations ?
        zornthewise 11y ago
        What kind of answer would satisfy your questions of why these theories are true anyway. I am not sure I can even imagine an ideal answer and this might be a clue that we are asking the completely wrong question.
        Rexxar 11y ago
        I don't have answer on the "Why". I think that this question is not a scientific question because the answer could no be proved/invalidated by experiments. It's a philosophical question and some people find the answer in religion or philosophy, some just admit they don't know and others just don't care.
        Retra 11y ago
        I suppose religion will tell you why those things are true?
- alexqgb 11y ago
  Slapping "In God We Trust" on everything was not only a fairly recent development, it was a cynically calculated response by a chastened business class that found itself coming under extraordinary scrutiny in the wake of the Great Depression. The redemption of capitalism by Christianity demanded a heavily modified version of the religion that basically abandoned all the parts about people looking after each other and created a new ethos in which getting rich was both a duty and a reward. Given a bunch of plutocrats who would pay well for effective propaganda and some creative but unscrupulous preachers willing to do their dirty work, a distinctly American (and conspicuously un-Christian) version of Christianity was born. It's been polarizing our politics and supporting the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands ever since. A couple of recent books by Nicole Aschoff and Kevin Kruse have done a good job unpacking this reprehensible hustle. If you have any interest in finding out just how much bullshit has gone into shaping your world view, Elizabeth Bruenig has reviewed both of them here: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121564/gods-and-profits-how-capitalism-and-christianity-aligned-america http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121564/gods-and-profits-h... You can also read Kruse himself, who has summarized his effort (How Corporate America Invented Christian America) here: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/corporate-america-invented-religious-right-conservative-roosevelt-princeton-117030.html http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/corporate-ame... On a separate note, Newton's total disregard of evolutionary theory is not a product of any disagreements he had with the theory itself. Rather, it's due to the fact that died more that 130 years before "On the Origin of Species" was first published. Class dismissed.
  - dang 11y ago
    > If you have any interest in finding out just how much bullshit has gone into shaping your world view Personal attacks and acerbic swipes are not welcome on Hacker News. Please don't do this.
- lotsofmangos 11y ago
  I half agree with you. I do think that the language used to describe religious viewpoints includes off the cuff insults far too often. The word benighted was unnecessary in that sentence and does detract from the article. I don't think it was egregious enough to demand the article not be posted, but I do agree that it is a form of philosophical point scoring that serves neither the article, nor the wider discussion. The first person to derive the Hubble constant and one of the main developers of big-bang theory was Georges Lemaître, a devout Catholic who would later become president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, who described the idea as "the Cosmic Egg, exploding at the moment of the creation", though he didn't like the Pope relying on it in proclamations. I think it would be fair to call him a creationist. Also, Hoyle, who was not a creationist, coined the term 'Big-Bang' to take the piss out of Lemaître's idea and promote the steady-state theory, which he preferred. Hoyle however believed that a god was guiding the fine tuning of the constants to help the evolution of life, so was effectively a proponent of intelligent design, while not being a creationist. Weirdly, the two ideas do not have to go together. I am not saying this from the article offending myself in any way, I am what most people would think of as strongly athiest, though personally I have come to dislike the label. I just think it is a lazy form of signaling that detracts from the argument and also demonstrates an ignorance of the wide variety of religious and philosophical viewpoints held by those throughout the scientific community.
  - Retra 11y ago
    Ignoring the argument in order to preach "nice makes right" also detracts from the argument...
    - lotsofmangos 11y ago
      I am not sure that describing creationists to be in a state of pitiful or contemptible intellectual or moral ignorance is anything to do with the argument presented by the article. Also, I was not addressing the article, I was addressing the comment of pcunite and their problem with the language used in one particular sentence, which is something I partly agree with and is nothing whatsoever to do with the accuracy of the article itself. If someone tries to teach children maths by telling them "listen up idiots, two plus two is four", and I pick them up for their use of language, it has no real bearing on my view of the usefulness of learning addition.
- Dewie3 11y ago
  > A whole lot of reasons for what allowed the Internet, HN, science, and technology to be where it is at today came out of a nation (silly apparently to the writer) which put "In God We Trust" on everything. Even a broken clock is right twice a day - imagine then how often a collective of 300 million of those are correct! :) (Just kidding - Americans aren't more broken than any other group. Of course)
- x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
  Are you crediting the cultural consequences of McCarthyism and anti-Communism in the 1940's and 50's with most major technological improvements since then?
woodchuck64 11y ago
"Evolution need only take a random walk along a web of neutral (or at least almost neutral) mutations, that, without impairing the fitness of an organism, surrounds it with very different neighbors: innovative solutions to selective pressures that are there for the taking when the circumstances compel it." Wow, that starts to explain the amazing creativity of rapid evolution (like whale evolution in 10 million years). So how to turn this into software? This seems like it could be a new class of evolutionary algorithm.
