The Strange Inevitability of Evolution

http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/the-strange-inevitability-of-evolution-rp

by dnetesn • 10 years ago

65 51 10 years ago

npgatech• 10 years ago

"You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive."

Interesting article but why are we still bringing up creationism. This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed. It adds no value to the article except ridicules itself.

kwhitefoot• 10 years ago

But you probably would have to be to think that the argument was relevant to Darwin's theory. Darwin book is titled: "The Origin of Species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life". That is to say, it is explicitly not about how the variation comes about but about how the variation becomes fixed.

spacehacker• 10 years ago

Indeed. Until we can quantify nature's computational power and the computational complexity of evolving solutions to problems in nature, the only sensible response to the fact that evolution works extremely well is no response because we lack comparisons. Evolution only surprises us when we falsely (or at least without good reason) regard nature and our own creative abilities to belong to the same reference class.

There are also already plenty of clues for why evolution works, e.g. distributed representations, parallelization, composition counteracting combinatorial explosions, selection for structures that evolve faster/better (kind of like learning to learn) etc.

SiVal2• 10 years ago

This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed

I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance embodied in terms like "benighted creationist" is the real problem, not that even acknowledging a theory that has been believed in some form by most humans who ever lived is too kind.

A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing more enlightened than a lack of independent thinking in an environment where atheism is in fashion among the cool kids.

I'll have to say that I'm astonished again and again when I write code that uses some "mindless" search process (including numerous experiments with evolutionary algorithms) and it finds the answer to some problem that I couldn't reason through. I can't seem to get over the feeling that if I have to reason to solve a certain problem, and I can't reason well enough to solve it, and another "thing" does solve it, it must reason better than I do--be smarter than I am--even when I wrote the code that did it.

It gives me a sense of "awe" for the power of evolution and a lasting "sympathetic attitude" toward those who just can't believe that it could work this well. Like the power of a simple, naive bayes spam sorter to "interpret the text of email", evolution is one of those things that, even when I can explain it well enough to actually implement it with my own hands, it's still hard for me to believe.

flukus9• 10 years ago

I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance embodied in terms like "benighted creationist" is the real problem, not that even acknowledging a theory that has been believed in some form by most humans who ever lived is too kind.

Creationism was never a scientific theory. And I think we can give a free pass to people being creationist before the theory was created and before it was taught in schools. Modern day creationist though, they are fools.

WalterBright2• 10 years ago

A theory makes predictions that can be tested. Creationism is a faith, not a theory, as it makes no predictions.

For example, Einstein's relativity theory predicted that gravity bends light, an effect that had never been observed. Decades later, the theory was confirmed when bent light was detected and the amount of the bend matched the theory's prediction.

TeMPOraL3• 10 years ago

A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing more enlightened than a lack of independent thinking in an environment where atheism is in fashion among the cool kids.

Oh, I love the last point. I've met people like this - who are atheists for the same reason others are religious - because that's what they were taught and/or because it's cool these days. Religion vs. atheism in general population is not really about independent thinking - in general, people are equally poor at this, whether believers or non-believers.

evolution is one of those things that, even when I can explain it well enough to actually implement it with my own hands, it's still hard for me to believe.

I think you need to have a proper "thinking framework" to explain it well. Like e.g. evolution seems awesome only until you get the feel of just how many checks it does to get to its goal. If you could do half as many checks yourself in a similar timeframe, you'd solve your problem yourself, along with countless others. Or with Bayesian filters, at some point you need to get the feel of how things are connected to one another via causality, and then it stops being a surprise[0].

