Hacker News Reader

I don't know if the analogy to darwinian evolution makes much sense, it seems to me that it makes more sense to see this as a way of error-correcting our reality, that is to say quantum phenomenon occur because anything else would cause a severe inconsistency.

View on HN

It is indeed a stretch, but it's just supposed to be an evocative name not a perfect analogy. In particular, quantum Darwinism has a notion of fittest types of information, and this information is replicated, but it crucially does not feature a notion of mutation, so in particular it cannot result in increasing complexity/sophistication over time as produced by biological Darwinism.

Evocative "sorta" names have a tendency to spread misinformation when the scientific details are opaque to most people. It's not a practice that I think is okay.

Then you should probably express your displeasure to guy who picked the name :)

Seriously though, all evocative names are imperfect. Laymen always over interpret them. I don't like "quantum Darwinism" much, but if your standard is that the name of a mathematical concept not be misinterpreted, then basically all English words are out.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/895/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com