If I know anything about nature, it's that it's a brute-force optimizer for biological fitness. Every possible combination of traits could feasibly be tested on these scales.
> [...] and there are - or used to be, sadly - enough species for every linear combination of both possibilities.
Extinction is sad, but there's still plenty enough species to make this statement true.
> If I know anything about nature, it's that it's a brute-force optimizer for biological fitness. Every possible combination of traits could feasibly be tested on these scales.
Not quite. Eg there's basically no wheel in nature, despite the structure itself being quite simple. That's mostly because it's hard to evolve in small steps.
Fair enough. I do find it interesting that even in plants that have N different sexes, their life cycles are still often dimorphic.
Maybe the most fundamental abstraction really is the difference between a 1 and a 0.
Nature and nurture. Gattica-level eugenics, at the end of the day, only affect the DNA. And eugenics will never save someone from the adage "Hard times make strong men. Strong men make good times. Good times make weak men. Weak men make hard times."
Eg western militaries don't seem to be worse at fighting than militaries from poor countries?
> In plant biology, Vavilovian mimicry (also crop mimicry or weed mimicry[1][a]) is a form of mimicry in plants where a weed evolves to share one or more characteristics with a domesticated plant through generations of artificial selection.[2] It is named after Nikolai Vavilov, a prominent Russian plant geneticist.[2] Selection against the weed may occur by killing a young or adult weed, separating its seeds from those of the crop (winnowing), or both. This has been done manually since Neolithic times, and in more recent years by agricultural machinery.
> Vavilovian mimicry is a good illustration of unintentional selection by humans. Although the human selective agents might be conscious of their impact on the local weed gene pool, such effects go against the goals of those growing crops. Weeders do not want to select for weeds that are increasingly similar to the cultivated plant, yet the only other option is to let the weeds grow and compete with crops for sunlight and nutrients. Similar situations include antibiotic resistance and, also in agricultural crops, herbicide resistance. Having acquired many desirable qualities by being subjected to similar selective pressures, Vavilovian mimics may eventually be domesticated themselves. Vavilov called these weeds-become-crops secondary crops.
Agreed, but V-ATPase is worth mentioning as it has a rotor and is very highly conserved. I guess it all depends on scale.