Feathers are one of evolution's cleverest inventions
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
I was drawn to this side point though: the microraptor has four wings. Not like a dragon, of course, which has to be an insect, but an ordinary quadruped that used all four limbs to fly (compare that to mammals with a membrane between the forelimbs and hind limbs on each side). I imagine it must have looked like an F-35 when flying.
Seems like it turned out to be optimal to stick to two, not just for terrestrial mobility, but due to the (bidirectional!) optimization of the wishbone and the chest musculature. It’s probably hard to get enough power into the dual-mode hind limbs. Sadly the Wikipedia article on the microraptor doesn’t explore this.
Nails are a much older "invention of evolution" than humans: so we have to investigate there...
> how do nails and hairs manage to grow only in one direction
Like all things evolution: nails that grow backwards to not have an advantage (prolly a disadvantage), where nails that grow forwards have an advantage (climbing, clawing, scratching).
That still doesn't describe the underlying mechanism of the growth itself.
Looking at the work of Dr. Michael Levin regarding electric communication of cells, I tend to believe him that the main factor in actually creating tissues in their intended, correct shape, is incessant electric chatter among individual cells.
An interesting corollary would be that cancer = cells that don't cooperate/communicate with their neighboring cells anymore.
Where does the rotational sense of cilia come from? From the stereochemistry of proteins, and therefore from amino acids. The left-vs-right handedness of the base chemistry of life is exploited to get a macroscopic signal.
In plants, for example, cells replicate primarily at the tip of a bud, which allows branches to lengthen directionally rather than grow out in all directions. The plant produces growth hormones, which are transported upward throughout all branches until they reach a dead end. When they reach a dead end, they stop moving and just sit there, which causes the cells at the dead end to have a greater exposure to these growth hormones. These cells bathe in growth hormones for so long that they pass the hormone-exposure threshold that triggers cell replication.
The question was how, not why.
Your answer is like saying "how does the eye focus light" and answering "so that you can see".
For example, observation A might be maladaptive, but it is caused by gene B which also causes observation C, which does provide an advantage.
You can't conclude that. Evolution is noisy and random.
Besides, birds are not unambiguously the most optimized flying vertebrates around.
You're correct that you can't conclude that evolution is perfection/optimized, but it's also not correct to say it is random. The genetic variation is random, but natural selection is very much not random[1][2].
[1]: https://evolution.berkeley.edu/misconceptions-about-natural-...
[2]: See Number 7. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/faq/cat01.html
I don't have a problem with that, but materialists don't have that luxury and use language in bad faith when do it.
Sexual selection in humans is a psychological phenomenon, and it’s subject to all of our most hifalutin ideas.
You have an opinion about what “god” wants and express it through sexual selection, thus influencing our collective evolution in that direction.
If anything, I would argue that human evolution has accelerated in the last few decades (at least in wealthy nations where people have a lot of control over their reproduction and enormous choice in who they marry, if they marry at all).
(Speak not of the relevant XKCD)
"The water doesn't want anything. It's just the laws of gravity."
Intelligence comes from being able to efficiently compress highly predictive models. Any computational mechanism that is unable to do this is a low-grade intelligence. If you need the whole thing spelled out carefully for you, you're NGMI.
Why not say things in the more accurate way.
Of course we have not reached the end of our evolution. That will exist only when we are all extinct.
As for the direction... that is something else. Maybe we will evolve into higher intelligence, but as the Dick's story "The Golden man" or "Idiocracy" show, is the intelligence really the driving force of today?
Yes, certainly. More than anything intelligence differentiates us as a species.
So, we are visually, materiallistically oriented. Not all, of course, but evolution works on population size, not exceptions. Exceptions only come into an overbearing effect on cataclysmic events.
Our intelligence is what allows us to acquire and improve new adaptations without having to change our own genetics. We're able to change living environments and adapt to them multiple times in a single life span, and we went from basic language to walking on the Moon much faster than evolution is able to make meaningful changes through natural selection. It takes however many million years for a species to grow fur to adapt to cold climate; it took a spear for us to adapt by stealing other animals' fur, and couple hundred years to figure out how to make synthetic ones at scale. In that time, we adapted to almost every environment on the planet.
Intelligence very much is the driving force behind humanity.
EDIT: and we're also beating natural selection from the other end - modern medicine allows many people to live and reproduce, who without it would've died from genetic diseases. We're very good at denying the "fitness" criteria nature uses.
