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Comment by BrandonM | Hacker News Reader

> Evolution took billions of years to engineer the ribosome

I see this argument a lot, but it doesn't really hold water. Evolution wasn't trying to engineer the ribosome. In fact, the only thing evolution tries to do is replicate. The biological forms that have come out of that are completely random.

Humans, on the other hand, consciously make efforts at engineering. Thousands of monkeys will never (for all practical purposes) manage to write a Shakespearean work, but Shakespeare did.

100 years ago we barely had phones. Almost no one had a car. There were no televisions and movies didn't have sound. Human flight was relegated to hot air balloons. On the other hand, total Internet bandwidth has increased from about 10 terabytes a month to 10,000,000 terabytes a month in the last 15 years. Trying to guess the limits of what we'll be able to do in the next 100 years is unfathomable to me.

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> Evolution wasn't trying to engineer the ribosome.

Evolution isn't purposeless. Sure, it is a random process but it has a purpose. And that's of survival of the organism (or if you like Dawkins, genes that encode the organism).

> The biological forms that have come out of that are completely random.

Wow, biological forms are NOT random. They are what they are because of the environment they are habituated in. The exact implementation (animal) may not be deterministic but if you set the right fitness function, evolution will produce what you wanted it to produce. Evolution is like a blind tinkerer who knows he needs to fix but doesn't know where to hit the hammer to fix it. He only gets feedback once he has hit the hammer. From the feedback, he can definitely avoid hitting at the wrong spot again and again. I wouldn't call this process random.

My original argument is about engineering macro v/s nano machines. Evolution is great at doing nano work because it is an inside out process.

PS: Thousands of moneys _will_ produce a Shakespearean work if their survival depended on it! (Just kidding)

Thanks for correcting the bits that I was wrong on. I hope the point I was trying to make was still meaningful in spite of the inaccuracies.

> Evolution isn't purposeless. Sure, it is a random process but it has a purpose. And that's of survival of the organism (or if you like Dawkins, genes that encode the organism).

Is survival a "purpose" or is it just the consequence that is selected for? (Survival isn't a property like length or color.)

Good point.

As long as we're quibbling/clarifying, it seems we're mixing up natural selection and evolution here.

> The biological forms that have come out of that are completely random.

That's not strictly speaking true in the sense that we normally use 'random'.

You're right. What I meant to say was that biological forms are not the end goal of evolution, as opposed to engineered products which generally are the goal of human production.

Thousands of monkeys will never (for all practical purposes) manage to write a Shakespearean work, but Shakespeare did.

I always wonder why people choose monkeys for that analogy, seeing as we're more or less descended from a recent ancestor. At some point there were only thousands of that ancestor, but they managed to produce something capable of writing Shakespeare within a few million years! Maybe a better animal to choose would be octopi...

It's a false analogy with regard to evolution. Purely random input is extraordinarily unlikely to match any specific output. But if you bring in inheritance, mutation, and environmental pressures then you can produce just about anything, given sufficient time.

I like this perspective, I prefer optimism over critical pessimism. This stance is really what drives innovation - not being restrained by perceived or even real limitations.

Real limitations will always restrain you, no matter how optimistic you are.

Real limitations aren't "real" though, in the sense that some sort of boundary or new knowledge extends the demarcating line between it being a "real" limitation and an "unknown" limitation. A matter of degree I suppose. I'm certainly not going to argue that humans will suddenly begin sprouting wings on their backs, but people at some point in history - I'm sure - claimed human flight to be an impossibility, a gift only birds and gods possessed. That is, until the airplane was created, which extended that "limitation".

Many etiological examples can be drawn, but can you not agree that saying "real limitations will always restrain you" is too absolutist?

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