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Comment by patkai | Hacker News Reader

Alan Kay should remember that evolution includes random mutations that get you out of local extrema, and "interesting" recombinations. The rate of these is maybe low, but there are examples where large organizations renew themselves this way. But I agree with the conclusion that this is slow and unreliable.

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Alan Kay majored in molecular biology and mathematics ... so he probably does understand just how evolution works. (Hint: the Internet is a good source of bios to look at before making assumptions). We put in a fair amount of work many years ago on personal computing and the Internet so that people can be a few typed characters and clicks away from much of the knowledge of the human race ... what does it take to get people to make use of this?

There's a paper out there with the title "Cognition is not computation; evolution is not optimization". I haven't read it!

I'm not sure you are accepting the basic principle, which is that evolution is not in any way optimization (not that the evolutionary process is not "optimized").

See something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway

Also Giuseppe Longo's work on randomness as a cause of organizational complexity in evolution: http://montevil.theobio.org/en/system/files/articlepdf/Longo...

The important bit is evolution is not optimizing for things humans understand. If you say evolution is optimizing for more copies of your DNA fragments your closer to the truth than saying 'fitness' in larger contexts. Don't forget there is more biomass in single celled organisms than single celled organisms. In terms of 'fitness' that does not seem like progress.

Optimization implies "teleonomy", the idea that there's a goal toward which evolution is working, however obscure to us. The interesting question IMHO is whether such a goal exists, somehow expressed or implied by the laws of physics. Jeremy England's work on thermodynamic reasons for the emergence of configurations/mechanisms/organisms that are good at dissipating energy is an example of recent research that asks why we have these complex organisms at all, and tries to answer that question with pure physics.

Not really. A fire's heat creates conditions under which fire more easily spreads by drying out the surrounding area. That's does not suggest needs / wants / goals etc it simply a statement of what happens in very specific circumstances. Further, while evolution might seem to be dissipating energy, oxygen + coal is a much larger reserve of energy than you get in similar environment without life.

And the rate of random mutation varies, influenced by evolution. Eukaryotes even have two sets of DNA, mitochondrial and regular, with very different mutation rates. The complexity of biology, I think, is greatly underestimated by most.

If you are more on the side of accepting punctuated equilibrium, then this isn't true. Organisms will evolve to the local optimum and then stay there. By definition, since most mutations will result in lower fitness.

It's only when the environment changes (rise of mammals post dinosaur-extinction) or the organisms themselves change environment (Darwin's finches) that you get the rapid rates of evolution to find the new optimumm.

Some obvious analogies of these two situations in tech are the rise of the Internet (Microsoft did change, but struggled), and the rise of the smartphone (Apple came from nowhere to a position of dominance).

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