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Comment by sinxoveretothex | Hacker News Reader

> It's illogical to design a system that can pop out one baby every nine months

To design? Are you a creationist?

Assuming you're just confused, evolution doesn't "design" life. It's just a "whatever works" process.

For example, angler fish have a lure that resembles prey for their prey. This has been selected by the eyes of their prey. It's not that the prey wanted their predator to fool them, it's just that angler fish with bad lures starved and died off.

In the case of humans, if what your parent comment suggests is true, then it would just be that some women had some sort of defect where they couldn't give birth after some point and that turned out to give their grandchildren an advantage over the grandchildren of women without the defect. Over a long period of time, more and more descendants with defective reproduction genetics would survive compared to those without and so it becomes prevalent.

That's how evolution works.

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No, that's how you explain things after the fact. If women could bear children until they died, we'd explain it by saying "well that's obviously because it's more advantageous to have more children". Again, something that can equally well explain why something happened and didn't happen doesn't have any explanatory power.

Put it another way, if I asked you "would you think that evolution would select for women bearing children until their 40s, or until they died?", you wouldn't be able to answer, because there's no predictive power in the explanation. Contrast this with "the sun rises every day because the earth revolves around itself", which allows you to predict whether the sun will rise or not tomorrow.

> that's how you explain things after the fact

I agree, that's what I said "if what your parent comment suggests is true"

In fact, said parent comment said "It might have been a mere speculation but it kind of makes sense"

I agree with you that there is no predictive power in explaining things that way (indeed, what I said is speculation, hence why I worded it in the conditional), but that was not what I was responding to. I was only responding to the "design" part of your comment.

That being said, evolution does make predictions which have been confirmed. Notably Darwin's long-nosed moth. Here's a list of more predictions[1]

[1] http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/evo_science.html

You seem to have fixated on one word in my comment and are arguing against creationism. I'm not saying that evolution makes no predictions, I'm saying that saying "oh yes, everything is the way it is because it confers an evolutionary advantage" is a mostly wrong, largely useless answer.

> You seem to have fixated on one word in my comment and are arguing against creationism.

Well, I would argue that the vibe of your whole comment was coherent in that sense: you talked about what nature wanted, about design and about what kind of stuff would make sense while looking at it from a architect perspective.

It's a very odd way to look at it if you have no creationist conception of it all to be honest.

As for your point that not everything has an evolutionary advantage, I agree. Deafness and blindness exist after all.

But I don't really see your point as far as proposing hypotheses to account for certain prevalent traits, which, in my opinion, is what the original content was about (the grandmother hypothesis).

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