But evolutionary pressure also occurs within the species and for the human race $$$ has largely influenced demonstration of procreational traits.
Intelligence doesn't matter if you are smart but don't have any opportunities. The other social cues, fashion, appearance, physical fitness, health, being "funny". Are all a lot easier if you have $$$.
So many conversations around modern population fertility rates have a $ component in them.
Maybe being intelligent matters more than simple strength and coordination used to. But what kind of intelligence?
Maybe being a sociopath such that you can bully your way to CEO - or to a high enough level you meet some "darwinian fitness" threshold.
But in and of itself, being able to engineer the feat of walking on the moon didn't make all the nasa employees inherently more desirable to partners to procreate. Those employees maybe had attributes that matched with desirable procreation partners and maybe that feat brought $$$ too - but the engineering smarts alone isn't it.
Similarly most people want some level of success be that artistic, financial, athletic, etc and success is highly correlated with above average intelligence. 101+ IQ’s might not seem that impressive but over a long time scale that’s an endless treadmill.
Women on the more narcissistic end of the personality spectrum may prefer ugly men, poor men, dumb men, low self esteem men, etc. so they can control him. Narcissistic men do the same when picking women.
This isn't even exceptional behavior. It might even be the norm depending on where you live. People who aren't as narcissistic may prefer to be single for much of their life.
Evolution doesn't care how today's politics perceives these personality traits. If they lead to reproduction they will continue. On this topic, it's not even evolution but culture and simple family traditions!
Ascribing teleological explanations to evolution is technically wrong, since it doesn’t look ahead.
However, it does something very similar. Our brains process competing options, from plausible to nonsensical, before selecting an action, partly in sequence (ideation), but also in parallel (competition processing).
Evolution tries many options in parallel and sequence too. Just by actually doing them and then selecting which of those choices to keep repeating (better survival), and those to forget (extinction of genes, clusters of genes, or whole species).
So over longer time periods, it acts very teleologically. A kind of reverse teleologic by hindsight.
The same is true for the “brilliance” of this teleology. Evolution tries so many things, that it can solve very difficult problems in very novel ways.
Is that “intelligence”? Our casual usage of intelligence isn’t defined precisely enough to say one way or another.
One person would say evolution is blind, and in the short run it is. But another person might point out that evolution is anything but blind. It is an epic version of Edison’s lab, where millions or billions of false solutions are continually tried and ruled out, to find each new fitness enhancement.
It relentlessly experiments and follows the “data”.
On longer timescales, evolution is effectively teleological, highly creative and very intelligent.
And all three aspects compound over time, just like human learning and research, because evolution doesn’t just find new features, but new abstractions and modularity. Such as flexible reusable gene systems for encoding body parts, epigenetic reuse of features in different kinds of cells for different purposes or triggered and “run” by different conditions, nervous systems, etc.
Thus evolution “learned” to speed itself up over time, letting it more rapidly optimize larger more complex solutions. I.e. orders of magnitude faster creation of new novel animals, than it originally took to optimize the first cellular life, colonies of cells, etc.
Watching evolutions first billion years would not have suggested that the plethora of different intelligent animals, from octopus, parrot to human, would have been remotely possible in the time it took. Evolution’s compounding meta learning created brains, our “true” teleology, and its expansion into technological and economic expressions of the pursuit of survival. All meta extensions of evolution, found by evolution.
But the combinations of amino acid sequences they would have to search through in order to find the correct shape is so large that it is greater by several orders of magnitude than the sum total number of all the organisms that have ever lived on Earth since the beginning of time (which is about 10^40, I think).
So your claim that "evolution just tries so many billions of options, man" just doesn't hold water.
There was a time, back during the 1960s, I'm told, when mathematicians in the academy would openly mock evolutionary biologists for their lack of understanding of statistics. But then political correctness took over or something.
Evolution isn't looking for that sequence.
It is looking for any change in sequence with a positive payoff, and in the meantime constantly diversifying sequences with similar outcomes, creating more opportunities for serendipity.
Every large animal is born with mutations. So we are also quite robust to spreading the search, running multiple experiments at a time, taking small risks with genes not quite as good, which will get weeded out quickly when combined with other weaker genes, but in the meantime cast a wider net for meshing with another gene that complements it.
