171–180 of 188 posts
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It's a nice thought. But many humans aren't able to do that with each other, so it seems like a high bar for a potato.
potatos have more genes that you
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Yes, beneficial refers to those genes continuing on into the future. The operative descriptive word describing those "useless traits" is cost. If nothing else, they have a cost of the energy and resources required to produce the relevant cells or whatever. Another organism that does not waste that energy and resources will out-compete the one building the useless trait. Natural selection will make it go away.
Though that might just be the case for most things, I don't think it would be fair to say that for all things. Two traits could develop in conjunction with another, and trait 1 gives an advantage, while trait 2 is a disadvantage. The most in-your-face example I think is the stereotype of nerds and glasses. In short, a good enough trait could get you laid and fed even though you have a crappy trait that came with it.…
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Yes, beneficial refers to those genes continuing on into the future. The operative descriptive word describing those "useless traits" is cost. If nothing else, they have a cost of the energy and resources required to produce the relevant cells or whatever. Another organism that does not waste that energy and resources will out-compete the one building the useless trait. Natural selection will make it go away.
That assumes that natural selection is a perfect process, and that we are at some "end" of it. In truth, the cost of generating useless noise could be small enough that it just doesn't matter and it hangs around. Maybe it will disappear in a few more billion years. Any organism we see today may very well have unnecessary traits that evolution is in the process of removing.
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When you cut off a human's appendage, the screaming comes from a voice. The voice comes from a sort of... consciousness. Which while we haven't exactly nailed down what makes one up, we are reasonably certain that it involves a nervous system .
It's still just physics and chemistry all the way down though. It's not clear that plants couldn't evolve something similar through a mechanism other than a nervous system.
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The rule of thumb in evolutionary biology is if it has a cost and lasts through evolutionary time, it is beneficial. Because otherwise a similar organism that doesn't waste that time/energy on the useless thing/behavior will outcompete. Here's some odd and obvious examples. Religion has a cost (lots of resources and time are spent on them) and they have lasted through time, therefore it is evolutionarily beneficial.…
I mostly agree with your point however IMO the psychopath thing is not a great example because it could be explained as the incomplete or nonexistent development of something that is complex that is beneficial. I think the error is that we can’t necessarily know what the cost was. And the benefit doesnt necessarily have to be that big relative to the cost. I mean I’m replying to you and that me costs something, and w…
>it could be explained as the incomplete or nonexistent development of something that is complex that is beneficial.
If it has a cost but doesn't have a benefit right now, it's going to get weeded out via natural selection in favor of variants of the organism that are not wasting the time and resources on that trait.
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I'm not sure why you can assume that without any direct evidence.
Like the xkcd about emacs control key spiking cpu[0], I think its a generally safe assumption that if a behavior exists consistently, then somebody likely depends on it for their workflow [0] https://xkcd.com/1172/
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If a branch falls in the forest and there is no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest#:~... . "... majority view of the quantum mechanics community then and arguably to this day is that existence in the absence of an observer is at best a conjecture"
"Observer" is the most unfortunate word physicists could have chosen, though. It gets people all confused about observation mistakenly having something to do with thinking or perception. "Interacter" would have been a more accurate term, but it doesn't sound as sexy. To wit, yes, the tree makes a sound because the tree is there to hear it.
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Sometimes signal is just there regardless. If you hit your tissue hard enough, it becomes blueish for a while (a bruise, a hemorrhage). It may benefit something by accident, but a bruise just can’t stay as pink as the rest of you, due to the physics of the process. (From tfa) Plants exposed to drought stress have been shown to experience cavitation – a process where air bubbles form, expand and collapse in the xylem,…
The person you’re responding to is talking about other organisms (ie not the tree), which seems compatible with your observation here. Trees might be screaming/bubble-popping into the abyss for simple physical reasons, but if cavitation is very important to some creature, there’s a decent chance that creature has evolved to sense these vibrations.
Ironically, something I didn't realize until now, and what also confirms the original point: apparently[0] the drumming itself turned into form of communication for woodpeckers.
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ehhmm... yep?
Do we know of any special type of sound unable to travel by the air that could be recorded by a microphone separated by several cm of air?
>"this sound is informative"
Not different than saying "Plants had evolved a plant telephone to be informed from other plants or inform animals that they need a pee, right now"
Why a plant in a humid spot at the valley should suffer and react as its neighbors in a dry spot on the top of the hill? That would be inefficient and negative for their survival. Does not add much to the info that they have yet (collected with their own roots) and can be deceptive.
I noticed that forks emit a sound when they are drop and hit the soil. So this means that is a mechanism to alert other forks of the danger. So forks must have ears. Pure logic.
"We assume a link between many things that could be unrelated in order to sell animism 2.0 and grab eyeballs" would be a better title