
The Strange Inevitability of Evolution - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/the-strange-inevitability-of-evolution-rp
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npgatech
"You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine
providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain
why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive."

Interesting article but why are we still bringing up creationism. This whole
apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed. It adds no value to the
article except ridicules itself.

~~~
SiVal
_This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed_

I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance
embodied in terms like "benighted creationist" is the real problem, not that
even acknowledging a theory that has been believed in some form by most humans
who ever lived is too kind.

A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in
evolution by nothing more enlightened than a lack of independent thinking in
an environment where atheism is in fashion among the cool kids.

I'll have to say that I'm astonished again and again when I write code that
uses some "mindless" search process (including numerous experiments with
evolutionary algorithms) and it finds the answer to some problem that I
couldn't reason through. I can't seem to get over the feeling that if I have
to reason to solve a certain problem, and I can't reason well enough to solve
it, and another "thing" does solve it, it must reason better than I do--be
smarter than I am--even when _I wrote the code_ that did it.

It gives me a sense of "awe" for the power of evolution and a lasting
"sympathetic attitude" toward those who just can't believe that it could work
this well. Like the power of a simple, naive bayes spam sorter to "interpret
the text of email", evolution is one of those things that, even when I can
explain it well enough to actually implement it with my own hands, it's still
hard for me to believe.

~~~
WalterBright
A theory makes predictions that can be tested. Creationism is a faith, not a
theory, as it makes no predictions.

For example, Einstein's relativity theory predicted that gravity bends light,
an effect that had never been observed. Decades later, the theory was
confirmed when bent light was detected and the amount of the bend matched the
theory's prediction.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'd say that for a typical religious person, "theory of evolution" as a source
of life is akin to saying "Einstein's theory predicted gravity bends light,
therefore my sun burn was really caused by a black hole over at Proxima
Centauri". There's _kind of a huge gap_ to cover between directly testable
predictions and what's trying to be explained. So it boils down to whether or
not you believe a complex chain of reasoning made by smart people, and there's
plenty of things that can influence what you believe and who you trust.

~~~
flukus
> There's kind of a huge gap to cover between directly testable predictions
> and what's trying to be explained.

The thing is, evolution is really simple. First there are random mutations,
which are directly testable. Your DNA will be slightly wrong from your parents
DNA. Secondly, there is environmental selection, also easily testable. Drop a
house cat in the middle of the arctic and you'll see how it works, although
there are much better (and humane) experiments that have been conducted. The
testability is much more accessible to ordinary folk than Einsteins theory
will ever be.

The final component is time, which is really what creationist take issue with.
That's why you'll see them reject every branch of science except evolution.

------
lucio
I don't like the anthropomorphization of evolution. It's a bad angle to view
the subject

>If evolution is “searching” for that function by natural selection...

Evolution is "doing" nothing. It has no particular purpose and it is not
"searching" for the particular life forms of this planet. The true shaper of
the life-forms we know is death. Death (by resource starvation) is the knife
cutting the uncontrolled growth of life, uncontrolled growth in number and
variations.

~~~
judahmeek
I agree. The difficulty people, including myself, have of realizing that
evolution is actually a impersonal, negative process (resource starvation and
the culling of the unfit) rather than a sentient, positive process is
astounding.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'd say it's simple when you actually "step through" a few steps of a
simplified simulation. On paper or in your head, picture a few critters
reproducing and dying, with random feature changes occuring every reproduction
step and with chance of death being directly tied to those features. Step a
few generations and you can clearly see that what really drives the
evolutionary process is the criterion you chose to determine which critters
die and which survive.

But yeah, I know most people have problem grokking processes like these.
School definitely doesn't teach it - not in a proper, abstract, "algorithmic"
way. Only with stories about butterflies and dinosaurs. I know I finally
grokked evolution somewhere in my mid 20-s, after a) reading enough Less Wrong
articles, and b) simulating it in my head, pretty much in the way I described
above.

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walter_bishop
"You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine
providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain
why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive."