So yes, in any given species with a nontrivial population, millions or billions of genetic variations are being explored at any point in time. We are nothing like carbon copies of each other, differing by just a couple checkmarks.
This is a radical speed up. Just as sexual recombinatory reproduction is. Evolution today operates with vastly more efficient genetic environment, structures and systems than what early life did.
Tractable statistics do no justice to how biology works and all the paths it searches. I am not knocking formal statistics at all, just noting that past one or two step events, the layered statistics of chemistry, genes, gene clusters, epigenetics, populatoin dynamics of complex creatures in their complex environments, etc. are not going to be tractably modelled.
Measurable sometimes for sure, but not symbolically characterizable or calculatable.
The entire reason I used the example of the combination lock was so that hopefully you would understand situations in which "any change in sequence with a positive payoff" is a nonsense concept. You either get the correct combination or don't get any positive payoff whatsoever.
When you are trying "millions or billions" of genetic variations are being explored at any point in time, as you point out, you are off by so many orders of magnitude in terms of the search space that you need to explore that the problem is intractable.
You may as well tell me that you can guess a random password that I come up with because you have a way to test millions or billions of combinations at a time. That's great, but I can come up with a random password that it would take you from now until the end of the universe to guess even if you guess quadrillions of possibilities at a time because I can create a password that would require you to test 10^84 possibilities.
Almost makes me wanna write a scifi short on it.
Except where punctuated by (subjective) catastrophe.
But then it is not the mechanism of evolution itself that is random.
Consider birds. There was a good article a few days back, on why only non-toothed birds survived. Until the meteor-strike, 65M years ago, all was equal and they survived along-side. Until they were the only survivors.
And here we are, with beaked birds. ^_^
Thus evolution is often random between local optima. People’s organs don’t represent perfect left/right symmetry but there’s no particular benefit for which of the two options were chosen overall. Ie swap just which lung is smaller and you get lots of problems, but swap everything and it all works.
The interesting question is where the working system that Natural Selection was able to select came from in the first place.
I remember reading something about bombers maybe during ww2. I think if fighters were chasing them, the bombers could escape because with their large wings, they could fly high and slow and turn inside them.
the analogy being - some birds might be set up for ground operations and chasing prey, others living in a different ecosystem with high altitude cruising over long distances.
Four-winged birds dying up can easily be a complete accident, even more because two-winged birds were almost completely killed once too.
What is a flying vertebrate that is not a bird? Bats are all I can think of.
Edit:
Oh, look: flying lizards and flying fish:
https://wildlifeinformer.com/flying-animals-that-are-not-bir...
And they also had two wings.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterosaur
Flies in particular are also among the best flyers, and yet, they use only two of their wings for flying, the other two shrank to became halteres, a sensory organ acting like a gyroscope.
Dragonflies may be the best fliers in the insect world thanks to their four independently controlled wings, but flies may be the second best, and they achieved that by losing two of their four wings. Evolution is interesting.
At the current level of O2 in the air I don't believe that flying insects can grow as large as even a hummingbird, much less an eagle.
This got me curious. At a quick search, I found out that there in fact is at least a species of flying insect larger than (the smallest) hummingbird:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauromydas_heros
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_hummingbird
The insect grows up to 7 cm in length whereas the bird can stay less than 6 cm at adulthood. No information about the insect weight though (for a proper comparison).
Obviously they don't (!) but the question is how?
The nail is the same: the lunula emits these keratinocytes in only one direction; even more weirdly it's a planar structure.
Don't cells "just" orient themselves using mechanotransduction [1] or am I missing something? That's a bit hand wavey but since cells don't form 3d structures in tissue themselves, they orient against the extracellular matrix using mechanotransduction and other growth factors.
The development of multicellular life was essentially cells learning how to orient themselves into a digestive tract.
On two different occasions, I've had ingrown toenails that had to have a procedure done because, once they started ingrowing, they wouldn't stop doing so. (It's still outward growth but still.)
Just an in-office procedure using some local anesthesia and acid I think. The first time the whole cycle went on for months while I was regularly going to the podiatrist because of a fairly severe foot fracture of the same foot which may or may not have been connected.
This last time--a good 15 years later symmetrically on the other foot--I was pretty much just "Let's do this" after a couple times trying to just cut the toenail.
I've had a few of these procedures too and it never really stuck for me. Ingrown toenails kept being a problem. Then I started cutting my toenails in the flat / straight '|' sort of way and I've not have a problem since.
