
Life may be getting better at evolving - sonabinu
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170301-life-may-actually-be-getting-better-at-evolving
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alexose
This "meta game" was my absolute favorite epiphany as a biology undergrad!
Genomes evolve in ways that allow beneficial mutations in the future-- And
genes aren't so much randomly scattered in chromosomes as much as they are
grouped in ways that maximize useful insertions/deletions/frameshifts.

Evolution has its hands on so many different biological processes, including
itself. Nature is astounding.

~~~
astrodust
Yeah, even evolution is evolving. We like to think of ourselves as highly
evolved, but honestly, we're still extremely primitive compared to what life
could be given another two or three billion years to play out.

~~~
felipemnoa
Unfortunately life does not have that long [1]. A billion years at best.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Fut...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Future_of_the_Earth.2C_the_Solar_System_and_the_Universe)

~~~
astrodust
You're presuming that life doesn't evolve to the point where it can escape
this planet and move to other ones.

Even if we have a horrible nuclear war that kills all humans it will only take
100-200 million years for another highly intelligent species to come back and
take over again. We've got around five kicks at the can before it's too late.

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Houshalter
The reverse happens as well. Consider DNA repair. Evolution requires a certain
level of mutation in order to work. If a species evolves perfect DNA repair
mechanisms, then it will stop evolving and eventually go extinct.

However on an individual level, DNA repair is highly selected for. Any
individual with lower mutation rates is much less likely to die of cancer.
Much less likely to have offspring with harmful genetic disorders. After all,
the vast majority of mutations are either neutral or harmful, not beneficial.
So individuals with the repair gene will tend to have more successful
offspring than organisms without, and the frequency of the gene will increase.

Most genes that could improve evolution itself are not selected for.
Individual fitness matters, not group fitness.

There are other ways evolution hurts itself. For instance there is a condition
in mice that lives on the male chromosome. It causes all of it's offspring to
be male. So all of them also carry this condition. Thus the condition spreads
itself twice as much as the competing genes. And so it quickly fixes itself in
the population and then there are no more females.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
D. radiodurans has evolved something close to 'perfect DNA repair mechanisms'
without becoming extinct [1] I would say the heightened risk of extinction
relies on the assumption that the environment will change and the organism
will not be able to adapt (without mutations). But for many bacteria, that
seems unlikely to occur.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans#Ionizi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans#Ionizing-
radiation_resistance)

~~~
webmaven
We've observed in the lab that in bacteria harmful changes in the environment
increase the number of mutations.

Further, we've observed that in many cases the mutations tend to be in the
genes that are most closely related to the change. That is, if the PH drops to
the point it is causing mutations, many bacteria will tend to get those
mutations in genes that are likely to increase tolerance for acidity!

Now _that_ is what I call evolved evolvability.

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amelius
I think that with all the medical aids (for instance, glasses), life may
actually get worse at evolving.

Unless, of course, you consider those aids as part of the system.

~~~
hasenj
I think the same applies to eating.

Since we can eat, we don't have to produce energy using sunlight like plants
do.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

~~~
adrianN
A plant has to collect sunshine for a whole season to produce a couple of
fruiting bodies that you can eat in minutes. I'd say heterotrophy wins.

~~~
badosu
Well, if you think that a plant only produces fruits for animals to spread
seeds...

~~~
adrianN
The ultimate evolutionary strategy: by tasty to a lifeform that has discovered
agriculture.

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M_Grey
_" The big challenge for Watson's hypothesis is whether any empirical evidence
for it can be found in nature"_

Bit of a sticking point, and what follows is less than convincing. This feels
like the biological equivalent of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology; a neat idea,
that seems to be pretty disconnected from reality.

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leggomylibro
Do you want shoggoths? Because this is how you wind up with shoggoths.

Seriously though, if the trend of species 'remembering' old genes and becoming
more agile in throwing them into the mix continues, could we wind up with
monstrous horripilating beasts capable of directing their own morphology? Or
as Lovecraft put it,

"It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a
shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with
myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light
all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic
penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had
swept so evilly free of all litter."

~~~
gliese1337
Probably not. At least, not in "real-time". It makes for good horror and sci-
fi, but in reality the energy costs of constantly reforming yourself like that
would be, shall we say, _prohibitive_. (Incidentally, at the risk of slight
spoilers, this is an issue that is addressed, if slightly obliquely, in
Michaelbrent Colling's horror novel _The Loon_.)

There are plenty of organisms that have extremely free body plans that can be
altered as they grow, however (notably, most plants and fungi), so it's less
of a stretch to imagine a creature that could consciously direct changes in
its own morphology over long periods of time- equivalent to how long it would
take the new structures to grow _anyway_ , if they were a set part of a normal
animal's morphology.

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js8
A similar idea comes from Daniel Dennett:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZefk4gzQt4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZefk4gzQt4)

If we consider cultural (memetic) evolution as a type of evolution, then the
answer is YES!

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sonabinu
There is some similarity in the work by Leslie Valiant where he uses an
“ecorithm” approach uses computational concepts to explore fundamental
mysteries of evolution and the mind. Incidentally, he is the man behind PAC ;)
[https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160128-ecorithm-
computers-a...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160128-ecorithm-computers-
and-life/)

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webmaven
This was one of the key insights I got from the book "The Plausibility of
Life". The authors describe several mechanisms beyond genetics, primarily
developmental, that make organisms more evolvable and help improve the odds
that random mutations will be at least interesting, rather than immediately
fatal.

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duncancarroll
Neat idea. The fulltext is paywalled but one thing I'm curious about is where
exactly the "strength of connectivity" would be stored within the chromosome?

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blueprint
Except for the whole development of science and technology apparently
inevitably leading to the destruction of the balance in life's environment
thing and its subsequent (temporary?) extinction. Will humans __ever __be able
to escape this planet?

~~~
crpatino
Probably not, but don't worry. Our ability to destroy the world is greatly
exagerated.

I don't think we will even manage to get ourselves extinct, though a great
deal of needless suffering is pretty much innevitable at this point.

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onychomys
tl;dr - Computer scientist discovers that selection happens at the organismal
level, bringing his understanding of the subject to very nearly what a third
year undergrad has.

~~~
grzm
Substantive criticism is always useful, though snarky tldrs generally lack the
substance. What points in particular do you find egregious?