- abecedarius 11y ago
  Gerry Sussman's http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/readings/robust-systems.pdf http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/readings/rob... has some related ideas.
- socceroos 11y ago
  What is the difference between evolution and adaptation? It sounds like circumstantial mutation is more in line with adaptation than evolution?
Xcelerate 11y ago
Wow, this was a very good article (I don't often say that). I have long had a rather uncomfortable feeling about this idea that many chance mutations eventually produce some that are close to some objective function -- for essentially the same reason given in the article. There's just too many combinatorial possibilities to explore in the rather small time that the universe has been around (I mean, we're comparing like 10^50 to like 10^(10^(...)) here). But this makes a lot of sense to me. Essentially what he's saying is that input sequences (vectors) pass through some kind of surjective mapping into a lower dimensional space of "networks" (I'll just call them a different space of vectors). If I had to guess (and this is purely speculation here), this is probably due to some symmetry property.
- Retra 11y ago
  A long time ago, I was trying to imagine how complex structures could evolve out of randomness, I came up with something I called "hinge evolution." Let the relevant behavior of a system be a function of the contact area between the two planes of the hinge, and the genetic variation be represented by the action of hinge. You can vary the hinge angle a lot while only causing minor shifts in the contact area, but if you close the hinge, there will be a giant discontinuous spike in the contact area. So I believed it wasn't absurd to think that things didn't have to evolve in continuous fashion: you could have 'silent' evolution happening in the background, but when certain conditions are met, a major shift in structure could happen all at once. This article elucidates a much better explanation.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
im3w1l 11y ago
Maybe a reformulation in terms of the familiar can be enlightening: DNA can spontaneously "refactor" itself, i.e. use vastly different internals without changing behaviour. For some "implementations", an appropriate change in behaviour can be much easier than in others.
mschuster91 11y ago
On a slightly unrelated note, I recommend the new Nightwish album "Endless Forms Most Beautiful", named after the Darwin quote in the first paragraph.
hyperpallium 11y ago
This is redundancy: many different sequences (genotypes) give the same shape (phenotype). Redundancy can be boring, such as non-significant whitespace in C code: different spacing compiles the same (and gives the same behaviour). It is also local, in that equivalent genotypes are just one step away - add or remove a space - and you can continue with further steps. So a set of equivalent genotypes/programs are connected by being adjacent (one "step" away). [\tangent maybe not all the equivalent genotypes are connected] But this is interesting redundancy, because some of those equivalent genotypes are just one step away from dramatically different phenotypes. This doesn't happen with C whitespace (though maybe it happens with other equivalent implementations, different names, ways of looping, but I can't think of an example] Using the metaphor in the article, one set of equivalent connected genotypes is like a network of roads, on which you can take steps to move around the system without penalty, because they are all equivalent and each step is neutral. Extending the metaphor for the "interesting" aspect, another set of equivalent connected genotypes with a dramatically different phenotype is like a railway network. Mostly, the two networks are separate, but sometimes, they are very close, so that in one step, you switch to another network, like a railway station. [For correctness, we disallow level crossings, because there both road and rail would have the same phenotype. We could disallow any crossings, making it planar, or introduce the third dimension and have bridge crossings, where the position in 3D is the genotype.] There would be a great many such networks, with distinct phenotypes. There would be networks that have no adjacency; but it might still be possible to reach them by moving to intermediate networks (e.g. travel by car then rail then bicycle path then footpath etc), provided the phenotypes of those intermediate networks were neutral or advantageous. I like both the article's hypotheses: that all complex systems have this property; or that evolved biological systems only have it because evolution is faster with it. 2. The second appeals to me because it helps explain accelerating evolution by the establishment of platforms: e.g. the body-plan collection of genes may have taken a long time to come up with, but once it did, body plan diversity exploded. Though the article complains about the number of body plans possible, it's dramatically fewer than all possible raw sequences. It's configuring a body-plan instead of coding it from scratch. Having many different possibilities is good as it makes it a powerful expressive platform - perhaps like an algebra or programming language, once it gets complex enough, it is very powerful. The key quality is that within this configuration language, the density of "useful" results is higher than without it [e.g. a random configuration is more likely to be useful than random raw code - the platform is somehow specialized to its purpose] Similarly, perhaps this system of RNA with this quality was not the first to evolve, but several arose... and this is the one that took off. 1. But maybe all complex systems have it too, provided they have redundancy. Perhaps, if there are many sets of connected equivalent genotypes, and each set is very large, there are likely to be many adjacencies between networks? Note: It's not necessary for all networks to have adjacencies, just enough of them. You could imagine varying these properties of the system (number and size of networks, relative to the total space) and come up with parameters that give "enough" adjacent networks [though I'm not quite sure how to define "enough".] My feeling is that getting those parameters good enough by chance might be pretty rare - something that could take a few billion years over the surface area of a planet to have reasonable chance at...