What I'd wish people would do is to stop trying to score cheap shots off one another. I.e. there's a difference between believing in evolution as a a process and evolution as the only source of all the life around us. For the former, the very phenomenon, you need only:

- ability for a thing to make copies of itself

- ability of an environment to make changes on the blueprint of those copies

That's it. You have those two things, you have evolution by definition. It's a trivial thing to accept once you understand how it works (which sadly, schools tend to not explain well). On the other hand, I sympathize with people who have troubles accepting that this very phenomenon could by itself create all life we know, ourselves included. Ultimately it boils down to whether you trust "science" or "religion" more, and frankly, there's plenty of reasons to distrust both nowadays. Keep in mind that for a typical person, science is not just GPS and cars and cell phones, it's also (and primarily) all the utter bullshit they read in science sections of newspapers and magazines.

[0] - Tangentially, it also makes you realize that you can only get away with a lie because the party that's being lied to doesn't bother to check things - things are connected together via causal links on so many levels that you really can't tell a perfect lie. Personally, it also makes me believe that the quest for privacy is a moot thing, because it again only depends on how much people bother to dig out the information they want; technology is only making the process of looking at causal links easier and faster.

geomark• 10 years ago

I get the some of the same feeling. And related is emergent behaviors where entities with simple rules/behaviors exhibit amazing, complex and seemlingly unpredictable behaviors when interacting in large numbers.

memracom• 10 years ago

A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing more enlightened than a lack of independent thinking in an environment where atheism is in fashion among the cool kids.

Lots of people are ready to make definitive statements about creationism without ever having studied the subject. Unless I am mistaken, creationism is not taught in universities, so one could only make EDUCATED statements about it if one had put the personal effort into studying creationism independently. And if a person had done that, they are unlikely to be making glib statements about how foolish creationists are, instead they would be blogging on the subject where there is enough space to make reasoned arguments.

People who say that creationists are fools, are just like people who are politically correct, or like right-wing extremist ideologues (Christian or Muslim). They are true-believers who have received wisdom from their chosen prophet (who may be a biology professor) but they are not thinking and reasoning.

Thinking is hard. Reasoning is even harder. But I would hope that on HN, there is a larger population of thinkers and reasoners than in the general public.

I'm not even going to state my beliefs on the subject because I am happy to let all of you believe what you want to. Evolution is a useful tool for biological life, but as the article states, it is not the be-all and end-all. It certainly does not negate creationism in all its forms because if it did, I would have heard of the paper which demonstrated this proof. Since I have heard of no such paper, and I know of no biology department in which creationism is studied, I feel confident in saying that evolution has not trumped creationism. I'm even willing to allow that some well-described theory of creationism in the future, could include evolutionary theory and the current neutral genomic mutation theory as part of a larger whole.

CamperBob24• 10 years ago

A person can be a creationist without being a fool

How, brainwashing aside?

simondedalus2• 10 years ago

As usual, this article makes me think of Wittgenstein, who would probably say, "I agree with everything you're saying, except the word 'strange'."

The content is interesting, definitely, but you could save some time and potentially misleading "appreciation of strangeness" by stating that neutral drift allows for dramatically more random possibilities than those offered by one-time random mutations.

Not that Wittgenstein (or I) want to poopoo the "wonder" element of science or life in general... but I think it's telling that the author, as other comments point out, mentions creationism, as if that's a natural motivator for "wonder" (or a natural view to take in light of "wonder"). But creationism is simplistic, incoherent, and wrong. If "strange" is adding nothing to the truth or falsity of any of the statements involved, and "strange" is somehow an excuse for creationism, perhaps we should take issue with this being "strange" at all.

hsitz• 10 years ago

A maybe relevant Wittgenstein quote: "It is not how the world is, that is the mystical, but that it is." Tractatus 6.44

simondedalus2• 10 years ago

indeed, the early wittgenstein thinks that the world is must be one of those things we must pass over in silence, while how the world is is exactly the kind of thing about which we can talk and reason.

the later wittgenstein (still?) thinks that explanation comes to an end somewhere, and just wants to make sure one doesn't append "and isn't that mysterious?" to the end of a good explanation (ie one that sets out to answer a precise question, then does so).

but who knows. wittgenstein and mysticism is an interesting topic... for the early wittgenstein, it's crystal clear that he's saying there are 2 domains: stuff that admits of being talked about in a propositional way, and stuff that doesn't. all the latter stuff is mystical; it's not necessarily supernatural, it's just that we can't get anywhere talking about it with true/false (or satisfaction-condition or whatever) talk.

but what about the later wittgenstein? he thinks that the domain of things we can talk about has opened up considerably, because he no longer things that language functions as a mirror of "the world", nor should it even try to. now he thinks that utterances are tools to get this or that done. this does not neatly carve out anything to be called mystical.

