Well, most mutations have no effect on fitness whatsoever. Others are completely catastrophic and that individual dies. No biggie.
I don't understand "How is it that a slight mutation could produce anything other than a reduction of fitness". A slight change in the shape of a fin could make the difference between being first or second to that scarce piece of food. The evolutionary pressure in this case is the scarcity of food. If food is plentiful, that particular advantage is immaterial. It's all about place and time.
Of course fully functional brains don't come about all at once. They evolved from the clusters of nerves that tell creatures how to move and react to their surroundings. Do you have a problem seeing how an organism with three cells to run its 'reacting to stimulus' algorithm could be fitter than one with two? (assuming there's no scarcity fuel for that cell). Many brain / nerve cluster mutations will merely be a slight change in the firing rate of a single neuron.
I'm a bit alarmed at your suggestion that proponents of evolution would suppress concepts for fear their argument would be weakened. That's ID territory. Scientists *want* to explore every angle.
There are differences between religion and superstition. Believing they are the same does not make them so.
You're going to have to explain the difference to me. I bundle them both under "belief in things that aren't true".
If your percieved difference is that you believe some religion to be true - well, we'll have to leave it at that.
The evidence is most people won't understand things better and never will.
Most people do not know how a car/computer starts and works when they turn the key/press the power button. Most never try to understand the workings of the things around them. They just mimic others (how many read manuals?), and it works well enough for them. They know about as much about cars and computers as the cargo cult knew about planes.
While it may appear to hold individuals back, it allows societies to move forward faster.
I think there's an important distinction to be made between 'not knowing' and 'ascribing a false explanation'. Let's imagine I'm one of those people that doesn't know how a car engine works. It's a black box that delivers more power when I push the pedal. That doesn't mean I have to fill in the blanks with another explanation. I don't need to imagine there's hundreds of hamsters in there. If I did, perhaps I would begin wasting resources on quasi-religious activities like singing a song before driving (to motivate the hamsters!) or leaving saucers of food for them to eat when the car is parked.
As a professional programmer, I often make conscious decisions not to understand the details of something. I don't need to understand Oracle's indexing algorithm in order to interact with the database.
I think it's much better to conciously not know something, than it is to fill the gap with made up nonsense.
(Actually that's my exact position on the origin of life. I find it very likely that Evolution allowed life to develop. Evolution means we only have to explain the origin of a very simple life form. I'm entirely comfortable in saying I'll probably never know how that very simple life form came into existence.)
I don't see anything in your argument about scalable societies that is helped by supersticion and hindered by 'known unknowns'.
Which belief systems will tend to result in Invisible Hands that are statistically more likely to change "lightbulbs" that need changing?
Definitely not belief systems where "everyone must understand everything better first".
That's a misrepresentation. Everyone does not need to understand everything better. They merely need to know that/someone/ knows. Of course, the danger there is a 'church of science'.
Lastly, if lightbulbs are changed, is it because bunches of cells changed them or people did or the Invisible Hands did?;).
Well, I may have completely missed the point of the lightbulb story, but in my house I change my own lightbulbs. And I'm made of bunches of cells.
Judging by the world economy, the invisible hands are on holiday.
I'm pretty sure that by definition, anyone who tries to live by the teachings of Christ is free to call themselves a Christian. This is regardless of whether or not they live by all of them, or live by the rules of the religion his ideology grew out of.
Well, that's two of you, and I guess there might be plenty more. I'm surprised I must say - in 35 years this is the first time I've been exposed to what seems to a mainstream tendency to describe yourself as 'Christian' despite not believing in, you know, the basic tenets of Christianity. You live and learn.
Just splitting hairs. But I think it's important because otherwise you set up a polarizing environment, where you think all Christians actually believe everything you listed.
It only becomes polarised if you think that all non-Christians don't believe in the good stuff. The being a good person bit.
By reserving the Christian label for people who believe in the Christian faith, you can demonstrate that the rest of us are decent people too. I bet if you tell a real Christian that you're Christian, they're going to assume, as I would, that you believe all the God/Hell/Heaven/Sin stuff.
Some of them just want Christ Consciousness. You know, love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek.