I used watch those Dawkins v the true believers videos and I suspect such
opinions are promoted to discredit Darwinian Evolution acting on the genome.
Regardless of the unknown nuances of DNA, Evolution is the environment acting
on the species to further adapt it to the environment. Here's another quote
from Philip Ball: "What often goes unremarked among the revisionism that
current research is prompting is that DNA was supposed to be the missing part
of the puzzle in evolutionary theory: the repository of Mendelian hereditary
factors."

So if DNA doesn't act on the units of inheritance, there must be some kind of
spooky spirit entities acting on matter,

[http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/images/miracle_sharris.gi...](http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/images/miracle_sharris.gif)

[http://www.philipball.co.uk/images/stories/docs/pdf/genes%20...](http://www.philipball.co.uk/images/stories/docs/pdf/genes%20and%20evolution%20full.pdf)

------
simondedalus
As usual, this article makes me think of Wittgenstein, who would probably say,
"I agree with everything you're saying, except the word 'strange'."

The content is interesting, definitely, but you could save some time and
potentially misleading "appreciation of strangeness" by stating that neutral
drift allows for dramatically more random possibilities than those offered by
one-time random mutations.

Not that Wittgenstein (or I) want to poopoo the "wonder" element of science or
life in general... but I think it's telling that the author, as other comments
point out, mentions creationism, as if that's a natural motivator for "wonder"
(or a natural view to take in light of "wonder"). But creationism is
simplistic, incoherent, and wrong. If "strange" is adding nothing to the truth
or falsity of any of the statements involved, and "strange" is somehow an
excuse for creationism, perhaps we should take issue with this being "strange"
at all.

~~~
hsitz
A maybe relevant Wittgenstein quote: "It is not _how_ the world is, that is
the mystical, but _that_ it is." Tractatus 6.44

~~~
simondedalus
indeed, the early wittgenstein thinks _that_ the world is must be one of those
things we must pass over in silence, while _how_ the world is is exactly the
kind of thing about which we can talk and reason.

the later wittgenstein (still?) thinks that explanation comes to an end
somewhere, and just wants to make sure one doesn't append "and isn't that
_mysterious_?" to the end of a good explanation (ie one that sets out to
answer a precise question, then does so).

but who knows. wittgenstein and mysticism is an interesting topic... for the
early wittgenstein, it's crystal clear that he's saying there are 2 domains:
stuff that admits of being talked about in a propositional way, and stuff that
doesn't. all the latter stuff is mystical; it's not necessarily supernatural,
it's just that we can't get anywhere talking about it with true/false (or
satisfaction-condition or whatever) talk.

but what about the later wittgenstein? he thinks that the domain of things we
can talk about has opened up considerably, because he no longer things that
language functions as a mirror of "the world", nor should it even try to. now
he thinks that utterances are tools to get this or that done. this does not
neatly carve out anything to be called mystical.

\---

relating this back to the article, the idea is that we sort of put an air of
magic about the mystical, and when we treat something for which we can create
an adequate explanation as mystical or magic (or "strange"), we lead ourselves
and others into getting perplexed.

and if there is something to be said for religion or purpose, it's not to be
found in something we can explicate adequately by adverting to neutral drift,
etc. that being the case, we want to be careful about what we call strange.
what are we endorsing when we see strangeness in something we can understand?

------
_greim_
If you put an boulder in front of a blind wanderer traveling in a straight
line, they'll bump into it and stop. If they're wandering in a plane, however,
they might wander past it.

You can install a line of boulders instead. But if it's a blind drifter
drifting through a 3D volume, they might drift past the string of boulders.

For every increase in the number of dimensions N the wanderer can move
through, an obstacle must block that many more pathways, in order to remain an
obstacle.

Complex genomes, having high-dimensionality phase spaces, present fewer
systematic barriers to genetic drift, allowing populations to spread out
through more of the phase space, which in turn ratchets up the probability
some mutation would emerge that increases fitness.

------
Jupe
Evolution does give us a tool to make predictions, and yes, some of those
predictions come true. Unfortunately, humans don't always heed those
predictions:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702430/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702430/)

------
reubenswartz
If you enjoyed this, you might like _The Vital Question_ by Nick Lane
([https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OD8Z4JW](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OD8Z4JW)),
which discusses the origin of life, and the jump from prokaryotic to
eukaryotic cells, focusing on energy.

------
dilemma
What if evolution is... Intelligently Designed?