---

relating this back to the article, the idea is that we sort of put an air of magic about the mystical, and when we treat something for which we can create an adequate explanation as mystical or magic (or "strange"), we lead ourselves and others into getting perplexed.

and if there is something to be said for religion or purpose, it's not to be found in something we can explicate adequately by adverting to neutral drift, etc. that being the case, we want to be careful about what we call strange. what are we endorsing when we see strangeness in something we can understand?

walter_bishop• 10 years ago

I used watch those Dawkins v the true believers videos and I suspect such opinions are promoted to discredit Darwinian Evolution acting on the genome. Regardless of the unknown nuances of DNA, Evolution is the environment acting on the species to further adapt it to the environment. Here's another quote from Philip Ball: "What often goes unremarked among the revisionism that current research is prompting is that DNA was supposed to be the missing part of the puzzle in evolutionary theory: the repository of Mendelian hereditary factors."

So if DNA doesn't act on the units of inheritance, there must be some kind of spooky spirit entities acting on matter,

http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/images/miracle_sharris.gi...

http://www.philipball.co.uk/images/stories/docs/pdf/genes%20...

lucio• 10 years ago

I don't like the anthropomorphization of evolution. It's a bad angle to view the subject

If evolution is “searching” for that function by natural selection...

Evolution is "doing" nothing. It has no particular purpose and it is not "searching" for the particular life forms of this planet. The true shaper of the life-forms we know is death. Death (by resource starvation) is the knife cutting the uncontrolled growth of life, uncontrolled growth in number and variations.

judahmeek• 10 years ago

I agree. The difficulty people, including myself, have of realizing that evolution is actually a impersonal, negative process (resource starvation and the culling of the unfit) rather than a sentient, positive process is astounding.

TeMPOraL3• 10 years ago

I'd say it's simple when you actually "step through" a few steps of a simplified simulation. On paper or in your head, picture a few critters reproducing and dying, with random feature changes occuring every reproduction step and with chance of death being directly tied to those features. Step a few generations and you can clearly see that what really drives the evolutionary process is the criterion you chose to determine which critters die and which survive.

But yeah, I know most people have problem grokking processes like these. School definitely doesn't teach it - not in a proper, abstract, "algorithmic" way. Only with stories about butterflies and dinosaurs. I know I finally grokked evolution somewhere in my mid 20-s, after a) reading enough Less Wrong articles, and b) simulating it in my head, pretty much in the way I described above.

_greim_• 10 years ago

If you put an boulder in front of a blind wanderer traveling in a straight line, they'll bump into it and stop. If they're wandering in a plane, however, they might wander past it.

You can install a line of boulders instead. But if it's a blind drifter drifting through a 3D volume, they might drift past the string of boulders.

For every increase in the number of dimensions N the wanderer can move through, an obstacle must block that many more pathways, in order to remain an obstacle.

Complex genomes, having high-dimensionality phase spaces, present fewer systematic barriers to genetic drift, allowing populations to spread out through more of the phase space, which in turn ratchets up the probability some mutation would emerge that increases fitness.

reubenswartz• 10 years ago

If you enjoyed this, you might like The Vital Question by Nick Lane (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OD8Z4JW), which discusses the origin of life, and the jump from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, focusing on energy.

Jupe• 10 years ago

Evolution does give us a tool to make predictions, and yes, some of those predictions come true. Unfortunately, humans don't always heed those predictions:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702430/

dilemma2• 10 years ago

What if evolution is... Intelligently Designed?

The Strange Inevitability of Evolution

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