> Seems like it turned out to be optimal to stick to two
You can't conclude that. Evolution is noisy and random.
Besides, birds are not unambiguously the most optimized flying vertebrates around.
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.
And they also had two wings.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterosaur
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...