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Comment by tw1010 | Hacker News Reader

From "the social function of intellect"[1]: "Henry Ford, it is said, commissioned a survey of the car scrap yards of America to find out if there were parts of the Model T Ford which never failed. His inspectors came back with reports of almost every kind of breakdown: axles, brakes, pistons - all were liable to go wrong. But they drew attention to one notable exception, the kingpins of the scrapped cars invariably had years of life left in them. With ruthless logic Ford concluded that the kingpins on the Model T were too good for their job and ordered that in future they should be made to an inferior specification. Nature is surely at least as careful an economist as Henry Ford. It is not her habit to tolerate needless extravagance in the animals on her production lines: superfluous capacity is trimmed back, new capacity added only as and when it is needed"

[1] http://biology.unm.edu/pwatson/Humphrey%20The%20Social%20Fun...

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> It is not her habit to tolerate needless extravagance in the animals on her production lines: superfluous capacity is trimmed back, new capacity added only as and when it is needed

It's not exactly wrong, but it's way too anthropomorphic and attributes way too much intent.

Plus there's plenty of natural stuff which at least looks way over-engineered or redundant/unnecessary in its current form. The Mantis Shrimp's eyes for instance. The gallbladder also seems mostly redundant, and while one can argue that the lobed paired design of lungs is necessary considering the common occurrence of respiratory diseases redundant kidneys seem less than necessary.

I'll keep my paired lungs. Had one spontaneously collapse about 10 years ago, and had there not been a second in it's own pleural cavity, it would've been a much worse time for me.

As an aside, one really cool thing that happens in the case of a collapsed lung, is the trachea will shift toward the healthy side under less pressure. Called a tracheal deviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracheal_deviation

I also had a spontaneous lung collapse several years ago. While I'm thankful for the second lung, I think if there weren't also surgeons and hospitals I would've died anyways, even with the one still-good lung.

Tracheal deviation in the instance of lung collapse is a sign of a developing fatal condition, tension pneumothorax. Cool for me as a doctor because I get to stab a big needle through your chest. Not so cool for the patient

Also cool for Mad Max.

Nature can’t (or at least has a very hard time) climb out of the local minima it has created.

The gallbladder has a heap of design flaws but it is quite useful (until it causes problems). Bird lungs would be much more efficient a design as they don’t have dead space in the way ours do. And having 2 of an organ has more to do with our bilateral body symmetry which was an early evolutionary choice of our line than anything else

The prime example of this to me is a completely silly path a nerve takes in a Giraffe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve#Evid...

Evolution does not care at all about fixing waste, unless that waste harms the individual's ability to procreate.

>It's not exactly wrong, but it's way too anthropomorphic and attributes way too much intent.

This made me start wondering something... at what point can something be attributed to intent? When did the first intent arise? If humans are blobs of matter following the laws of physics, why can we possess intent when nature cannot? What is the simplest process which can have intent?

This is probably just a restatement of an existing problem like where does intelligence come from. Just a random though I had reading your post.

This kingpin story is not likely to be true.

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/urban_legends/henry_fords...

People (geeks often) attribute efficiency to evolution's designs. The process really produces just barely good-enough for given environmental pressures/problem domain. Nature is the queen of avoiding pre-optimization and YAGNI.

Which begs the question, since humans have been able to dominate their ecology and competitors to such a massive degree, why didn't our evolution stagnate a long long time ago? The answer, as far as I have read, seems to be that for humans, competition within the species (for sexual opportunities, position in the dominance hierarchy, etc) has been the primary driving force pushing our brains to evolve to the size it is today.

A few sources that support this thesis are the books, "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny", "The Elephant in the Brain", as well as this paper: https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/5717...

This is attributing emotion to things that have none, but regardless: Species don’t compete, genes do. My genes want to beat your genes, were you another human (in-species), a bonobo (in same-ish morphological niche) or a rat (another modern urban dweller).