67 points by kirang1989 11y ago

A quote from the article: "You don’t have to be a benighted creationist ..." Can we please keep these type of articles off HN please? I don’t come here to be insulted. I have other sites for that! Sir Isaac Newton was not a simple nor stupid man and he gave honor to the Creator. Just because science has not figured God out, does not deny His existence. A whole lot of reasons for what allowed the Internet, HN, science, and technology to be where it is at today came out of a nation (silly apparently to the writer) which put "In God We Trust" on everything.

sethrin 11y ago
No one else is required to cater to your religious beliefs, no matter what those may be. Also, this is an article about evolutionary biology, not creationism. The part you object to is easily overlooked. I'm sure this issue is very important to you, but I believe the best move here is to simply turn the other cheek.
Red_Tarsius 11y ago
I think you misunderstood the article. American Creationists are believers who reject what science has figured out in favor of biblical literalism. They even built the Creationist Museum, whose exhibits depict "the coexistence of humans and non-avian dinosaurs, say that the Earth is approximately 6,000 years old, and dispute the idea that life evolved into its current forms." – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Museum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Museum
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
solipsism 11y ago
Just because science has not figured God out, does not deny His existence. Science isn't trying to figure god out any more than it's trying to figure fairies out. Science focuses its efforts on understanding reality.
- Rexxar 11y ago
  Just because science has not figured God out, does not deny His existence. The big question of science is "How ... ?" The big question of religion is "Why ... ?" The two solve different problems and could coexist without so many animosity on each side.
  - shasta 11y ago
    The big question of science is "Why...?" The big question of religion is "Who...?"
    - Rexxar 11y ago
      I disagree here. For example, relativity and quantum mechanics explain how our world behave but we have no idea why these theories are true or even why can the universe be described with mathematical equations ?
      - zornthewise 11y ago
        What kind of answer would satisfy your questions of why these theories are true anyway. I am not sure I can even imagine an ideal answer and this might be a clue that we are asking the completely wrong question.
        Rexxar 11y ago
        I don't have answer on the "Why". I think that this question is not a scientific question because the answer could no be proved/invalidated by experiments. It's a philosophical question and some people find the answer in religion or philosophy, some just admit they don't know and others just don't care.
      - Retra 11y ago
        I suppose religion will tell you why those things are true?
alexqgb 11y ago
Slapping "In God We Trust" on everything was not only a fairly recent development, it was a cynically calculated response by a chastened business class that found itself coming under extraordinary scrutiny in the wake of the Great Depression. The redemption of capitalism by Christianity demanded a heavily modified version of the religion that basically abandoned all the parts about people looking after each other and created a new ethos in which getting rich was both a duty and a reward. Given a bunch of plutocrats who would pay well for effective propaganda and some creative but unscrupulous preachers willing to do their dirty work, a distinctly American (and conspicuously un-Christian) version of Christianity was born. It's been polarizing our politics and supporting the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands ever since. A couple of recent books by Nicole Aschoff and Kevin Kruse have done a good job unpacking this reprehensible hustle. If you have any interest in finding out just how much bullshit has gone into shaping your world view, Elizabeth Bruenig has reviewed both of them here: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121564/gods-and-profits-how-capitalism-and-christianity-aligned-america http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121564/gods-and-profits-h... You can also read Kruse himself, who has summarized his effort (How Corporate America Invented Christian America) here: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/corporate-america-invented-religious-right-conservative-roosevelt-princeton-117030.html http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/corporate-ame... On a separate note, Newton's total disregard of evolutionary theory is not a product of any disagreements he had with the theory itself. Rather, it's due to the fact that died more that 130 years before "On the Origin of Species" was first published. Class dismissed.
- dang 11y ago
