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Comment by a_gnostic | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this one of the reasons kissing evolved; To develop resistance to each others' microbiome, and not allergies?

That wasn’t in my copy of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories.”

A little more seriously, that sounds like a behavior that would be beneficial for many creatures, and yet only a few do anything like that. If it were effective, it’d be common.

Dogs eat other dogs' excrement in part to keep a healthy and diverse gut culture. I prefer kissing.

I have not heard that this is known to be a reason dogs do that - it's more common for them to eat their own feces, which can't have any gut-culture benefit - but it does work in humans, where it's called a "fecal transplant".

How can you prefer one thing over the other if you haven't tried both? It's so funny how we are set up to think we are in control but overriding the default here would take some serious effort. Who is in charge really? The gut microbes order specific kinds of food then we obey? Trying to refuse to eat or change the order is pretty hard.

Dogs sniffing butts?

Maybe? It’d have be pretty intense to transfer microbiome diversity.

Don't nearly all mammal parents extensively lick their offspring's faces?

But they lick each other.

applying intention to evolution is a bad habit

there are only accidents or happenstance that might turn out to be sex linked traits and not end life before a viable offspring is created

if it sounds nihilistic, that’s also accurate

> applying intention to evolution is a bad habit

I think it boils down to the directionality of time. let me explain

applying intention to evolution does mean re-imagining what may have happened, but I put that it's an extremely natural thing to do. when I reimagine some historical sequence of events as if it had intention I am making it easier to remember for me.

but this is only realistic in retrospective. this whole argument is also applicable to conpiranoic thinking.

what one does in a conspiracy mindset is exactly to attribute agency and intention into events; this is very easily done in retrospect, when we know what the outcome actually was. doing this for future events is difficult and always comes with a risk of guessing wrong (this is why I say this has got to do with time-directionality: looking backwards into the past in contrast with guessing the future)

but does this even mean that historical people (the participants of the historical events) knew what would happen in the end? maybe or maybe not. that is not the point. I'm saying that projecting non-existing agency into historical evens is a memorization technique

this all becomes really funky whenever anybody assumes the memorization technique (what I say/do to remember) is the same thing as that which I'm actually remembering

memorization for you, interesting. well the first step is admitting.

unique to evolution though, this habit assumes that everything is beneficial for navigating the environment aside from just reproduction, or the most beneficial compared to unimagined alternatives that died out and simply can't be observed. it ignores other population ending factors despite that line of population having more beneficial traits to today's environment.

the only "evolved because" answer to evolution is "some mutant reproduced", and reality is even more crass than that given how that mutant reproduced a lot

What if the mutation is the result of some crude logic? Like the choice of things to eat is limited by what you can catch or find. You not just randomly happened to prefer eating chickens over eagles. Then when used to eating chickens you run into dodo's and the choice is obvious. Running into dodo's wasn't a random event. We deliberately went looking for something like them.

I've been wondering about that since early child hood. While it seems like it I don't think there is a good answer.

One fun experiment I did was ask first and final years students why they chose that particular field. In the final years all but few alternative studies are part of the answer. They mostly explain coping or what they enjoy about their field. Some of the first year students provide an elaborate examination of many fields.

I [jokingly] ask if they chose the study only because they didn't like the other things. Or I accuse them of post purchase rationalization.

We like to think some logical process/choice is going on when we are simply doing what we are used to doing.

There is also something to be said for any process that arrives at logical conclusions to be some kind of reasoning.

What is free will?

I think the "intent" to evolution is reproduction. Thus, it makes sense to look at these traits as chosen or adaptive to further this cause. Everything is based on reproducing a species, it's the only reason we know now of even the purpose of life. Everything else is superfluous or constructs towards that purpose. So yes, apparently there is intent to evolution. To live and produce offspring. Otherwise why are we so afraid to die and fight to live.

I can't think of a more effective means of determining if a potential mate is deathly ill than smelling and tasting their mouth, before diving in downstairs.

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