| ▲ | TheCraiggers 4 hours 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?" |
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| ▲ | fc417fc802 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | PaulDavisThe1st 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | fc417fc802 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Framed in anthropomorphized terms this would look something like the goal of humans as a species is not the synthesis of vitamin C but rather mere survival. Walking a path where we come to depend on external sources is not necessarily at odds with that. Or more generally: Why did I do that specific thing? No particular reason, it just happened to work. After all, I managed not to fall off the platform for another few seconds. No telling what the future will bring. As long as we're thinking about anthropomorphization it's amusing to note that vitamin C synthesis can be framed as a species level tragedy of the commons. In that case you are simply advocating that we as a species make the responsible choice not to participate in a race to the bottom! |
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| ▲ | fc417fc802 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | You're being overly literal. It's not "trying to fit anthropomorphized design onto a process" but rather "using anthropomorphization as a descriptive tool". This situation is not unlike when someone takes issue with an analogy due to erroneously interpreting it as a direct comparison. > here are frequently multiple different "solutions" for a given metric So too are there multiple different options when working towards any nontrivial goal in the real world. In the context of stochastic optimization the multi-armed bandit problem is a rather well known concept. > evolution is not attempting to optimize anything For the purpose of communication (of some other idea) it could be reasonable to say that the human race merely wants survival first and foremost. That is what evolution is after, at least in a sense. Of course that is not technically correct. Pointing out technical inconsistencies isn't going to convince me that I'm in the wrong here because I've already explicitly acknowledged their presence and explained why as far as I'm concerned objecting to them is simply missing the point. Switching to a technical angle, to claim that evolution is not optimizing is to claim that water doesn't flow downhill but rather molecules just happen to vibrate and move around at random. It's completely ignoring the broader context. Evolution happens at a species level. It's an abstract concept inherently tied to other abstract concepts such as optimization and survival. | | |
| ▲ | PaulDavisThe1st an hour ago | parent [-] | | and you are missing my point that trying to help people understand a process that has no design element as if it was one that did actually does them (and the process) a disservice, possibly a great disservice. |
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| ▲ | gary_0 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A more intuitive and natural phrasing, even though it's invalid in a technical sense. I've noticed this happens when people talk about computers/software as well ("it thinks the variable is set", "it freaks out if it doesn't get a response", etc). Outside of formal writing/presentations, using only technical terminology seems to take a suboptimal amount of effort for both speaker and listener compared to anthropomorphizing (unless, as you mention, the listener is a layman who gets the wrong idea). | |
| ▲ | IanCal 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | jacquesm an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | It definitely is not useful. Your model should at least attempt to approximate reality, not to depart from it by putting effect before the cause. That way lies madness. | | |
| ▲ | fc417fc802 33 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It is not a model. It is a description. I'm torn on whether it would be correct to refer to the approach as constituting a sort of analogy. No idea why you think the effect is being put before the cause. I'm hungry so I head to the kitchen. An observer says "he wants to eat". Antibiotics are administered. Only the bacterial cells expressing a certain set of proteins survive. An observer says "the infection wants to be resistant". |
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| ▲ | didibus 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | hinkley an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | Sharlin 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 0) What do humans have to do with it? We're not the only animals that eat mushrooms. |
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| ▲ | RicardoLuis0 an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | VanshPatel99 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | uh_uh 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | PaulDavisThe1st 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The search space is highly constrained. All life on this planet is based on hydrocarbon chemistry, more or less, and must operate in the face of high rates of oxidation and water as pretty much the only available solvent. Even with such constraints, the differences between what has evolved (bacteria to blue whales! viruses to polar bears! algae to orchids!) are staggering. The fact that you find something hard to believe doesn't say much at all. Humans have all kinds of things that we find hard to believe - for example, I find it almost impossible to believe that there is only one object I can see in the night sky with my own eyes that is outside of our galaxy - but that doesn't make them any more or less true. | | |
| ▲ | uh_uh an hour ago | parent [-] | | Let's take human DNA as an example. It contains 3.2B GTCA base pairs. This gives rise to 4^3.2B possible combos. It's just not possible to navigate this space blindly. There is not enough atoms in the universe to do that. It is known that there is bias in what mutations are favoured. | | |
| ▲ | PaulDavisThe1st 13 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Only a tiny percentage (around 1%) of the DNA in chromosomes codes for proteins. And yes, certain mutations are favored precisely because of the chemistry constraints (an extremely basic one is which base pair changes actually alter the resulting protein; a more sophisticated one is which amino acid changes alter the physical functionality of the protein). |
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| ▲ | wyldfire 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat. Your perspective has the unfortunate bias of being posed at the end of a long stream of evolution that happened to emerge with an intelligence far superior from other living things. > Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of planets conduct the experiment, ours just happens to have resulted in intelligence. > It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips". Mutations introduce randomness but beneficial traits can be selected for artificially, compounding the benefits. | | |
| ▲ | uh_uh an hour ago | parent [-] | | > It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of planets conduct the experiment, ours just happens to have resulted in intelligence. My argument doesn't depend on the existence of an intelligent species on the planet. The problem already arises when there are multiple species on ONE planet. If you calculate the pure combinatorial distance between the DNA of 2 species, you must find that you can't just brute force your way from one to the other before the heat-death of the universe. This is why mutation bias exists: not all mutations are equally likely, evolution favours some kinds over others. |
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| ▲ | bavell 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Maybe won't be viewed favorably by the HN crowd, but I enjoyed the most recent Bret Weinstein interview on Joe Rogan [0] where Bret talks about his pet theory on natural selection / evolution (maybe 2/3 way through the interview). Basically, the "junk" DNA we have may be "variables" that influence form and morphology, thus giving natural selection a vastly reduced design space to search for viable mutations. E.g. not much chemical difference between a bat wing and another mammals hands - mostly a difference of morphology. Allowing for more efficient search of evolutionary parameters instead of pure random walk. [0] https://youtu.be/WX_te6X-0aQ | |
| ▲ | BobbyTables2 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Look at software fuzzing, particularly the coverage guided mutators (basically a simple “genetic algorithm”. It’s amazing what a few random bit flips combined with a crude measurement can do. To me, evolution at first seem implausible. Monkeys banging on a typewriter aren’t going to write Shakespeare. But add a crude feedback loop to them, and soon they’ll be dishing out Charles Dickens too! | | | |
| ▲ | username135 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why does it need some kind of boundary? What if it was operating on a limitless trajectory? | |
| ▲ | lotsofpulp 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That mechanism is a set of genes failing to procreate. | | |
| ▲ | yes_man 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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) |
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| ▲ | DonHopkins 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | uh_uh 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I have little patience for intelligent-design and the likes, if that's what you are getting at. All I'm saying is that blind enumeration of mutations seems combinatorially infeasible due to the vastness of the search space. It is already known that mutation bias exists, so what I'm saying shouldn't be that controversial. | |
| ▲ | FunHearing3443 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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? |
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| ▲ | malux85 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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)) |
