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Comment by phyzome | Hacker News Reader

There is also some fraction of the sea turtle population that goes in the "wrong direction" when navigating by the Earth's magnetic fields. I believe these individuals generally do not do very well. But... this natural variation might be what allows the species to persist even as the magnetic fields shift over millions of years.

Being the rogue bee might be fine. Being the rogue turtle, well... it might be good for the species but bad for the individual.

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There's also a famous clip from Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World where a penguin does something similar,[0] and I've seen it theorised (possibly in the book Empire Antarctica, but I'm not certain) that this may be a mechanism to find new breeding grounds (though, as you say, in a way that may be good for the species but is bad for most of the individuals so called).

[0] https://yewtu.be/watch?v=zWH_9VRWn8Y

This also reminds me of the Radio Lab episode that tracks bird migration, including one bird (that they were actively tracking) that simply peeled off the group and settled down somewhere else that wasn't part of the historic migration path. Feels like the same idea.

In the book A Mote in God's Eye, they have a concept of the Crazy Eddie (presumably named after the 'eddies' in fluid dynamics), which is a mythical social phenotype where the member disagrees with the status quo and believes there is an unknown solution to their thus-far unsolved generational problem. Simply believing in a solution that is worth searching for denotes the member as 'insane'.

Kind of seems like we, as natural beings and members of natural systems, absolutely have some kind of pattern-breaking behavior built in at a systemic level. A master-level emergent behavior that can exploit local maxima but still succeed in finding other local maxima to ensure the survival and adaptation of a species.

In the ‘mote in god’s eye’, the crazy Eddie’s were a bad thing because they inevitably destabilized the system (or were symptoms of the system destabilizing), and inevitably resulted in apocalyptic consequences if they found something of note (and had dozens of times or something). Which I believe was also what ended up happening in the book, wasn’t it?

We can see this in some form in mankind too, and I would expect this in most if not all species, the trick is how to notice it with our current tech options. In humans it may be a rogue psychopath or hermit that sails out in the unknown sea in ancient boat despite everbody telling him not to, often dying in the middle of nowhere, but from time to time actually making it someplace (to probably die there too until some other won't).

Its as if species were a sentient organism playing some complex survival strategy game, sacrificing few individuals for that rare occasion that they could make a big difference.

Its a fantastic evolutionary advantage when you think about species and eras, not individuals and their tragedies as we are wired to do. Any complex species not possessing it would be outcompeted eventually, or destroyed by some cataclysmic event that destroys balance built over time by more conforming populations. I am sure in some form this could be applied to economics too.

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