Hacker News Reader

Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com