There's already a perfectly good phrase to describe that kind of person "decent human beings". You don't need Christ to be a decent human being (though he did create some catchy slogans). Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. all manage to love their neighbours and turn the other cheek.
If you're not thinking exclusively in terms of whole populations, I think our conversation must be at complete cross-purposes.
You understand that the 'terrain' we're talking about is the curve of fitness plotted against a range of variables, right? And that "follow the gradient" means "select the offspring with a higher fitness than their parent".
To wrench this back to how it started, it's possible that our brains are pretty much as intelligent as they can get given their current architecture: we are at the peak of a local maximum on the terrain. To reach another - much higher - peak, we would have to mutate down the hill and back up. This is unlikely to happen - it's more likely to arise from some other species on another point in the curve.
Having said that, the whole drive of the article is that multiple species have independently converged on the same peak. That's a strong indicator that there aren't that many different ways to construct a brain (that can be reached by selection).
I'm a baptized, confirmed, signed, sealed, and approved Christian. It's my culture. A lot of it is pure voodoo, but there are some decent messages buried in there. Big man in the sky? Probably not. It looks to me like we're on our own, but I'll still put an angel on my tree, thanks.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to side with the bible basher on this one. I'm pretty sure if you're to claim you're a Christian, you need to believe at least:
There's a heaven and hell
There's a creator who takes a personal interest in all humans
God keeps records, including a boolean field named 'sin'. Certain actions set/unset 'sin'.
Anyone with sin == true when they die goes to hell - that's bad. Otherwise you go to heaven. That's good.
Jesus was God's son. By virtue of dying in a particularly painful and gruesome way, Jesus was able to set sin=false for anyone who chose to believe in him.
Failing to believe all of the above sets sin=true.
All the other stuff, I think you can be flexible about. But that bullet list - you need that to be Christian. I know it all looks a bit unlikely. That's why it amazes me there's so many of them.
Now, I was brought up in a Welsh Presbyterian tradition (which doesn't the fundamentalist connotations it may have in the US) and like you, despite not believing in the mumbo jumbo aspects, I hold 'Christian values' dear - love thy neighbour, turn the other cheek, all that good stuff. I have a star atop my Christmas tree. But I'm still an atheist.
You, since you don't believe in a "big man in the sky", are either an atheist, an agnostic, or an "it's a bit more complicated than that". If anyone asks again.
Same thing for humans. A brain that makes you a supremely good programmer isn't terribly good at attracting women, especially when using that extra ability involves withdrawing from society to get things done.
If you have to withdraw from society to get things done, then perhaps you're not as great a programmer as you think you are. The qualities that make a good programmer are in no way incompatible with getting on in society.
The qualities that make a good programmer - abstract thought, application, problem solving, general geekery - have always been useful in society. People look to you for inventions and solutions, and are willing to pay for it.
The 'programmer' in a prehistoric tribe, might be the guy who realised you could throw spears further by flinging with a curved stick... or the guy who realised you could herd mammoths into a gulley to trap them. Their tribe would definitely be interested in keeping that person around, so they'd be high up in the pecking order when it came to sharing out food, drink and shelter.
So being useful tends to keep you alive, healthy and wealthy. All terrific things to look for in a mate.
Once you do reproduce, your kids are more likely to survive and reproduce themselves, because you've earned privilege which you pass on to them. Better food, better education.
(I'm imagining all this in a prehistoric setting - but I think it applies right up to the present day.)
Geeks are not extinct. Guess why not? Because being clever is a good survival strategy.
Other good survival strategies include being physically strong, or just breeding a lot. Homo Sapiens exhibits those too. I'm not judging!
Except following the gradient is just an example of using a suboptimal solution that works in the majority of cases, and is significantly less difficult to implement than the "next step up," which requires, at the very least, an internal model of the surrounding terrain.
It requires nothing of the sort. It just requires that you sometimes try going up instead of down.
In genetic algorithms (that is, 'breeding' a solution by applying mutation and fitness based culling to an encoding of the parameters), it's a recognised problem that you can converge on a suboptimal local maximum. One solution is more randomness in the culling heuristics, as well as bigger populations and occasional bigger mutations.
I think that evolution activists have this inherent problem of having to acknowledge that religion is a natural part of humanity (since they believe it was "evolved") and is an evolutionary advantage, while at the same pretending it's something artificially forced upon people in order to be able to criticize it.