  > If you have any interest in finding out just how much bullshit has gone into shaping your world view Personal attacks and acerbic swipes are not welcome on Hacker News. Please don't do this.
lotsofmangos 11y ago
I half agree with you. I do think that the language used to describe religious viewpoints includes off the cuff insults far too often. The word benighted was unnecessary in that sentence and does detract from the article. I don't think it was egregious enough to demand the article not be posted, but I do agree that it is a form of philosophical point scoring that serves neither the article, nor the wider discussion. The first person to derive the Hubble constant and one of the main developers of big-bang theory was Georges Lemaître, a devout Catholic who would later become president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, who described the idea as "the Cosmic Egg, exploding at the moment of the creation", though he didn't like the Pope relying on it in proclamations. I think it would be fair to call him a creationist. Also, Hoyle, who was not a creationist, coined the term 'Big-Bang' to take the piss out of Lemaître's idea and promote the steady-state theory, which he preferred. Hoyle however believed that a god was guiding the fine tuning of the constants to help the evolution of life, so was effectively a proponent of intelligent design, while not being a creationist. Weirdly, the two ideas do not have to go together. I am not saying this from the article offending myself in any way, I am what most people would think of as strongly athiest, though personally I have come to dislike the label. I just think it is a lazy form of signaling that detracts from the argument and also demonstrates an ignorance of the wide variety of religious and philosophical viewpoints held by those throughout the scientific community.
- Retra 11y ago
  Ignoring the argument in order to preach "nice makes right" also detracts from the argument...
  - lotsofmangos 11y ago
    I am not sure that describing creationists to be in a state of pitiful or contemptible intellectual or moral ignorance is anything to do with the argument presented by the article. Also, I was not addressing the article, I was addressing the comment of pcunite and their problem with the language used in one particular sentence, which is something I partly agree with and is nothing whatsoever to do with the accuracy of the article itself. If someone tries to teach children maths by telling them "listen up idiots, two plus two is four", and I pick them up for their use of language, it has no real bearing on my view of the usefulness of learning addition.
Dewie3 11y ago
> A whole lot of reasons for what allowed the Internet, HN, science, and technology to be where it is at today came out of a nation (silly apparently to the writer) which put "In God We Trust" on everything. Even a broken clock is right twice a day - imagine then how often a collective of 300 million of those are correct! :) (Just kidding - Americans aren't more broken than any other group. Of course)
x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
Are you crediting the cultural consequences of McCarthyism and anti-Communism in the 1940's and 50's with most major technological improvements since then?

woodchuck64 11y ago

"Evolution need only take a random walk along a web of neutral (or at least almost neutral) mutations, that, without impairing the fitness of an organism, surrounds it with very different neighbors: innovative solutions to selective pressures that are there for the taking when the circumstances compel it." Wow, that starts to explain the amazing creativity of rapid evolution (like whale evolution in 10 million years). So how to turn this into software? This seems like it could be a new class of evolutionary algorithm.

abecedarius 11y ago
Gerry Sussman's http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/readings/robust-systems.pdf http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/readings/rob... has some related ideas.
socceroos 11y ago
What is the difference between evolution and adaptation? It sounds like circumstantial mutation is more in line with adaptation than evolution?

Xcelerate 11y ago

Wow, this was a very good article (I don't often say that). I have long had a rather uncomfortable feeling about this idea that many chance mutations eventually produce some that are close to some objective function -- for essentially the same reason given in the article. There's just too many combinatorial possibilities to explore in the rather small time that the universe has been around (I mean, we're comparing like 10^50 to like 10^(10^(...)) here). But this makes a lot of sense to me. Essentially what he's saying is that input sequences (vectors) pass through some kind of surjective mapping into a lower dimensional space of "networks" (I'll just call them a different space of vectors). If I had to guess (and this is purely speculation here), this is probably due to some symmetry property.

