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Comment by lgeorget | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing about all that "decentralization" and the fact that the heart doesn't need the central nervous system to work is that the pulmonary system does need it. So on the one hand, it's great, your heart can function on its own, on the other hand, you cannot breathe without a working brain.

Time to finish that refactoring, evolution! One component is over-engineered with respect to the rest of the system.

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Evolution: Well, our milleniums-long testing indicates that adding decentralization to pulmonary system is not the highest prority right now, as the blood already provides an oxygen cache - in case of pulmonary failure, we have a couple-minutes window to restart it before any permanent damage occurs. You can add it to the backlog, and we'll get to it when we have time.

That's way too eloquent for evolution. More like: "Hey, let's try this" burp

For one individual, maybe your analogy might be closer to what evolution tries, but I suspect in a large group of individual in a species over a long period, a more eloquent description could be emerged.

No, it's pretty much "hold my beer, I got this" billions of times until something works.

Evolution isn't organized or eloquent. It's messy and random and non-optimized. Evolution results in many individuals who are not fit, any many evolved solutions are quite plainly bad.

Any elegance or beauty in evolution is a construct humans apply to an incredibly abstract and obtuse concept because that's just what we do to things that are difficult to grok.

Evolution is simply random mutations from various mechanisms, but the only guiding force is that of survival. Some random changes make some individuals more fit to survive, which makes the species more fit in time. There really isn't anything more to it. It's all just random chance averaged over a very, very long time.

> Evolution is simply random mutations from various mechanisms, but the only guiding force is that of survival.

Much like enterprise software development.

It's only a matter of time before the conglomeration of ancient software slowly having complexity bolted on becomes self-aware and helps plot the overthrow of the lunar government

A very large number of random decisions needn't always yet surprisingly often results in high-level emergent elegant/predictable phenomena... that's like, the entire point of statistics.

Indeed, although I believe the main value of the automaticity of the heart isn't about being able to survive brain failure, but about being a real-time system with no dependencies. Unavailability of just ~3 seconds can lead to loss of consciousness. We can afford to stop breathing for a bit if the nervous system is overwhelmed, but the heart can't afford that.

It is interesting that we always think about things that would be favorable for humans, but there are plenty of mammals out there which can hold their breath for minutes, almost hours. Think about whales or dolphins. It would not make much sense for them when the lungs start breathing by themselves. On the other hand, the heartbeat of some mammals slows down when they are under water to spare oxygen.

Since the breathing regulation centre is located in the medulla oblongata region of the brain stem, one can miss a surprisingly large amount of brain before one’s breathing stops.

Of course, if the event that causes one to miss part of one’s brain also induces swelling of the remainder all bets are off.

Would that mean that if we had decentralized pulmonary control, we wouldn't be able to hold our breath?

Basically, yes. Nice catch, that completely slipped my mind.

So decentralized pulmonary system would be a huge drowning hazard.

Not necessarily. The heart is autonomous but is nevertheless connected to the central nervous system and can be controlled by the brain to some extent. It could be the same for the pulmonary system. By the way, you can hold your breath for some time, and some people with extreme willpower can do it until passing out, but you can't do it until dying, there are reflexes hard-wired deep into the brain preventing that.

Bah, that's what you landlubbers get for trying to use gaseous oxygen.

yeah, but then you'll want the central nervous system to be able to fiddle with the state anyway in order to do things like holding your breath while swimming, at which point the autonomous system is redundant and you may as well just have the brain manage the breathing state directly.

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