Superstition is definitely an evolutionary advantage. For example, if you don't have a sophisticated knowledge of bacteriology, in a hot climate, never eating pork is a good way of staying alive.
All sorts of things could injure or kill you in the forest after dark - if fear of wherewolves keeps you out, you're just as alive as if you'd used any other reason.
But once you/do/ understand things better, superstitions just hold you back.
Although the brain represents only 2% of the body weight, it receives 15% of the cardiac output, 20% of total body oxygen consumption, and 25% of total body glucose utilization.
(I assume that's the human brain. There is a citation, but it's dead tree and I didn't go looking.)
Brains are expensive things to maintain. If an organism can survive and replicate without one, then it's not worth the cost.
So what I want to know is, what was it about human beings that caused us to develop the capacity to drive cars, build computers and walk on the moon?
I think the ability to construct "what if" scenarios in the brain is a useful trait for staying alive, and one where it's quite easy to see stepwise improvements as possible and beneficial. Increasingly sophisticated planning type activity, that could happen in increasingly evolved brains:
If I step over that cliff, I'll die
If I use that pointy stick I can get food out of that shell
If I fix that rock to this stick I can use it to hit things
...
If we put some men in some of these suits and fire them in a rocket, they could walk on the moon
Maths comes somewhere in the middle.
What's special about humans? Only that we got there first. There's only room for one species of 'organisms that compensate for poor physical traits with cleverness and adaptability' and we took it.
this means the nascent potential evolutionary building blocks for intelligence are widely distributed in species in nature and given a chance will give riser to a smarter brain.
It takes more than a chance - it takes evolutionary pressure. If something's already perfectly adapted to its environment without a brain, then it's unlikely to evolve one. A brain might even reduce the fitness of an organism (by diverting energy that could be better used for other survival/reproduction mechanisms).
. as if following some pre-determined path to a completed, human state.
Or, as if there are a limited number of adequate solutions to the problem 'control a bunch of muscles in order to survive in a three dimensional environment in which other organisms are trying to do the same thing'.
It seems like what we're seeing is that *if* a species randomly goes down the brain route, it'll either die out, or develop a brain very like other brains. Note that many organisms survive very nicely with no brain at all. Where's their "pre-determined path to a completed human state"?
What I don't believe is the "many have assumed" bit.
Parallel evolution is evident in all kinds of animal and plant features. I can't imagine why intelligence would be any different.
I strongly suspect that most evolutionary scientists don't consider these findings to be surprising. Still, it makes a better headline if you pretend it's a shock discovery.
I'd pump water UP to store the energy and let it flow DOWN to release the energy.
This is already mainstream technology. Traditionally it was used as a buffer between a constant power source (e.g. coal fired power station) and a variable demand (pesky consumers).
But it's not a big step to use the same technology to buffer between a variable source such as wind, and a variable demand.
OTOH I'm sure I've read statements by proponents of wind power stating that on a grid as large as the UK's (and the UK's not that big), drops in wind in one part of the country would almost always be compensated for by other parts of the country.
No mod points, so I'll follow up to highlight your very valid point: TFA doesn't speak of destroying the Earth. Only lesser achievements such as destroying (in increasing order of ambitiousness) civilisation, human life, all life.
Here's the rub: pay for the proprietary software and get service, deployment, and customization with varying degrees of quality. Or get open source projects that require customization and put the burden on your IT staff to make it happen.
I'm confused as to why you think OSS necessarily requires customisation. I'm even more confused as to why you thing non-OSS software necessarily does not require customisation.
Or, if you're saying that what you pay for proprietary software includes consultancy and support -- well, you must realise that you can buy that kind of thing for OSS. It may even cost less - but the real benefit is that you can shop around -- choose your application and your support package independently.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, most mutations have no effect on fitness whatsoever. Others are completely catastrophic and that individual dies. No biggie.
I don't understand "How is it that a slight mutation could produce anything other than a reduction of fitness". A slight change in the shape of a fin could make the difference between being first or second to that scarce piece of food. The evolutionary pressure in this case is the scarcity of food. If food is plentiful, that particular advantage is immaterial. It's all about place and time.