I figure it's worth a shout out to the few of you out there that need the help. But, again, it may not work for you too.
I suspect the cause is socks or shoes pushing against the skin at the end of the toe, causing it to grow incorrectly over many months.
An untrimmed nail pushes any sock/shoe away, solving the issue.
The "ingrown" phenomenon occurs well after the nail has formed (it's getting pushed out from the lunula end) and is due to a combination of your toe's (hallux I assume) ideosyncratic geometry and environmental conditions, likely, as another commenter pointed out, how you innocently cut your nail.
Sorry for the pedantry but when I worked in drug development I used to research the nail unit, which, it turns out, few people do.
How does the hair on arms and legs 'know' how long it is?
Different anagen phase durations.
You can observe this on many people by looking at hair miniaturization of people who have MBP or similar -- the follicle constricts in size and the resulting hair that comes out is progressively shorter in length and diameter until the follicle is so constricted that it no longer produces hair.
growth (3 to 6 years) -> static (2 to 3 months) -> fall out -> rest -> start over
The maximum length of your hair is determined by how long it stays in the growing phase, in general this phase is longer in females than in males. And some people are naturally able to grow longer hair than others.
In pregnant females the static time is increased, i.e. the hair stays there without falling out. This makes their thick and full. After delivery this changes and the hair falls out in clumps, which is unpleasant, but it's the same hair that would have anyway fallen out earlier, it's not extra hair falling out.
If you cut the hair nothing changes, it still grows for as long as it was going to originally.
That myth about cutting hair (or shaving) to make it grow faster or whatever is not real.
I've never experienced a time where I've trimmed body hair and had it remain the same length for a couple of months.
Look closer, the hairs are random length. You have to wait of course for them to reach natural max length, and then you'll see a randomized mix of lengths.
If you are always clipping hair they will almost all be at one length because > 90% of them are still growing and then getting trimmed. The rest (a minority) have recently fallen out and are just getting started and will be shorter.
Does that make sense?
Are you sure? I have fairly hairy body so when I use moisturizers it tends to stick to the hair instead of the skin, and since I'm trying to take care of my forearm tattoos, I trim my forearm hair on a regular basis, after a few weeks, if I look closely, I can see some hairs being around, say, 2cm long, whereas others are just barely growing out.
I've always wondered if the almost universal preference for women to have long hair is linked with their ability to have long hair, while for males people (not you :) typically want it short, which matches what males are able to naturally do.
i.e. which came first? The ability for hair of a certain length, so that's what people like, or if people like hair a certain way so natural selection helps out.
This was just asked and answered in /r/askscience
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1c6zztu/why_doe...
According to simulations of plate tectonics, these two locations would have been somewhat closer... 100m years ago.
Think about all the cells, and the thousands/millions of jobs they do, in perfect coordination just in your fingers or hands.
It's all designed.
Just because the output of a system looks complicated does not mean that the input into a system is complicated.
If you don't start with all of them in place, the organism dies, and fails to benefit from both time and natural selection.
Even in this model there are many chicken / egg scenarios. e.g. Every cell needs a membrane to survive, but how does a membrane benefit a cell if it has no ports built in to let waste out and food in? So the wall and the access control systems must appear simultaneously, or the cell dies and does not benefit from natural selection.
Another one is DNA, it's information storage, but it's inert, it doesn't do anything except be acted upon by other systems, but DNA holds the information to create those systems. So how were the systems consistently replicated before information storage systems like DNA?
You probably don't care about this because you seem to be answering something he didn't suggest... But he's not saying that every cell in our bodies is being actively managed by another being, he's saying that cells have been designed to self-coordinate.
Anyway, just food for thought for other readers who may also have these questions, you're not alone, and it is worth investigating because the current paradigm is in crisis and it's not worth basing your life decisions on their ideas anymore.
On the other hand, there are plentiful examples of extremely simple lifeforms in nature, and there are also non-living things in nature that display phenomena that early simple lifeforms could have utilized (e.g., membrane-like structures that are spontaneously formed by phospholipids). There are still a lot of questions and unknowns here, but not nearly as many, and scientists are on a general trajectory of answering them at a fairly quick clip — whereas theological questions about the creation of living organisms are largely just as unanswered today as they were hundreds of years ago.
