On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 10:15 PM, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 3:37 PM, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> > wrote: > > > Evolution will favour whichever strategy is better in the long run >> > > That is incorrect. Evolution will favor whichever strategy is better in > the *SHORT* run. > There is a point where the antropomorphisation of evolution breaks, and I think we are past this point for the purpose of this discussion. Evolution favours nothing. There are trees of organisms descending from other organisms. Sometimes a mutation will create a local advantage that is maladaptive in the long run. Perhaps an organism is mutated to reproduce at a much higher rate than its peers. This branch appears to be winning for a bit, but is then completely weeded out by resource depletion. Meanwhile, another population that suffered a more subtle mutation with advantages in the long run, does not suffer from resource depletion and ends up enjoying the benefits of a mutation that is better in the long run. The condom is one of these things. It seems like a disadvantage in the short run but transforms into an advantage in the long run. Poor populations that are stuck in the catholic reproductive algorithm suffer from resource depletion, while condom users prosper in the long run. > That's why Evolution is such a dreadful designer and was never able to > come up with something as simple and obviously useful as a macroscopic body > part that could move in 360 degrees. > > And that is why the eye of all vertebrate animals is backwards, the nerves > and capillaries of the retina are on the wrong side so light must pass > through it before it hits the light sensitive cells. There's no doubt this > degrades vision and we would be better off if the retina was reversed as it > is in squids whose eye evolved independently, however It's too late for > that to happen now because all the intermediate forms would not be viable. > Once a standard is set, with all its interlocking mechanisms it's very > difficult to abandon it completely, even when much better methods are found. > Yes, but this conflates several issues. Evolution is necessarily iterative. A phenotypical improvement is only possible if it can be produced by a sequence of genetic mutations such that every intermediary organism is viable. This doesn't mean that every intermediary organism has to be better. There is a lot of evidence for neutral search -- random walks through neutral mutations eventually enabling a big improvement. In the long term, neutral mutations + survival bias can lead to something that looks like foresight. > That's why we still have inches and yards even though the metric system is > clearly superior. That's why we still have Windows when Apple is clearly > superior. Nature is enormously conservative, it may add new things but it > doesn't abandon the old because the intermediate stages must also work > because Evolution has absolutely no foresight, it knows nothing about "the > long run". > This is a bit nonsensical. Evolution generates the long run. You talk as if evolution had a goal, but it does not. There seems to be an arrow of increasing complexity associated with evolution, but even there it is not clear of this isn't just an artefact of the low-complexity initial conditions of the universe. Nobody even knows if the complexity increase is unbounded. Telmo. > > That's also why humans have all the old brain structures that lizards have > as well as new ones. > > John K Clark > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
