I am always amazed how these complicated systems evolved through random variations.
There must be plenty of “versions” which don’t do anything but generations later are crucial to a function.
How does evolution not get stuck in a local optimum?
There must be plenty of “versions” which don’t do anything but generations later are crucial to a function.
How does evolution not get stuck in a local optimum?
So in our case the starting conditions just lined up the way it did and no single step (or series of steps) easily flipped our wiring, so we just rolled with it (and we get by quite well).
Vertebrates for example had a at least 2 whole genome duplication events in the past giving us up to 4 copies of the same family of many genes. This enables mutations to alter one copy of a crucial gene to "invent" new functionality without killing the organism.
The most common version of this is probably duplication of G protein linked receptors for odor and taste. Mice and dogs have far more of these than we do.
Evolution does get stuck in a local optimum quite a bit. Think of how many vertebrates are now limited to 4 limbs compared to many insect or mollusk species.
Instead of having dexterous forelimbs around the mouth like crabs, elephants make due with prehensile noses.
Similarly, to get to running speeds while having opposable thumbs humans evolved to stand upright on the hindlimbs instead of simply becoming 6 limbed centaur like creatures. Humans can't outrun any major predators at short distances.
Could be wrong, but my understanding is that it does? Plenty of things in nature are not really evolving much at all (as in, variations are not selected) even over longer periods of time. What can happen to it is getting removed by something that evolved from somewhere else (taking the evolutionary niche, or making it unsurvivable)
Neutral drift and very large population sizes. Anything that preserves diversity in the population long enough to find the right basin. Most artificial evolution systems cannot support population sizes large enough to preserve diversity long enough to locate any solutions that matter.
Right now, evolution is running a live experiment with something like 10^30 candidates in one population alone. The computational requirements for this are effectively zero. The environment is the computer.
This is why some animals have barely changed in appearance for hundreds of millions of years, e.g. scorpions, while others have changed so much that nobody would guess the relationship between them and their ancestors, had we not discovered some intermediate steps in their evolution.
More recently, e.g. 70 million years ago, when dinosaurs still lived, the ancestor of humans looked more like a rat than like a human, but the ancestors of sharks, crocodiles and big constrictor snakes looked pretty much the same like today.
Now I'm wondering whether HN uses some sort of language model to infer semantic similarity and thus kill content automatically. Frankly, whether this is automatic or by consensus of certain users, there's not much of a difference. It is dystopian, especially given the mountains of meaningless one-line comments that abound here (probably “too little substance to be worth killing”).
Once upon a time the Internet was the realm of free thought and free speech. I get it that spam etc needs to be fought and suppressed, but frankly, none of my comments that have been killed (quite a couple of them already) come close to that category. Rather, it seems the ruling HN mindset is about as narrow-minded (if not more so in certain respects) than your typical mainstream forum.
Don't know about you specifically, but people here clearly "flag" things they disagree with, which is part of why what could be an interesting discussion often ends up being a dull CJ style chorus between affirmative and know-it-all. As if there was no middle ground between that and a "flamewar".
I've read comments to the effect it would be easy to change to the better by administrative means, but apparently there's no will, so "smug-flagging" seems to be in line with the purpose of the site, and that's it.