i think one evolutionary purpose of chronic pain is to remind about the event which caused it.
for example, every time it rains i'm reminded of all the events which caused fractures. hopefully that helps with not repeating them.
for example, every time it rains i'm reminded of all the events which caused fractures. hopefully that helps with not repeating them.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Having an option to relive the users of this pressure (like enabling a little anonymous posting, or adding distinctions between the downvote types) might incentivize them to drop this unwanted behavior.
As long as the community continues this kind of behavior, we'll have people spamming new accounts.
Certainly there are unfairly downvoted comments, but users tend to give those corrective upvotes after a while: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
It's more accurate to say "The environmental factor selected for a genetic variation that improved fitness."
For example, if feels more natural to me to say "an obstacle in my path may cause me to go around it", compared to "an obstacle in my path selected for me to go around it".
I think of evolution as a system than reacts to conditions, similar to a state machine. It's hard for me to think of those conditions as acting in some way on a system, but perhaps that's just a failure in my own thinking.
When you say "an object in my path caused me to go around it", you're switching the cause and effect.
A more accurate way to say it would be "an obstacle on the path meant that only a handful of the population can go around it".
The change that allows you to go around the obstacle was not caused by the obstacle, it would have happened regardless. However, the change is only important if the obstacle is there - that's what drives evolution (selection).
I understand what's being said, it's the "selects" that triggers the problem for me.
I think of evolution as a system. Inputs cause the system to act in a certain way, but it's the system responding to the inputs, not the inputs choosing to get a specific output (which is what it sounds like to me to say A selects for B).
In the same way with orbital mechanics I wouldn't say a one object selected for a change in trajectory in the other. I would say one caused the change in the other, or more specifically, due to the how orbital mechanics work (the "system", the law of gravity), one object caused a change in the trajectory of the other.
So I guess my question is, why does evolution prefer the "selects" terminology? Is that common in any other sciences?
I think this is due to set theory and statistics. Terminology such as "select x such that" is standard. In fact a choice function is commonly referred to as a selector. Since evolution is essentially a biased random walk, you can describe it as a stochastic choice function (plus some other stuff) applied to the set of entities that makes up a population.
(If "selects" bothers you, what do you make of quantum mechanical "observers"? I witnessed that one cause lots of misconceptions among university and even a few graduate students.)