A different but popular notion is that a creator created the universe (effectively by sparking something like the Big Bang), but the lifeforms that followed evolved as scientists believe. This, to me, is far more plausible. As yet, we do not have any other good explanations for how the universe came into existence, and so this deistic hypothesis is as good as any other I have heard.
https://timpanogos.blog/2011/10/08/evidence-of-evolution-gir...
According to the meaning of the verse: Who has created everything in the best way,(Quran)
everything is cut out according to its innate abilities with perfect measure and order, and put together with the finest art, in the shortest way, the best form, the lightest manner, and most practicable shape. Look at the clothes of birds, for example, and the easy way they ruffle up their feathers and continuously use them. Also, things are given bodies and dressed in forms in a wise manner with no waste and nothing in vain; they testify to their number to the necessary existence of an All-Wise Maker and point to that Possessor of Absolute Power and Knowledge
If they fly through the same air as airplanes, you also lose efficiency wherever you have wingtips (pressure below leaks above, basically), and the rear wings can get messed up by turbulence/vortices from the front wings if you're not careful.
Yes! I've been saying this. Global warming seems like a given at this point, so instead of stopping it we should try to increase oxygen levels too and then stick Bombardier Beetle fire-breathing genes in back-bred Hatzegopteryxes. Those beasts had wingspans over ten meters, were apex predators, and were built like it. May as well get some dragons to look at…
> Time to welcome our new avian overlords.
Not new. Birds are theropods, same as T-Rexes. It's just a return to form.
I think feathers would be one of those things.
Many factors contributed to this astonishing feat of athleticism—muscle power, a high metabolic rate and a physiological tolerance for elevated cortisol levels, among other things.
Additional fun fact the article doesn't mention:
Birds sleep with only half their brain at a time when making these long distance flights. That's why they don't doze off and fall out of the sky.
Other fun fact: Humans making long car drives also do what's called "microsleeping". Your eyes remain open and your hands stay on the wheel, but your brain goes unconscious for a couple seconds at a time. Usually, you don't even notice…
My understanding is that these incredible distances are achievable less by "flapping" and more by leveraging small adjustments to harness the incredibly powerful forces found among and between air currents and waves as they traverse across the ocean.
For example, here is an unpowered remote control glider achieving measured speeds of 548+! mph using nothing but natural energy harnessed from wind and gravity.
I never got out to Parker Mountain but those guys had great stories. 100G will find the weak point on your model, often explosively.
Also fun is pelicans surfing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEFrSycTvRk
100G will find the weak point on your model
You know, just a casual glider built to withstand 10 times more gravitational force than an F-15 and 15 times more than a Formula 1 car. Wild.
But they’re also a masterpiece of weight reduction - the less mass, the less of a problem the Gs are. No big IC engine to deal with. The electronics are tiny and the fuselage walls are also super thin. It’s a stressed surface carbon fibre/kevlar frame to spread the force.
What I like is the common idea that only powered flight is fast. A propeller would only slow this model down. They’re so sleek.
My gliders are very casual — this one is a serious machine!
That is not correct. This particular bird (Bar-tailed Godwit) has never been observed to "dynamically soar" nor does it have the proper wing shape for that type of flight. If you ever seen Godwits in the wild, you will know why, it's a flapping only bird, they have no other mode of flight.
Albatrosses on the other hand do employ dynamic soaring and fly even greater distances than Godwit does (they can circumnavigate the Southern Ocean several times) although albatrosses have additional advantage of being able to use water for rest (Godwits cannot).
Best human gliders have glide ratio of 60. So Godwit still needs to be very efficient glider, or, what is more likely also knows how to use winds and updrafts.
So it means that it must gain altitude and, perhaps, travel speed by alternative means, most likely using updrafts and riding winds.
You are welcome to recalculate :)
I know some of the early evolutionists wondered about the evolution of the feather and wing, since it seems hard to evolve in a gradual way -- a little bit of a feathery flap doesn't offer any advantages if it's not enough to glide on.
I know one of the leading theories is that they evolved to keep animals warm, since they're also good insulators. Is this still the main theory?
When I thought about this in the past, I assumed they evolved in sea creatures first - where even very small flaps or mini wings/fins could improve hydrodynamics and/or swimming control, without needing to make a single jump from useless to being able to fly. But I've not looked into whether that is the case.
Edit to add two quotes from a quick search:
"Thus, early feathers functioned in thermal insulation, communication, or water repellency, but not in aerodynamics and flight." - https://www.britannica.com/animal/bird-animal/The-origin-of-...