Retra 11y ago
A long time ago, I was trying to imagine how complex structures could evolve out of randomness, I came up with something I called "hinge evolution." Let the relevant behavior of a system be a function of the contact area between the two planes of the hinge, and the genetic variation be represented by the action of hinge. You can vary the hinge angle a lot while only causing minor shifts in the contact area, but if you close the hinge, there will be a giant discontinuous spike in the contact area. So I believed it wasn't absurd to think that things didn't have to evolve in continuous fashion: you could have 'silent' evolution happening in the background, but when certain conditions are met, a major shift in structure could happen all at once. This article elucidates a much better explanation.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

im3w1l 11y ago

Maybe a reformulation in terms of the familiar can be enlightening: DNA can spontaneously "refactor" itself, i.e. use vastly different internals without changing behaviour. For some "implementations", an appropriate change in behaviour can be much easier than in others.

mschuster91 11y ago

On a slightly unrelated note, I recommend the new Nightwish album "Endless Forms Most Beautiful", named after the Darwin quote in the first paragraph.

hyperpallium 11y ago

This is redundancy: many different sequences (genotypes) give the same shape (phenotype). Redundancy can be boring, such as non-significant whitespace in C code: different spacing compiles the same (and gives the same behaviour). It is also local, in that equivalent genotypes are just one step away - add or remove a space - and you can continue with further steps. So a set of equivalent genotypes/programs are connected by being adjacent (one "step" away). [\tangent maybe not all the equivalent genotypes are connected] But this is interesting redundancy, because some of those equivalent genotypes are just one step away from dramatically different phenotypes. This doesn't happen with C whitespace (though maybe it happens with other equivalent implementations, different names, ways of looping, but I can't think of an example] Using the metaphor in the article, one set of equivalent connected genotypes is like a network of roads, on which you can take steps to move around the system without penalty, because they are all equivalent and each step is neutral. Extending the metaphor for the "interesting" aspect, another set of equivalent connected genotypes with a dramatically different phenotype is like a railway network. Mostly, the two networks are separate, but sometimes, they are very close, so that in one step, you switch to another network, like a railway station. [For correctness, we disallow level crossings, because there both road and rail would have the same phenotype. We could disallow any crossings, making it planar, or introduce the third dimension and have bridge crossings, where the position in 3D is the genotype.] There would be a great many such networks, with distinct phenotypes. There would be networks that have no adjacency; but it might still be possible to reach them by moving to intermediate networks (e.g. travel by car then rail then bicycle path then footpath etc), provided the phenotypes of those intermediate networks were neutral or advantageous. I like both the article's hypotheses: that all complex systems have this property; or that evolved biological systems only have it because evolution is faster with it. 2. The second appeals to me because it helps explain accelerating evolution by the establishment of platforms: e.g. the body-plan collection of genes may have taken a long time to come up with, but once it did, body plan diversity exploded. Though the article complains about the number of body plans possible, it's dramatically fewer than all possible raw sequences. It's configuring a body-plan instead of coding it from scratch. Having many different possibilities is good as it makes it a powerful expressive platform - perhaps like an algebra or programming language, once it gets complex enough, it is very powerful. The key quality is that within this configuration language, the density of "useful" results is higher than without it [e.g. a random configuration is more likely to be useful than random raw code - the platform is somehow specialized to its purpose] Similarly, perhaps this system of RNA with this quality was not the first to evolve, but several arose... and this is the one that took off. 1. But maybe all complex systems have it too, provided they have redundancy. Perhaps, if there are many sets of connected equivalent genotypes, and each set is very large, there are likely to be many adjacencies between networks? Note: It's not necessary for all networks to have adjacencies, just enough of them. You could imagine varying these properties of the system (number and size of networks, relative to the total space) and come up with parameters that give "enough" adjacent networks [though I'm not quite sure how to define "enough".] My feeling is that getting those parameters good enough by chance might be pretty rare - something that could take a few billion years over the surface area of a planet to have reasonable chance at...