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Comment by sebastianconcpt | Hacker News Reader

Hahaha that would be nice. But it likely demands a stock of varied nutrients, not just "energy". Also the cells changing need to take a break to consolidate what they have adapted to (brain plasticity).

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> Also the cells changing need to take a break to consolidate what they have adapted to (brain plasticity).

I feel like this has got to be a problem solvable by throwing money at it. Not as is, most likely, but if we had evolved without caloric restriction there would be some kind of more complicated support structure which handles all that.

This feels like it may fall into the realm of "I think if we just throw money at it we could solve it" problems that you can't actually solve by throwing money at.

Metaphorical money thrown at evolution several million years ago, namely calories. You were built on a budget, just because it's still better than anything we could make doesn't mean it's the best evolution can do under lesser constraints

If we had no calorie restriction why would we have evolved.

underrated perspective

Something else would end up scarcer

In an energy-rich environment, evolution should select for faster and faster reproductive rates.

Perhaps so, but humans are reproducing later and having fewer offspring, so there are more variables than just energy.

Environmental stresses are well-known to cause reproduction rates to plummet. That can be because of a lack of available food, but it can really be any sort of stress.

That's true, we evolved to adapt to calorie scarcity but our environment has changed: calories are now abundant but our system is still optimized for scarcity despite that constraint no longer existing. I'm sure in a few thousand years that'll go away (possibly faster, as we get better at manipulating our own biology) but the status quo is that we're poorly adapted to our environments, energy-wise.

Excellent point.

But note that calories scarcity is a simplistic model.

What I'm trying to show with what I was saying, is that there are stocks of scarce molecules imposing performance limits too.

If we had evolved without caloric restriction in an "easy" energy-rich environment where there's less competition for scarce energy and thus complexity and intelligence aren't absolutely mandatory to acquire it, evolution should select for faster reproductive rates by simply sacrificing complexity, not building some kind of more complicated support structure.

Well yeah, obviously. It's just a dream after all

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