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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

No. Evolution is not "tuning" it's just statistics at a huge scale. The high likelihood of back pain, the lack of important sensors, broken synthesis pathways, this is not a carefully tuned system, this is just blind luck plus statistics. Which means we can do better because we're purposeful.

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>we can do better because we're purposeful.

"Purposeful" does not help if we are mostly clueless.

There's no wise guiding force behind evolution. It's all guesswork.

There's no guessing force behind evolution. It's just statistics at scale.

Yea, so what is the point in this context?

It might be guess work, but it has got a ruthless filter called natural selection and really long time to get here.

So I don't see your point. It is really tuning for surviving within the constrains.

And the constraints are very different now…

Maybe, but that does not mean that it is possible to work around evolution to change ourselves to fit better with the new constraints.

There's no reason to believe that's true, that there some inherent reason we can't change our selves to better fit our new environment. Arguably that's exactly what humans have been doing now for tens of thousands of years.

The reason is that we cannot fully figure how evolved systems work. Let me explain..

Let x be the set of all physical behaviors in nature. At any point in time, we (human beings) are aware of a subset of x, let us call it y.

When a human entity design a system, they can only use the behaviors in y. But an evolved system could potentially use all of x. Since y is always proper subset of x, this means that we will never be able to know everything required to safely modify an evolved system.

We know enough specific things about immunology and about the illnesses we're trying to avoid to be something more than clueless and we're learning more all the time, including about the potential applications of "everything vaccines" that are being tested for potential programmatic use.

Don't we have a problem of ever increasing auto-immune diseases? If we know "enough" then I think we should be able to make it go away. Until that happens, I don't think humanity can claim to know "enough".

Also, evolved systems are hard to reverse engineer.

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

If something simple like an electronic circuit with comparatively short evolution can end up with mysterious, un-intutive and complex inter-dependent behavior, imagine how non-understandable an immune system that evolved over millions of years can be..

So I still think we are mostly clueless, and it is nearly impossible to safely engineer changes into something that was not engineered in the first place...

I would flip that framing around entirely. If we were clueless, we would not have had a centuries worth of progress of any kind whatsoever, let alone be brought to the point of testing general purpose vaccines, something that would have been unthinkable perhaps even a decade ago.

Electricity is a convenient example, because it's indisputable that we have leveraged it to do real work based on real understanding. I suspect any and every area of knowledge is subject to a kind complexity crash where the combinations of variables outstrip our ability to track them. But treating that like it negates the knowledge we do have is almost literally what it means to miss the forest for the trees.

It does not negate the knowledge that we do have. But we should also acknowledge that certain undertakings are impossible to do safely with the amount of knowledge that we do have.

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