Of course fully functional brains don't come about all at once. They evolved from the clusters of nerves that tell creatures how to move and react to their surroundings. Do you have a problem seeing how an organism with three cells to run its 'reacting to stimulus' algorithm could be fitter than one with two? (assuming there's no scarcity fuel for that cell). Many brain / nerve cluster mutations will merely be a slight change in the firing rate of a single neuron.
I'm a bit alarmed at your suggestion that proponents of evolution would suppress concepts for fear their argument would be weakened. That's ID territory. Scientists *want* to explore every angle.
There are differences between religion and superstition. Believing they are the same does not make them so.
You're going to have to explain the difference to me. I bundle them both under "belief in things that aren't true".
If your percieved difference is that you believe some religion to be true - well, we'll have to leave it at that.
The evidence is most people won't understand things better and never will.
Most people do not know how a car/computer starts and works when they turn the key/press the power button. Most never try to understand the workings of the things around them. They just mimic others (how many read manuals?), and it works well enough for them. They know about as much about cars and computers as the cargo cult knew about planes.
While it may appear to hold individuals back, it allows societies to move forward faster.
I think there's an important distinction to be made between 'not knowing' and 'ascribing a false explanation'. Let's imagine I'm one of those people that doesn't know how a car engine works. It's a black box that delivers more power when I push the pedal. That doesn't mean I have to fill in the blanks with another explanation. I don't need to imagine there's hundreds of hamsters in there. If I did, perhaps I would begin wasting resources on quasi-religious activities like singing a song before driving (to motivate the hamsters!) or leaving saucers of food for them to eat when the car is parked.
As a professional programmer, I often make conscious decisions not to understand the details of something. I don't need to understand Oracle's indexing algorithm in order to interact with the database.
I think it's much better to conciously not know something, than it is to fill the gap with made up nonsense.
(Actually that's my exact position on the origin of life. I find it very likely that Evolution allowed life to develop. Evolution means we only have to explain the origin of a very simple life form. I'm entirely comfortable in saying I'll probably never know how that very simple life form came into existence.)
I don't see anything in your argument about scalable societies that is helped by supersticion and hindered by 'known unknowns'.
Which belief systems will tend to result in Invisible Hands that are statistically more likely to change "lightbulbs" that need changing?
Definitely not belief systems where "everyone must understand everything better first".
That's a misrepresentation. Everyone does not need to understand everything better. They merely need to know that /someone/ knows. Of course, the danger there is a 'church of science'.
Lastly, if lightbulbs are changed, is it because bunches of cells changed them or people did or the Invisible Hands did? ;).
Well, I may have completely missed the point of the lightbulb story, but in my house I change my own lightbulbs. And I'm made of bunches of cells.
Judging by the world economy, the invisible hands are on holiday.
I'm pretty sure that by definition, anyone who tries to live by the teachings of Christ is free to call themselves a Christian. This is regardless of whether or not they live by all of them, or live by the rules of the religion his ideology grew out of.
Well, that's two of you, and I guess there might be plenty more. I'm surprised I must say - in 35 years this is the first time I've been exposed to what seems to a mainstream tendency to describe yourself as 'Christian' despite not believing in, you know, the basic tenets of Christianity. You live and learn.
Just splitting hairs. But I think it's important because otherwise you set up a polarizing environment, where you think all Christians actually believe everything you listed.
It only becomes polarised if you think that all non-Christians don't believe in the good stuff. The being a good person bit.
By reserving the Christian label for people who believe in the Christian faith, you can demonstrate that the rest of us are decent people too. I bet if you tell a real Christian that you're Christian, they're going to assume, as I would, that you believe all the God/Hell/Heaven/Sin stuff.
Some of them just want Christ Consciousness. You know, love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek.
There's already a perfectly good phrase to describe that kind of person "decent human beings". You don't need Christ to be a decent human being (though he did create some catchy slogans). Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. all manage to love their neighbours and turn the other cheek.
If you're not thinking exclusively in terms of whole populations, I think our conversation must be at complete cross-purposes.
You understand that the 'terrain' we're talking about is the curve of fitness plotted against a range of variables, right? And that "follow the gradient" means "select the offspring with a higher fitness than their parent".
