Hacker News Reader

Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I do worry about is glasses. Is there a reason why we correct vision? There's probably a reason evolution made some of us see the world in a blur. Likewise with therapy - maybe killing yourself is like cell apoptosis. Many body cells are supposed to choose to die when they no longer function well. It's a good thing. That's often the problem with scientists: "They were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should".

Until we find out why nature made it so some of us kill ourselves maybe we shouldn't fuck with it? Remember Chesterton's Fence.

View on HN

You're making the mistake of thinking of "nature" and "evolution" as intelligent, reasoning systems, and that every evolutionary adaptation exists for a purpose. Evolution doesn't do things for "reasons," things just happen.

Remember that cephalopod brains are donut shaped and their digestive tracts go right through the middle and if they eat something too big they'll have an anyeurism. Pandas and koalas evolved special diets that serve no evolutionary purpose and both would be extinct if humans didn't find them cute. Sloths have to climb down from trees to take a shit. Female hyenas give birth through a pseudopenis that often ruptures and kils them. Horses can't vomit and if they swallow something toxic, their stomach ruptures. Also their hooves and ankles are extremely weak and not well designed to support their weight. Numerous species like the fiddler crab and peacock have evolved sexual displays that are actively harmful to their survival.

And as for humans, our spines are not well adapted for walking upright, our retinas are wired backwards, and we still have a useless appendix and wisdom teeth. The recurrent laryngeal nerve has an unnecessarily long and complex route branching off the vagus and travelling around the aorta before running back up to the larynx.

Evolution is not smart. Evolution isn't even stupid. It isn't trying to keep you alive and it isn't even capable of caring if you die. Yes we should absolutely fuck with it, because we don't want to live in a world where we still die of sepsis and parasites and plagues because "we don't want to mess with evolution."

Yes, there’s a misconception that evolution leads to optimization and efficiency. It really just leads to traits that are “good enough”.

Evolution has lead to optimization and efficiency many times. It rarely trends to maximization or the largest possible efficiency, since those conflict with "good enough". Protein structure and function is a common example.

> It rarely trends to maximization or the largest possible efficiency, since those conflict with "good enough".

Sometimes things get trapped in a local minima. Particularly when a seemingly inconsequential detail at a much much earlier stage becomes a dependency of lots of downstream stuff, but then it turns out that this just so happens to conflict with a better option in the here and now.

More commonly, the "perfect" solution is extremely brittle while the (supposedly) "good enough" solution is incredibly robust to all sorts of environmentally inflicted bullshit. In other words, most of the time evolution is practical while the humans criticizing the outcome are ignorant idealists.

I would go so far as to say that the vast majority of the time, systems that evolved are robust, not brittle, and you're right, this compromise "works better" or is "good enough to reproduce more than my relatives". And other times something gets caught in a local minima- but other bits around it optimize anyway (I think the "backwards" human eye might be an example of that- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye#Placement and see also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_baggage).

Anyway, the example I was thinking of is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion-limited_enzyme where some enzymes have evolved to reach extremely close to the maximum rate of catalysis limited by diffusion rates (and some enzymes have clever tricks to get around that).

Not even good enough: "population reproduced faster then it died".

That's it: and it's separate from good enough because that can include things like "happened to live on the part of the island which didn't get obliterated by a volcanic eruption at the only point in history that volcano ever erupted".

FYI horses are the product of domestication.

Fair enough.

In my defense, domestication is still technically an evolutionary process.

Are their hooves, though? The fossil record clearly shows a progression in their ancestors from having feet with many toes to the single "toe" they have now.

>koalas evolved special diets that serve no evolutionary purpose

Koalas biggest problem is us? Like they seem perfectly adapted to their niche. Eat lots of leaves that nobody else is adapted to use as food, and once a year, run very fast to outpace the bushfire that your principle food source needs to reproduce.

>we still have a useless appendix

This was believed in the 20th century, but we now believe the appendix is actually useful, and is basically a fail-safe in case the intestinal flora are wiped out; some will survive in the appendix and repopulate the intestine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendix_(anatomy)#Functions

Which is an incredibly specious conclusion because when would the gut fauna ever be wiped out? For the evolutionary history of mankind, antibiotics did not exist, and people without an appendix (such as myself) have no medical need for any special treatment after going on antibiotics.

> intestinal flora

> gut fauna

May I be excused? My macrophages are full of slime molds!

>Which is an incredibly specious conclusion because when would the gut fauna ever be wiped out?

It's called "gastrointestinal illness". From the article I linked:

"Research in 2012 reported that individuals without an appendix were twice as likely to have a recurrence of Clostridioides difficile colitis. The appendix, therefore, may act as a reservoir for beneficial bacteria. This reservoir could repopulate the gut flora following a bout of gastrointestinal illness."

Huh, that's really interesting. But I suppose it doesn't apply to the amber alert thing. In that situation, evolution probably was an intelligent reasoning system that existed for a purpose and we must be subverting it (a bad idea). There's always an exception to every rule, I suppose.

Evolution is never an intelligent reasoning system, any more than gravity ever is.

Some groups of people have evolved to believe that, anyway.

Never? Not even the OP's «there's probably a reason evolution didn't put the immune system on permanent "amber alert" as they call it in the article»? Oh, that's surprising. Well, TIL.

Although we don't have a lot of hard evidence, there is reason to suspect that the high rate of poor vision in modern young people is more environmental than an evolutionary flaw. We spend too much time indoors staring at nearby objects under dim artificial light. People who spend most of their time outdoors are less likely to need vision correction, although there could be trade-offs later in life as the damage caused by natural UV light accumulates.

IIRC, we do have evidence that myopia started to decline (in the population) in Singapore as soon as the city applied strict rules for enforcing outside activities for the children basically every day.

I remember that the effect in the tendency was more or less immediate.

The reason we correct vision is for safety and convenience. My guess is that we have a distribution of vision capabilities due to the inability of complex biological systems to ensure that the precise geometry of the cornea and lens is subject to statistical variations that can't be controlled. There are probably also tradeoffs associated with near and far vision.

Now, you could have restated this in a better way IMHO. I'd put it like this: are there any evolutionary advantages to having worse-than-average near or far vision? For example, we can imagine that people who had extremely good long range vision would be more successful in hunting, and perhaps- this is where I'm speculating heavily- having poor long vision is compensated by having better detail vision for fine tool work. However, what I've learned after many years is that attempting to perceive the true nature of the evolutionary fitness function is challenging.

As for your bit about suicide: please be a lot more thoughtful in speculating about suicide.

I had to upvote this just because it's such an incredible take, it really made my day even if I think it's complete horseradish

C'mon now, it's probably one of the better trolls I've seen today.

Poe's law and all, but the first two responses to this are missing some sarcasm that looks pretty overwrought to me.

Really...?? :)

"Sorry son, you can't get these glasses. It's for the betterment of humanity."

I think you missed their sarcasm

... Yeah probably huh :)

You just don't know sometimes.

This isnt a vaccine against suicide.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com