Comment by vibrunazo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vibrunazo | Hacker News Reader

> If the proposed intervention would result in an enhancement, why have we not already evolved to be that way?

Really? This is getting upvoted here? How disappointing.

"Evolution doesn't have a goal, it doesn't make future plans. Evolution is an accident." - Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene

Did you know giraffes have a nerve connecting the points in it's head that are about 5cm apart? But instead of connecting those 2 points directly, the nerve goes all the way down through the neck, then all the way back up, to connect its end point. Is there any advantage in this design instead of just connecting directly? No there isn't, giraffes are that way only because, historically, that's how they evolved. Evolution doesn't make intelligent plans. Mutation happens randomly, then natural selection will sometimes prune out bad mutations. That's all. Evolution is imperfect. Alluding there's anything intelligent about evolution is alluding to intelligent design and creationism.

A few paragraphs down the article is a list of answers to the question you quote, from the same author. It includes this:

> There is a discrepancy between the standards by which evolution measured the quality of her work, and the standards that we wish to apply. Even if evolution had managed to build the finest reproduction-and-survival machine imaginable, we may still have reason to change it because what we value is not primarily to be maximally effective inclusive-fitness optimizers.

The actual thesis of the article is more interesting than what you seem to have read into it.

Just to reiterate: upvoting an article does not mean "I agree". It means that it's interesting.

If I see a well-written and interesting article that may not be correct, I'm likely to upvote it. Why? Well, I want to read an interesting discussion about it: perhaps its premise is wrong, but I'm not equipped to answer so I want to farm it out to the HN reader base.

That DOES seem to be the right way to use upvotes. Surface the interesting content for comment and debate.

FWIW, it's called the recurrent laryngeal nerve: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_common_descent#Recu...

That's a popular example, but Wikipedia has another example (mentioned in the same section) which I was unaware of: the vas deferens in human males, which unnecessarily loops over the ureter. You learn something new every day...

As I mentioned in another comment, biologists who know better often take the unfortunate shortcut of describing evolution in terms that inappropriately ascribe intelligence to the process, which tends to mislead both biologists who don't know better and the general population.

> Mutation happens randomly, then natural selection will sometimes prune out bad mutations. That's all.

That is not all. Beneficial mutations sometimes occur; and because they provide a benefit they spread through the population [caveat below].

Bostrom's question is valid: if some change to the brain's chemistry could provide a boost to intelligence, why hasn't a mutation providing that change already swept through the population?

There's nothing wrong with the question, and it does have answers, e.g. constraints (no simple set of mutations can provide the specified change) or tradeoffs (the change would result in a net fitness loss; intelligence isn't everything) or just insufficiently large benefits (any rare gene, e.g. a new mutation, is likely to die out by chance simply because it's rare; providing a larger benefit helps its chances of survival. [1])

[1] http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1544/1195...

Video showing that nerve on a dead giraffe http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO1a1Ek-HD0

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