Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Strange Inevitability of Evolution

nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 52 posts

Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution

#11

Post by simondedalus »

hsitz wrote: post #8
simondedalus wrote: post #5

As usual, this article makes me think of Wittgenstein, who would probably say, "I agree with everything you're saying, except the word 'strange'." The content is interesting, definitely, but you could save some time and potentially misleading "appreciation of strangeness" by stating that neutral drift allows for dramatically more random possibilities than those offered by one-time random mutations. Not that Wittgenst…

A maybe relevant Wittgenstein quote: "It is not how the world is, that is the mystical, but that it is." Tractatus 6.44

indeed, the early wittgenstein thinks that the world is must be one of those things we must pass over in silence, while how the world is is exactly the kind of thing about which we can talk and reason.

the later wittgenstein (still?) thinks that explanation comes to an end somewhere, and just wants to make sure one doesn't append "and isn't that mysterious?" to the end of a good explanation (ie one that sets out to answer a precise question, then does so).

but who knows. wittgenstein and mysticism is an interesting topic... for the early wittgenstein, it's crystal clear that he's saying there are 2 domains: stuff that admits of being talked about in a propositional way, and stuff that doesn't. all the latter stuff is mystical; it's not necessarily supernatural, it's just that we can't get anywhere talking about it with true/false (or satisfaction-condition or whatever) talk.

but what about the later wittgenstein? he thinks that the domain of things we can talk about has opened up considerably, because he no longer things that language functions as a mirror of "the world", nor should it even try to. now he thinks that utterances are tools to get this or that done. this does not neatly carve out anything to be called mystical.

---

relating this back to the article, the idea is that we sort of put an air of magic about the mystical, and when we treat something for which we can create an adequate explanation as mystical or magic (or "strange"), we lead ourselves and others into getting perplexed.

and if there is something to be said for religion or purpose, it's not to be found in something we can explicate adequately by adverting to neutral drift, etc. that being the case, we want to be careful about what we call strange. what are we endorsing when we see strangeness in something we can understand?

Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution

#12

Post by WalterBright »

SiVal wrote: post #6
npgatech wrote: post #2

"You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive." Interesting article but why are we still bringing up creationism. This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed. It adds no value to the article except ridicules itself.

This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance embodied in terms like "benighted creationist" is the real problem, not that even acknowledging a theory that has been believed in some form by most humans who ever lived is too kind. A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing…

A theory makes predictions that can be tested. Creationism is a faith, not a theory, as it makes no predictions.

For example, Einstein's relativity theory predicted that gravity bends light, an effect that had never been observed. Decades later, the theory was confirmed when bent light was detected and the amount of the bend matched the theory's prediction.

Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution

#13

Post by judahmeek »

lucio wrote: post #10

I don't like the anthropomorphization of evolution. It's a bad angle to view the subject >If evolution is “searching” for that function by natural selection... Evolution is "doing" nothing. It has no particular purpose and it is not "searching" for the particular life forms of this planet. The true shaper of the life-forms we know is death. Death (by resource starvation) is the knife cutting the uncontrolled growth o…

I agree. The difficulty people, including myself, have of realizing that evolution is actually a impersonal, negative process (resource starvation and the culling of the unfit) rather than a sentient, positive process is astounding.

Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution

#14

Post by TeMPOraL »

SiVal wrote: post #6
npgatech wrote: post #2

"You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive." Interesting article but why are we still bringing up creationism. This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed. It adds no value to the article except ridicules itself.

This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance embodied in terms like "benighted creationist" is the real problem, not that even acknowledging a theory that has been believed in some form by most humans who ever lived is too kind. A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing…

> A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing more enlightened than a lack of independent thinking in an environment where atheism is in fashion among the cool kids.

Oh, I love the last point. I've met people like this - who are atheists for the same reason others are religious - because that's what they were taught and/or because it's cool these days. Religion vs. atheism in general population is not really about independent thinking - in general, people are equally poor at this, whether believers or non-believers.

> evolution is one of those things that, even when I can explain it well enough to actually implement it with my own hands, it's still hard for me to believe.

I think you need to have a proper "thinking framework" to explain it well. Like e.g. evolution seems awesome only until you get the feel of just how many checks it does to get to its goal. If you could do half as many checks yourself in a similar timeframe, you'd solve your problem yourself, along with countless others. Or with Bayesian filters, at some point you need to get the feel of how things are connected to one another via causality, and then it stops being a surprise[0].

What I'd wish people would do is to stop trying to score cheap shots off one another. I.e. there's a difference between believing in evolution as a a process and evolution as the only source of all the life around us. For the former, the very phenomenon, you need only:

- ability for a thing to make copies of itself

- ability of an environment to make changes on the blueprint of those copies

That's it. You have those two things, you have evolution by definition. It's a trivial thing to accept once you understand how it works (which sadly, schools tend to not explain well). On the other hand, I sympathize with people who have troubles accepting that this very phenomenon could by itself create all life we know, ourselves included. Ultimately it boils down to whether you trust "science" or "religion" more, and frankly, there's plenty of reasons to distrust both nowadays. Keep in mind that for a typical person, science is not just GPS and cars and cell phones, it's also (and primarily) all the utter bullshit they read in science sections of newspapers and magazines.

--

[0] - Tangentially, it also makes you realize that you can only get away with a lie because the party that's being lied to doesn't bother to check things - things are connected together via causal links on so many levels that you really can't tell a perfect lie. Personally, it also makes me believe that the quest for privacy is a moot thing, because it again only depends on how much people bother to dig out the information they want; technology is only making the process of looking at causal links easier and faster.

Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution

#15

Post by TeMPOraL »

WalterBright wrote: post #12
SiVal wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance embodied in terms like "benighted creationist" is the real problem, not that even acknowledging a theory that has been believed in some form by most humans who ever lived is too kind. A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing…

A theory makes predictions that can be tested. Creationism is a faith, not a theory, as it makes no predictions. For example, Einstein's relativity theory predicted that gravity bends light, an effect that had never been observed. Decades later, the theory was confirmed when bent light was detected and the amount of the bend matched the theory's prediction.

I'd say that for a typical religious person, "theory of evolution" as a source of life is akin to saying "Einstein's theory predicted gravity bends light, therefore my sun burn was really caused by a black hole over at Proxima Centauri". There's kind of a huge gap to cover between directly testable predictions and what's trying to be explained. So it boils down to whether or not you believe a complex chain of reasoning made by smart people, and there's plenty of things that can influence what you believe and who you trust.

Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution

#16

Post by TeMPOraL »

judahmeek wrote: post #13
lucio wrote: post #10

I don't like the anthropomorphization of evolution. It's a bad angle to view the subject >If evolution is “searching” for that function by natural selection... Evolution is "doing" nothing. It has no particular purpose and it is not "searching" for the particular life forms of this planet. The true shaper of the life-forms we know is death. Death (by resource starvation) is the knife cutting the uncontrolled growth o…

I agree. The difficulty people, including myself, have of realizing that evolution is actually a impersonal, negative process (resource starvation and the culling of the unfit) rather than a sentient, positive process is astounding.

I'd say it's simple when you actually "step through" a few steps of a simplified simulation. On paper or in your head, picture a few critters reproducing and dying, with random feature changes occuring every reproduction step and with chance of death being directly tied to those features. Step a few generations and you can clearly see that what really drives the evolutionary process is the criterion you chose to determine which critters die and which survive.

But yeah, I know most people have problem grokking processes like these. School definitely doesn't teach it - not in a proper, abstract, "algorithmic" way. Only with stories about butterflies and dinosaurs. I know I finally grokked evolution somewhere in my mid 20-s, after a) reading enough Less Wrong articles, and b) simulating it in my head, pretty much in the way I described above.

Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution

#17

Post by _greim_ »

If you put an boulder in front of a blind wanderer traveling in a straight line, they'll bump into it and stop. If they're wandering in a plane, however, they might wander past it.

You can install a line of boulders instead. But if it's a blind drifter drifting through a 3D volume, they might drift past the string of boulders.

For every increase in the number of dimensions N the wanderer can move through, an obstacle must block that many more pathways, in order to remain an obstacle.

Complex genomes, having high-dimensionality phase spaces, present fewer systematic barriers to genetic drift, allowing populations to spread out through more of the phase space, which in turn ratchets up the probability some mutation would emerge that increases fitness.

Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution

#18

Post by flukus »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #15
WalterBright wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A theory makes predictions that can be tested. Creationism is a faith, not a theory, as it makes no predictions. For example, Einstein's relativity theory predicted that gravity bends light, an effect that had never been observed. Decades later, the theory was confirmed when bent light was detected and the amount of the bend matched the theory's prediction.

I'd say that for a typical religious person, "theory of evolution" as a source of life is akin to saying "Einstein's theory predicted gravity bends light, therefore my sun burn was really caused by a black hole over at Proxima Centauri". There's kind of a huge gap to cover between directly testable predictions and what's trying to be explained. So it boils down to whether or not you believe a complex chain of reasoni…

> There's kind of a huge gap to cover between directly testable predictions and what's trying to be explained.

The thing is, evolution is really simple. First there are random mutations, which are directly testable. Your DNA will be slightly wrong from your parents DNA. Secondly, there is environmental selection, also easily testable. Drop a house cat in the middle of the arctic and you'll see how it works, although there are much better (and humane) experiments that have been conducted. The testability is much more accessible to ordinary folk than Einsteins theory will ever be.

The final component is time, which is really what creationist take issue with. That's why you'll see them reject every branch of science except evolution.

Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution

#19

Post by SiVal »

WalterBright wrote: post #12
SiVal wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance embodied in terms like "benighted creationist" is the real problem, not that even acknowledging a theory that has been believed in some form by most humans who ever lived is too kind. A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing…

A theory makes predictions that can be tested. Creationism is a faith, not a theory, as it makes no predictions. For example, Einstein's relativity theory predicted that gravity bends light, an effect that had never been observed. Decades later, the theory was confirmed when bent light was detected and the amount of the bend matched the theory's prediction.

Although I tend to agree with you, Walter, most of the time, and I don't disagree here, I'm a little puzzled at why you're making this distinction. When discussing the evolution of humans, it was already a past event before any explanations were even possible, and creationism and evolution are both (in this context) offered as explanations for something that happened in the past, like the Tunguska Event. We can't really make predictions about Tunguska, just figure out what explanation is most likely. For creationism vs evolution of humans, predictions, except maybe about things that haven't been found in the fossil record but will be, don't seem involved. It's not faith vs. theory; it's plausibility of explanation vs. explanation or mechanism vs. mechanism.

But if we're talking about something going forward, which excludes the origin of humans, evolution definitely makes predictions (and creationism has nothing to say, AFAIK). We can see evolution in action with our own eyes in those recent "evolution of drug resistant bacteria" videos, and we can definitely make predictions about that and run cool experiments, but creationism isn't a part of those conversations. It's only about where humans first came from.

I'm not defending creationism (more generally: things that even a human isn't smart enough to do but yet WERE done, were done by being(s) smarter than humans) as an explanation, which I believe was only the most likely until we discovered a clearly superior and powerful explanation, but I'm a little puzzled at the "creationism is faith, evolution is theory" response. Evolution as explanation for the past seems like the same kind of thing as creationism, and creationism is only about explaining the past.

Post reply on HN