Extinction of Steam Locomotives Derails Assumptions about Biological Evolution | Hacker News Reader

Extinction of Steam Locomotives Derails Assumptions about Biological Evolution

today.ku.edu

What a bizarre analogy. Steam engines disappeared because of an optimization choice by railroad managers. Organisms emerge, persist, and go extinct because of random events with local effects. Successful organisms may have been the "fittest" at some point in their evolutionary history, or they may just have been lucky and not seen much selection. But there was no decision maker that chose the end result, unlike steam engines.

On the other hand, what is “an optimisation choice” but a competition?

There are decision makers which choose to stop purchasing steam engines, but they don’t make their decisions out of arbitrary whim, at least not purely so (and you can assimilate whim to luck).

it's a creative analogy

as you dug into it, you found it didn't hold quite as well

but I think that all scientific theories are is just 'creative analogies' that people came up before we were even born (or at least, grown up enough to understand?)

I think that many discussions about evolution -- even by evolutionary biologists -- rely much to heavily on the idea that evolution involves some kind do optimization process (as in Genetic Algorithms). Evolution is a random process that only cares about survival. Optimization is an occasional side effect.

Analogies that incorporate the optimization perspective can easily mislead.

rudimentary (old) evolution does only care about survival

but for "newer"(?) evolution it's a solved problem. so "it" appears as if to care about other things.

it's not quite correct to contrast 'rudimentary or old' with "newer". I think it's more reasonable to think of it as more or less fundamental to life. closer or further from basis survival

How are you defining "optimization"?

If evolution didn't optimize anything, we'd have cats in the ocean and dolphins on mountains.

I think there is a spectrum between not optimizing anything and optimizing everything. The whole selection vs neutral drift controversy is about placing effects on that spectrum. But of course it is more complex than that -- at different times and different places selection may be more important, and at other times and places less important. So when you look at organisms today, you see evidence for both (no seals on mountains, but human "tails" and other vestigial artifacts). Evolutionary history is very long, even just for mammals (>100 My), so it is difficult to say which part of the spectrum (selection (optimization) vs drift) played the more important part. Modern organisms are at the end of a path that could have taken many branches.

I found the press release pretty confused/confusing. It starts by saying there's little evidence for competition affecting evolution, which sounds like nonsense.

I peeked at the paper's abstract which seems to be talking about "macroevolution". Looks like this refers to larger scale trends on the level of clades rather than competition within species or between more closely related species.

What evidence is there for competition causing extinction, the topic of the article?

The article is about species driving out unrelated species by evolving to be better competitors (not invading from elsewhere), not a species evolving due to internal competition among individuals.

Yes, that's what the paper appears to be about. I was saying I thought that the press release didn't express this very clearly. But if you got it perhaps I just read it badly.

"But what we would argue is, in fact, when things start to adapt and shift directionally — traditionally in evolution that's not a good time for a group. We'd argue it's a sign the group may be experiencing duress or pressure from other things.”

that seems like an unapologetically unacademic assertion used to support someone's underlying personal problems on aging, change, and mortality.

How? It makes complete sense to me? "Selection pressure" is basically a euphemism, the mechanism of evolution is the differentiation between survivors and those that fucking die.

If a lot of evolution is happening, if there's strong pressure and quick changes in response to it, then it means there is a lot of "selecting" going on, a lot of death or at least failure to reproduce which isn't experienced as much less distressing for most organisms.

Consumers, or businesses, making choices (A) is a poor analog to species flourishing or going extinct (B).

B may suggest something about A, but the converse is not true at all.

Certainly gravity applies to both economic and ecological physical artifacts, and many aspects of evolution do too, including its sources in heritability, variation and scarcity. How is it that you can know categorically that choices by economic replicators don't implicate evolution in the same ways as choices by ecological replicators?

Does a light bulb implicate the sun? In some very specific ways certainly, but believing it generally does will cause more errors than useful insights.

Studying the physics of the sun is highly useful in understanding lightbulbs, and visa versa. It's not just a surface analogy but a deep physical commonality in which discoveries about one not infrequently informs both. The same is true of the study of replicators across domains that look very different on the surface.

That's really not true though. The important concepts in incandescent lightbulbs, mainly blackbody radiation, did not give us better knowledge about the sun because the sun is an immensely more complicated system heavily reliant on very different effects.

There is a strong connection between the incandescent lightbulbs and the sun because the sun is almost a blackbody emitter too. Studying incandescent lightbulbs allowed researchers to discover the blackbody spectrum and Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation, which was then applied to the Sun to discover its apparent temperature. The spectral lines in the Sun's spectrum (the frequencies where it deviates from the blackbody spectrum) then allowed researchers to study elements present in the Sun's photosphere.

I agree with your point, just wanted to add that 'implicate' is not even the right term to describe the paper in question. Metaphors and analogies don't prove or even implicate anything, but can provide new perspectives for considering a subject. Looking at the original paper, that seems to be why steam locomotives are discussed.

Still, "competition" among mechanical devices is inherently different from competition among species or clades.

you're right that it may provoke questions, but the inherent differences would give biologists plenty of reasons to just dismiss them.

You seem to be willfully misunderstanding science. "Implicate" is a political word, not a scientific one. @giraffe_lady has hit the nail on the head here.

That entirely depends on what suggestions are being made, no?

It's an interesting article (press release?) that makes an interesting point, although I personally realized as I was reading it that I don't think of biological evolution in terms of competition as much as I do differential survival or inheritance rates in some ecological context, possibly changing.

Sexual selection seems more directly relevant to the idea of competitive evolutionary processes though maybe?

check "Summa technologiae" by Stanislaw Lem, from 1960ies, one chapter is comparing bio-evolution with all kinds of technological (r)evolution(s), lots of similarities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Technologiae

I find it interesting that the article and paper which it summarises takes the analogy of representing steam locomotives as a species with a "driving force of survival" that far.

Steam Locomotives are simply a *product* in a competitive market, and that market changed.

If one wants to imbue them with all these biological properties, one can surely do that with any failed product? The Blackberry? 3D Televisions?

(Full disclosure: I'm a lifelong fan and studyer of steam locomotives)

Isn't this just stating the obvious? Things evolve when there's a natural selection pressure, i.e. stress, to evolve? If variations within the species don't confer any special advantages then all the variations will continue. If the environment were to suddenly change such that only one or two of those variations would confer an actual competitive advantage then the species will rapidly evolve.

I thought this has been known for quite some time? Am I missing something?

Invasive species have already shown this to be the case. I swear sometimes academics think something can't be "true" or "known" until there's a paper written about it with a new term to signify the phenomena.

To be fair to the academic, this just looks like a poor summary by the university's PR department.

Braking news, a non biological relatively simple machine gives bad answers when used to study biological evolution.

original paper

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.221210

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