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Comment by skyraider | Hacker News Reader

Not to go all [0][1][2][3] on one word in your thoughtful comment, but for me, it is always worthwhile to ponder the fact that the theory of evolution is not about chance per se.

You take the intelligent-design approach - pattern recognition on designed things. I hear you. But what about the compelling inductive evidence we have that deterministic, if chaotic, natural systems are perfectly capable of establishing a feedback loop and modifying themselves?

IMHO, accepting evolution is all about wrapping one's head around the notion that the result of this modification, when stretched over unimaginably large timescales, is significant change.

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The time scales are not unimaginable at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox

By selecting for behavior rather than physical byproduct, they have induced evolution at a rate not thought possible in vertebrates.

Not to mention: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_influenza

Edit: I think the parent comment was about the difficulty imagining the process of evolution which we assume takes billions of years because we cannot observe its impact directly in ourselves except to interpret the results. Yet, it is both observable and inducible in things around us. Not so hard to imagine.

I believe the parent comment was referring to the difficulty of imagining billions of years.

Right. My point is that the evidence is there but there's a difficulty in developing or accepting an intuition for evolution given the huge timescales involved in unicellular-to-human evolution, even though it's well-supported by inductive and deductive evidence.

Evolution certainly works much slower in a near-equilibrium scenario.

There is no evolutionary equilibrium. The below linked study of e.coli demonstrated that even during periods where morphology is somewhat fixed that the genomic evolution rate does not slow down.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7268/full/nature0...

Their generation time is shorter, but the principle is the same.

That's why I said near-equilibrium, precisely because I read about the E. Coli experiment on http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/11/15/245168252/bacteri... and I trusted the editor where it says "The pace of improvement is slowing down, but shows no sign of stopping". Perhaps I shouldn't had to say "evolution", but "improvement" instead, which is much more accurate.

I would add that if you think it's not so hard to imagine, maybe share your imaginations with others. Simply asserting it's easy to imagine hasn't worked out well for science in terms of communicating its findings to the public. There are still lots of people who find that imagining hard - it's a psychological barrier to accepting evolution for many people.

Look at how much a human being changes over the course of one lifetime through learning and experience. Evolution is similar process, except instead of storing individual memory in biochemistry you are storing species memory in the genome.

Life is more than a loop. Life is not a loop, actually.

"Feedback loop" is a term of art with a specific meaning and associated math:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory

life is loop with a break

life is a loop with a break

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