Computer Scientists Find Mass Extinctions Can Accelerate Evolution | Hacker News Reader

Computer Scientists Find Mass Extinctions Can Accelerate Evolution

news.utexas.edu

34 pointsr72123 comments

This has been know for a long time. The rate of evolution depends heavily on the number of open niches (one might argue that it depends _entirely_ on the number of open niches). Mass extinctions lead to the opening and reconfiguration of a vast number of niches into which existing species will rapidly radiate since a huge number of body plans that were not previously viable now have no competition.

Am I misguided to see war as a twisted cross-pollinisation / evolutionary push ?

I would argue that war and conflict/territoriality of all kinds (including predator/prey relationships) requires more agency than adaptive radiation. Adaptive radiation takes place over thousands of generations whereas war/conflict take place over a single generation.

Given humans are currently causing the 'Sixth' of these major mass extinctions this is relevant. My own view is that there's about to be a massive increase in biodiversity driven by synthetic biology and that this is going to lead to an acceleration in evolution - specifically our newly developed ability to enable horizontal gene transfer between species means improvements nature finds in one evolutionary branch can rapidly be applied to all evolutionary branches.

We can imagine a future in which everyone view this genetic craziness as normal, and people feel sorry for us poor benighted fools who live just before the end of the Age of Heredity. Of course, we can also imagine a future in which the world is populated entirely by a ten-meter carpet of rapidly-adjusting and constantly-warring bacteria.

Reference Peter Watt's "Echopraxia" - http://www.rifters.com/

Now I've read it. Great stuff! It will take some time before I work out how it compares against Blindsight, but [SPOILER!?] I was glad to find out that it doesn't all end in bacteria.

Not to excuse humans' massive transformation of Earth, but life usually "finds a way." So it seems plausible evolution via natural selection may accelerate a few remaining species to bifurcate to take advantage of antropogenic climate change which wiped out would-be past competitors for resources. Given enough time, perhaps other technology-making and art-creating lifeform/s may eventually challenge or coexist with us. Perhaps a plot to a terrible, megabudget Hollywood scifi movie too.

Death in general speeds up evolution. Generally the shorter the lifespan, the higher the reproduction rate, and the faster the evolution. Evolution takes place almost exclusively through reproduction and death (anyone not dead can reproduce, anyone dead who hasn't reproduced is a genetic failure, reproducing passes on their genes/characteristics/instincts to the next group). With an extinction where many species die, organisms that were already highly reproductive have a greater chance of one of their offspring living. So the characteristics of a strong desire to reproduce are passed on to survivors. Survivors who haven't died likely have lower lifespans due to difficult times, which psycologically encourages organisms to procreate. This is observed in humans in almost every country. As lifespans go up, fertility goes down. There's no need to reproduce if you're not dying soon.

Prior to an extinction event you may be in some kind of equilibrium state where no agents are expressing phenotype a of sufficient novelty to provide a major selective advantage. Once you remove species this creates a vacuum for new phenotypes.

This also makes me think about how new technologies may disrupt the status quo leading to rapid technological evolution as we are seeing now, and in the dot-com

An interesting idea here is that government regulations have the ability to shift the selective landscape away from it's current equilibrium state and drive more technological evolution.

Creating new government regulations or the removal of old government regulations?

I would posit that progress in an industry gets 'stuck' due to large companies using their resources/influence to encourage regulation that hinder competition. It then takes very significant advancements in technology to create businesses that are so different that they can compete with incumbents in ways that have not been preemptively regulated.

In fact I would suggest that regulation is the opposite of an 'extinction event'. Regulation is not a random shock and it inherently targets smaller industries/organizations. For instance, "too big to fail" is an example of regulation preventing a mass extinction event. Without "too big to fail", many of the least innovative companies (large banks, GM, etc.) would have gone bankrupt and there would be drastically more progress in these industries.

Computer scientists rediscover punctuated equilibrium?

An interesting thought-experiment to accompany this. Suppose that you are writing a program to create the best creature through evolution. One potential way of writing the program is to simply let evolution do its work and have the creatures evolve overtime. The other way is to write the program to simulate mass extinction every few thousand/million generations.

This article would suggest that purposely programming in mass extinctions would help speed up the evolution process. This seems counterintuitive given the amount of genetic diversity that a mass extinction would cause.

Perhaps the researchers should try doing this and see if the results fall in line with their own.

This is exactly what they did?

link to the article: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

So global warming is a GOOD thing, let the next sentient species figure out how to live durably on the planet :-). It is an interesting challenge to propagate the sum of our knowledge through a global extinction event, something durable enough to survive, and yet with a means of each level unlocking the next level.

The speed of evolution is proportional the population size. What extinction can do is open up new niches (environments) that new species can move into and undergo rapid adaption to the new niche. Evolution chugs away unseen and it is only when a new niche opens up does the adaption process become visible.

This could have some suprising outcomes - who would have thought that plastic could learn to rot ?

That green plants could haverst power from cables by induction?

If evolution speeds up, the fox rampaging through your garbage, might plant some ambrosia in your backyard to do so undisturbed.

If you believe in a platonic ideal of evolution, then maybe this means something to you. Otherwise this would be better titled "Computer Scientists Find Simulated Mass Extinctions Can Accelerate Simulated Evolution".

Agreed, the title should be changed. I clicked thinking there was actual factual data here, not a computer program.

Yeah, major refactoring of the world sounds good, unless you end up in the obsolete part.

Of course: Can get that headline from a simple Markov process argument.

Glad to see there are GNOME3 user doing real science job out there

Reply on news.ycombinator.com