> This is attributing emotion to things that have none

Ummm, fair enough. But then you say...

> My genes want to beat your genes

Your genes don't want anything. They have no desires. No emotions. They're just molecules. Long, complex polymers, granted, but just molecules, nonetheless.

they are instructions. those instructions say compete in what ever round about way they decide on doing it. the ones that don't say compete die out.

Evolution doesn't "stagnate". Ever.

Humans are still evolving. Probably faster than ever. See http://www.pnas.org/content/104/52/20753.long .

What does "a long long time ago" mean to you?

It's only 65M years since mammals underwent the massive adaptive radiation after the K–T extinction.

It's only 50,000 years since the human population started to greatly increase. (See previous reference.)

You need to be very careful in looking for references which support your thesis. You'll not find good counterarguments that way.

Be very cautious about any reference which emphasizes "dominance hierarchy" in humans, especially when based looking towards chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) as a model for understanding how early humans interacted.

Only more recently have we been looking at bonobos (Pan paniscus), which are evolutionarily equally distant from us. The thing is, bonobos have rather different behaviors than chimpanzees, including in how they deal with dominance.

Unfortunately, a lot of wide-spread cultural beliefs on this topic are wrong, or at least much more controversial than can be used as the basis for any good understanding. See for example "alpha male" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_(ethology)#Controversy and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ti86veZBjU .

I would advise you to look for books by people who work in, or very closely to, anthropology, archeology, and genetics. And stay away from evolutionary psychologists, most of whom in my experience have a flawed understanding of evolution.

As an example of a warning flag, your last link, a book from 1990 is pre-genome, and talks much more about chimps than bonobos.

You might be interested in "Why are there so many explanations for primate brain evolution?" at http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/372/1727/2016... .

They argue that the Social Brain Hypothesis (SBH) has the strongest support:

> SBH is an explicitly two-step process: an ecological problem is solved socially (i.e. as a cooperative process) and a big brain is needed to allow the requisite level of sociality to do this. The group created by big brains is not an end in itself (a mistake made by many attempts to compare between alternative hypotheses: e.g. [18,103]), but rather the means to an ecological end. It is important not to mistake this view for group selection: it does not involve the differential survival or extinction of groups. Rather, it is a group-level or group-augmentation explanation (sensu [104]), such that individuals living in larger social units have higher fitness than those living in smaller ones.

The only mention of "dominance" in that publication is in the title of a citation to a paper from 1980.

If I could have a team of millions of developers spending centuries building applications then I too could work out the leanest possible implementation.

Nature makes a lot of pull requests, but has a great peer review system that prevents bad design entering the core of the system.

nature produces the optimal animals for survival, and its not limited to the current form the animal is in. (I'll get to that later). think of this as a machine learning problem, you want to have regularization penalties from over-fitting the environment, because it will inevitably change.

the author makes some absurd comments. "There doesn't seem to be any fundamental reason why an animal couldn't evolve which makes steel, for example. It would get its raw material like we do, from iron ore."

how does the author expect our bodies to produce heat in the thousands of degrees to burn out the impurities in iron and infuse carbon in its super heated state? i dont buy their argument that our bodies can make anything just because its building stuff at the molecular level. humans survived a lot of extinction level events, a lot of global famine. even if we could do the former, we might have gone extinct if we had extraordinary dietary requirements of iron. and what ever animal we evolved from would have also had to deal with that, and they experienced even larger extinction level events.

i was thinking about why the dinosaurs had such small brains. other animals and reptiles living today existed in the same period, and they had larger brains, so I thought the dinosaur brains were small by design, why?

i think because being big was adventitious, and being egg layers, only so much air can travel through a membrane. some eggs were as large as 2 feet long, probably not a lot of air getting into the whole system, so a hulking brain is a waste. even if they had small eggs, they needed the ability to evolve / or activate genes to grow big when allowed to do so.

http://www.grg.org/OneHossShay.htm

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