"Two major rival published theories are based on the roles of feathers in insulating the body against heat loss and in providing an aerodynamic surface for flight. However, because of the lack of knowledge about the roles and ecological relationships of protofeathers and of the most primitive feathers, it is not possible to test strongly either of these theories, or others as proposed in this symposium, against objective empirical observations to determine which is falsified or is the most probable" - https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/40/4/478/101404#
There seems to be 4 different hypotheses. So there is no consensus on this question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_avian_flight#Hypothe...
A video about the "wing-assisted incline running" hypothesis:
"The Origin of Flight--What Use is Half a Wing?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMuzlEQz3uo
Only what works, survives, regardless of the politics, i.e. what others think of it.
I'd argue that it's not science at all, because what's missing is the coordination behind it. To me, evolution is not a product of conscious effort, but an emergent behavior or the individuals and systems that participate.
Taking the "science" definition from Wikipedia: "Science is a rigorous, systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world". With evolution, testing definitely happens, but it's not a systematic endeavor, or at least I'm not convinced that it is.
Pretty smart too - the recognize people and objects and uses association of the words - like when my one black cat (got two but he has white feet) enters the kitchen to check for food scraps he says "Get out" like I would.
He has no oil gland to lube his feathers since they are a tree dwelling species from the tropics but down feathers which break down into a fine dust when he grooms.
Is it countless though? Earth is "only" 4.5 billion years old with life appearing "only" 800 million years later, which seems pretty short for something chaotic and unorganized to self-organize into the nearly unfathomable sophistication we have now. Of course, humans are bad at grokking large numbers, and I might be too biased as a God fearing man... to be clear I don't deny the realities of evolution, but I currently tend to believe that as far as abiogenesis/evolution goes, life was "seeded" in some way on the planet, i.e. given a head start vs arising spontaneously from primordial soup within 800M years. I realize that this belief doesn't really contribute anything to the scientific discussion, just musing that 800M years to create the initial life seed doesn't seem that long considering we use super computers to simulate trillion+ iterations of various models and have failed to observe similar phenomenon in terms of self-organization without outside influence.
It really depends on what you think the seed was.
The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and we have pretty good records of life on it and the evolutionary steps that took place going about about 3 billion of those with reasonable evidence of life for another billion before that (the 800 million years later part that you reference).
So, if life got seeded onto the planet, it happened before then and would have to have been in the form of small carbon-based molecules.
There's some debate in the field if life evolved genetics first or metabolism first. But the 'seed' would be the same in both cases, it's just that the pathway to get to modern life would be different.
The most compelling case that I'm aware of for these small carbon-based molecules to originate somewhere other than Earth is this paper: https://biologydirect.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/174...
Essentially they show that genomes have been doubling in size on average every 350 million years or so. If you project that math backward, you end with life starting, not at the beginning of Earth, but at the beginning of time, coinciding eerily with the Big Bang.
That points to a theory that carbon, water, and other elements we thought developed later might have been created earlier in the universe than expected. That would then point to the building blocks for life being essentially 'seeded' everywhere in the universe. Waiting to wake up as soon as conditions were right.
Randomly mashing the keyboard, then running the code hoping that it doesn't crash? Not exactly what I'd have in mind when thinking of great programmers, but to each their own.
Take chimps to humans : 6 millions years. 10 years to produce some offspring : that's only 600000 generations
To be a success, a mutation would be transmitted to an offspring, replace a large number of the existing population, and only then be followed by the next "worthy" mutation
I do not know how many mutations are required to transform a chimp into a humain
I guess the number are not working
This, we're discovering, takes quite a lot of information. Organised, specific information in the correct order to harness maths, physics and chemistry to create a working feature.
To get such a feature off the ground by random point mutations using evolution by natural selection, each and every mutation needs to provide selective advantage, or it is discarded. Any progress to such a feature must start again from scratch.
There is a theory about how this can happen, it's well understood, but now we know much much more about how Biology actually works at the lower levels. So regarding the theory, people know that something needs to give, and it's not going to be maths, physics or chemistry, lets put it that way.
It completely made sense. I heard some research where starting about 500K year ago humans started to pair bond as a way to prevent mom and child mortality during and after childbirth and indeed Fathers are a clever invention. So yea, feathers are cool - fathers too! (for more info/reading here is a book suggestion: Eve)
I'd say invention is closer but does seem to imply agency.
