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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

No. Chance + selection. VERY important difference.

Is selection here not a byproduct of chance?

No. The root of all selection is selection for reproductive fitness. That is decidedly non-random.

There is no selection for reproductive fitness until there is a replicator. Once a random process has stumbled upon a replicator, selection for reproductive fitness is inevitable, so long as some of the replicator's descendants survive. Reproductive fitness, therefore, is a feature of sufficiently large, complex and long-running random processes, not something additional that is imposed from outside. This is what Dennett called "Darwin's dangerous idea".

No. The "dangerous idea" is that design might not require a designer.

As for the first replicator, we simply do not yet know how (or even when) that came about, though random chance does seem likely. So I guess if you add enough layers of "built the machine that..." then you do end up with pure randomness (probably). But I would conjecture that there's a lot less "informational distance" between the cosmos and the first replicator than there is between the first replicator and Adam Yedidia.

It might not be what Dennett meant, but I don't think issues of informational distance refute the claim that we can expect selection for reproductive fitness to be a feature in any random process that gives rise to replicators. After the appearance of the replicator, the random process continues to operate under the same rules (laws of physics) as before.

Oh, I certainly agree with that.

After the appearance (and sufficent success) of the replicator, it stops being a random process. Edit: or at least not a completely/primarily random process.

Etymological arguments for either position. Regardless, I wouldn’t claim the distinction exists, and would find it hard to justify that it’s VERY important.

It's the difference between draw poker and a fresh hand every time.

If I aim a gun and pull the trigger, the results are not the byproduct of chance, excepting that in some sense everything is.

This was consciously aiming a gun at an explicitly-named remote target, ricocheting the bullet off an unprecedentedly-reasonable number of explicitly-chosen elements, and hitting the target.

Don't let semantics muddy the water about this achievement

I think the selection is a byproduct of the underlying laws, thought one must rely on chance until a system complicated enough to engage in selection emerges. Now, are those underlying laws reliant upon chance? This requires understanding beyond that of the current universe, so maybe.

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