Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a biologist so forgive me the poor wording, but there are "infinitely high" peaks/walls in the evolutionary landscape, as in: "the human urinary system has some evolutionary constraints and anatomical features that are not optimally designed from an engineering perspective, but they are generally functional and reflect our evolutionary history rather than deliberate design." So in that sense, a global maxima (min…
Interesting I did not know human urinary tract was suboptimal. Are there examples of "discontinuous" evolution where a chance mutation stumbled upon a much better way to do something that allowed a species to jump the gap? I imagine it would be very rare because chance mutations in a single individual that confer extraordinary survival / mating advantage to offset entire population would be rare like being a superman…
-> This also depends on population size, if there is a bottleneck event (ie 99.99 percent of some species dying) then among the 100's of survivors perhaps there could be a superman. Either because this person got lucky, or the rest got unlucky. But in general the distribution of traits is quite continuous, given large populations.
It's also good to keep in mind that us biologists have messy definitions, ie we call specimen A and B the same species when they produce fertile offspring. Some species produce offspring but infertile (Horse-Donkey, Lion-Tiger). But what if A and B have fertile offspring and B and C do, but A and C do not? The whole definition of species falls apart (it leads to a paradox).
We have a lot of that in biology. You need to learn to deal with it (sunglasses dropping down), and assign uncertainties to terms you learn about, they are often just our attempts to name boxes on continuous, multidimensional scales.