Hacker News Reader

Comment by fastaguy88 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com