Hacker News Reader

Comment by im3w1l | Hacker News Reader

It may simply be the normal predator-prey dynamic. Even if the predator is infinitely more powerful than the prey it's not in their interest to wipe the prey out. They want to leave enough prey for tomorrow. And if there are defector predators that try to gain an edge by eating more than is sustainable, other predators will try to stop them from doing so.

Now, before you object: it's not always perfectly balanced like this. Sometimes the prey does go extinct.

View on HN

> And if there are defector predators that try to gain an edge by eating more than is sustainable, other predators will try to stop them from doing so.

You're talking about a virus, you know... an inert molecule.

Ye but by the same token predators don't try to consciously manage the population numbers of their prey.. rather through evolution self replicating organisms either pick up traits that helps their replicated copies be around at time point x.. or they dont. And u don't see them at time point x.

An inert molecule that kills all its prey will not survive. The natural selection will favor those molecules that are able to spread without extinguishing all their guests.

oh wow, natural selection applies to non-living things?

Viruses evolve in a way that's very similar to living things (and some scientists consider them living, but that gets into philosophical definitions of life). They have genotypes that can mutate, and some of these mutations find ecological niches where they reproduce better than others, which leads to those genomes reproducing themselves more, i.e. evolution by natural selection. They're taxonomized similarly to living organisms as well, into phyla, orders, families, genera, species, etc.

Natural selection is a consequence of mortality and reproduction, not life in total.

natural selection applies to any self-replicating things... viruses are considered non-living, but they are still self-replicating.

(technically, the self-replication need also admit mutations into the replication process for natural selection to apply. viruses do mutate so, they qualify)

My background is nothing to do with biology, but it has struck me for years that natural selection is just a broad statement about probabilities that can be applied almost everywhere.

It is something like: if something has high odds to exist, given enough time to possibly exist, it will exist.

So an inert protein coming into existence? Sure. Better odds to be replicated? Then it'll happen. We ascribe agency or will to survive. Those probably help the odds in a lot of cases. But the concept is broader than that.

You could read Lee Smolin’s book about natural selection in black holes!

Yeah, I'm not dead against a bit of language simplification by anthropomorphisation, but one needs to be wary about the mental traps it sets.

This barely happens with humans. What makes you think it will happen with animals?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com