101–110 of 191 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you’re describing evolution.
I am. I am also saying you can not design us any better than what we are today. You can't look into next billion years. Whatever becomes of us at the point will the best design at that point. The optimal design you are suggesting has zero guarantees to keep working. If anything, your optimal design is just another mutation that may or may not survive time.
When I was younger, I was fascinated by evolution, especially the intricacies of how things just work. This fascination also explains why many people believe in the intelligent design theory. However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.
When I was younger, I was fascinated by evolution, especially the intricacies of how things just work. This fascination also explains why many people believe in the intelligent design theory. However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.
Half a billion, afaik. And also how technology matters. Oxygenless ~3.5B years were boring as hell.
For those unaware: Earth not always had O2 in its athmosphere - O2 is a result of one kind of ubiquitous goo that was emitting it as a byproduct. And while it oxidized what it could on the surface, it killed almost every goo, cause it is a poison. Then (and that is still an unproven theory) oxygen-breathing evolved and allowed for fast movement and carnivory, which started arms race of tracking and evasion, coordination, vision, swarming, etc. 0.5B years later here we are.
Btw, there were even higher peaks of oxygen concentration that allowed for animal-sized insects to exist. A time insectophobes wouldn’t want to live in.
Scientists know that dragonflies with wing spans as wide as a hawk's and cockroaches big enough to take on house cats lived during the Paleozoic era (245-570 million years ago). At the same time, mammoth millipedes longer than a human leg skittered across prehistoric soil.
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Also, why didn't any animal evolve a way to avoid sleep completely?
There's a species of bird (Chinstrap penguin) which kinda does that: it sleeps by intervals of 4 (four) seconds only. Many times through day & night. Can these 4 seconds naps be considered sleep? I don't know, but it goes along your question. Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.fr/animaux/insolite-decouvert...
You know how when your hand is relaxed, your fingers are curled? When birds relax, their feet curl in a similar way, and this provides enough grip that if they're on a perch, they will automatically hold on as easily as if they're awake. There's a bit more to it, as the way the tendons in their feet and legs are attached, the foot will automatically grasp when the ankle is bent, so it's a much stronger grip than our…
> It's the wings and chest muscles that get tired. But some birds can use tricks to fly without flapping, and I'm pretty sure some birds can sleep aloft. https://news.mit.edu/2017/engineers-identify-key-albatross-m...
This article doesn't even try to address what I feel is the deeper and more interesting question (but probably one that can't be answered): Why is it that horses, cows, giraffes and birds have all had to come up with a purely passive solution of "locking" themselves in place, either via their joints (for the four-legged), or via the tendon mechanism described here for birds? I.e. why wasn't in simpler in evolutionary…
or it has evolved somewhere and we either don't know about it or the trait didn't survive
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The fascination with “intelligent design” is cherry-picking. The is no shortage of “unintelligent design” in the natural world. Take humans, for example. You can block your trachea and die through the simple act of eating. An intelligent (and omniscient) designer could have avoided that by better designing our overall our overall structure. Or take the fact or ear bones are modified jaw bones. Or if you believe in in…
When you notice these flaws you are seeing it in very very short term. What we are today is what eventually worked for a million years. The design you see today is the way it is because it had to be robust enough (including those problems) to survive to this day. The examples you quote do look like a problem today, but I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.
Iow, it’s not only robust enough, but just robust enough and never pretended to be ideal or durable, except for few accidental cases like sharks, crocs and turtles. Who surely can suffer from long-term non-killing issues but cannot whine to their GP about it.
The examples you quote do look like a problem today, but I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.
Nah, it’s a vast space. There may be natural trade-offs, but there’s no force to solve an issue in the best way possible. It solves randomly and if that creates a non-fatal problem - bad luck, now we just have it. You’ll always have a set of non-fatal problems just under fatality, and also a set of fatal problems just under a reproduction disabling line.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you’re describing evolution.
I am. I am also saying you can not design us any better than what we are today. You can't look into next billion years. Whatever becomes of us at the point will the best design at that point. The optimal design you are suggesting has zero guarantees to keep working. If anything, your optimal design is just another mutation that may or may not survive time.
Of course you can. We could regenerate limbs like a lizard’s tail, keep growing teeth like a shark, not require so many different types of foods to survive healthily… The list goes on and on.
When I was younger, I was fascinated by evolution, especially the intricacies of how things just work. This fascination also explains why many people believe in the intelligent design theory. However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.
what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve Half a billion, afaik. And also how technology matters. Oxygenless ~3.5B years were boring as hell. For those unaware: Earth not always had O2 in its athmosphere - O2 is a result of one kind of ubiquitous goo that was emitting it as a byproduct. And while it oxidized what it could on the surface, it killed almost every goo, cause it is a poison. Then (…
https://youtu.be/oY32HPQrhYg?si=z0QO821u3-E5sJ6l&t=480 (about millipedes from 8:00)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you’re describing evolution.
I am. I am also saying you can not design us any better than what we are today. You can't look into next billion years. Whatever becomes of us at the point will the best design at that point. The optimal design you are suggesting has zero guarantees to keep working. If anything, your optimal design is just another mutation that may or may not survive time.
I disagree, evolution is not perfect nor intelligent (as far as we know). It's never the "best design" that survives, it's always "good enough for now", merely better than other solutions at the time. A billion years of good enough is not necessarily the best it can be theoretically.
I'm sure we can find examples of living processes that are dumb and inefficient, with obvious room for improvement, but have survived for millenia simply because it was good enough.