I think feathers are the evolution here. Something evolved into a feather.
"Survival of the fittest" doesn't mean "That gene was gorgeous like Mr. Universe, so he won!" It means "Life threw something at a wall and this is what stuck. It died less in the face of actual real world conditions."
After you winnow away all the failed stuff, you have stuff that works. Do it for millions of years and amazingly complex and elegant stuff can emerge from the process.
And if we're talking philosophy, I think the feather doesn't exist at all, so it's even harder for me to imagine that it's a product of conscious effort. I imagine that what we humans consider feathers have near-infinite, similar-looking predecessors, proto-feathers, which differ so slightly from actual feathers that it's hard to say where the non-feather featherlike skin protrusions end, and feathers begin. What we can do of course is agree on such a line, but that further proves to me that feather is just a human concept, and that non-humans don't actually consciously interact with whatever we happen to call feathers.
So, feathers just kinda happened over time.
Checks out!
It would be like finding a watch someone had dropped on the ground and being like, “Wow what an amazing invention! It must have evolved over several thousands of years until it was able to accurately track the time!”. Or thinking that a chaotic natural process like a tornado could somehow assemble a car if it blew through a junkyard. Both of these are ridiculous arguments, but that’s what people claim evolution is like. After all, given enough time anything is possible? Right?
> a: something invented: such as (1): a device, contrivance, or process originated after study and experiment (2): a product of the imagination especially : a false conception[0]
Studying, experimenting, and imagining all require agency.
And Voltaire did not know about all the maths behind matter and universe, the computer science behind DNA, the complexity of biochemistry...
To all the engineers here : work about causality, and the power of randmoness, be curious, do not take for granted evolution through randmoness, it makes no sense especially for an engineer who knows how codes work.
The idea must precede the code, and the right code can act upon the matter. The random code without idea has absolutely no chance to do anything valuable.
Evolution's most "clever" turn and invention is it achieving self-consciousness (we are its "self consciousness")
I get the author's point, I think, but the etymology of "pen" according to wiktionary.com:
> From Middle English penne, from Anglo-Norman penne, from Old French penne, from Latin penna (“feather”), from Proto-Indo-European péth₂r̥ ~ pth₂én- (“feather, wing”), from peth₂- (“to rush, fly”) (from which petition). Proto-Indo-European base also root of *petra-, from which Ancient Greek πτερόν (pterón, “wing”) (whence pterodactyl), Sanskrit पत्रम् (patram, “wing, feather”), Old Church Slavonic перо (pero, “pen”), Old Norse fjǫðr, Old English feðer (Modern English feather);[1] note the /p/ → /f/ Germanic sound change.
So pens aren't called pens because we used pennaceous feathers, but because they were made of feathers, period. At least that's how I get it.
"Pennaceous feather" is a funny term too, then, meaning something like "featherlike feather"?
>covering 8,425 miles without taking a single break. For comparison, there is only one commercial aircraft that can fly that far nonstop, a Boeing 777 [...]
The Boeing 787 and the Airbus A350 have ranges exceeding that, with ranges of up to 8,790 mi and 11,163 mi respectively, depending on the variant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner#Specific...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A350#Specifications
edit:
Turns out there's even more aircrafts that exceed that range.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A330neo#Specifications
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380#Specifications_(A3...
I'd probably render it as more like "typical feathers" or "standard feathers". Note that "typical feathers" and "feathery feathers" mean the same thing, but one is perfectly normal phrasing and the other isn't.
Also in Italian. Although I believe penna can also mean the more modern "pen."
Penne pasta is basically plural of this.
javascript:void(location.href='https://archive.is/?run=1&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href))
javascript:void(window.open('https://web.archive.org/web/*/'+location.href))
Or this more complicated version of the Wayback Machine one, which if you click while on an empty tab will instead give you an alert with a text field in which to type or paste whatever URL you want to look up:
javascript:(function()%7Bif(location.href.indexOf('http')!=0)%7Binput=prompt('URL:','https://');if(input!=null)%7Blocation.href='http://web.archive.org/web/*/'+input%7D%7Delse%7Blocation.href='http://web.archive.org/web/*/'+location.href;%7D%7D)();*ducks*
2 = 1 proven?
One of my cat's eyes is blue. One of my cat's eyes is green.
Both can be true at the same time.