To wrench this back to how it started, it's possible that our brains are pretty much as intelligent as they can get given their current architecture: we are at the peak of a local maximum on the terrain. To reach another - much higher - peak, we would have to mutate down the hill and back up. This is unlikely to happen - it's more likely to arise from some other species on another point in the curve.
Having said that, the whole drive of the article is that multiple species have independently converged on the same peak. That's a strong indicator that there aren't that many different ways to construct a brain (that can be reached by selection).
I'm a baptized, confirmed, signed, sealed, and approved Christian. It's my culture. A lot of it is pure voodoo, but there are some decent messages buried in there. Big man in the sky? Probably not. It looks to me like we're on our own, but I'll still put an angel on my tree, thanks.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to side with the bible basher on this one. I'm pretty sure if you're to claim you're a Christian, you need to believe at least:
All the other stuff, I think you can be flexible about. But that bullet list - you need that to be Christian. I know it all looks a bit unlikely. That's why it amazes me there's so many of them.
Now, I was brought up in a Welsh Presbyterian tradition (which doesn't the fundamentalist connotations it may have in the US) and like you, despite not believing in the mumbo jumbo aspects, I hold 'Christian values' dear - love thy neighbour, turn the other cheek, all that good stuff. I have a star atop my Christmas tree. But I'm still an atheist.
You, since you don't believe in a "big man in the sky", are either an atheist, an agnostic, or an "it's a bit more complicated than that". If anyone asks again.
Same thing for humans. A brain that makes you a supremely good programmer isn't terribly good at attracting women, especially when using that extra ability involves withdrawing from society to get things done.
If you have to withdraw from society to get things done, then perhaps you're not as great a programmer as you think you are. The qualities that make a good programmer are in no way incompatible with getting on in society.
The qualities that make a good programmer - abstract thought, application, problem solving, general geekery - have always been useful in society. People look to you for inventions and solutions, and are willing to pay for it.
The 'programmer' in a prehistoric tribe, might be the guy who realised you could throw spears further by flinging with a curved stick... or the guy who realised you could herd mammoths into a gulley to trap them. Their tribe would definitely be interested in keeping that person around, so they'd be high up in the pecking order when it came to sharing out food, drink and shelter.
So being useful tends to keep you alive, healthy and wealthy. All terrific things to look for in a mate.
Once you do reproduce, your kids are more likely to survive and reproduce themselves, because you've earned privilege which you pass on to them. Better food, better education.
(I'm imagining all this in a prehistoric setting - but I think it applies right up to the present day.)
Geeks are not extinct. Guess why not? Because being clever is a good survival strategy.
Other good survival strategies include being physically strong, or just breeding a lot. Homo Sapiens exhibits those too. I'm not judging!
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life
I don't think that word means what you think it means. (Or rather what the word "races" meant at the time.)
Here is a rebuttal against accusations of Darwin being a racist.
Actually I don't know what he believed about non-white humans, but none of it would make him wrong about evolution.
We're constantly being told that scientists have it all hammered-out; they know all there is to know. About everything.
By whom?
If that's the case why don't all the scientists pack it in and do something else?
Fact is, science distinguishes itself from religion by NOT having it all hammered out. There's always more to find out.
Where's the paradox? The dumber you are, the more you need to reproduce for your genes to survive.
Smart genes can survive on half a child per parent.
I mean "down instead of up", of course.
Except following the gradient is just an example of using a suboptimal solution that works in the majority of cases, and is significantly less difficult to implement than the "next step up," which requires, at the very least, an internal model of the surrounding terrain.
It requires nothing of the sort. It just requires that you sometimes try going up instead of down.
In genetic algorithms (that is, 'breeding' a solution by applying mutation and fitness based culling to an encoding of the parameters), it's a recognised problem that you can converge on a suboptimal local maximum. One solution is more randomness in the culling heuristics, as well as bigger populations and occasional bigger mutations.
Terence McKenna would hate ya :P
I heard he was on drugs! :-O
I think that evolution activists have this inherent problem of having to acknowledge that religion is a natural part of humanity (since they believe it was "evolved") and is an evolutionary advantage, while at the same pretending it's something artificially forced upon people in order to be able to criticize it.
Superstition is definitely an evolutionary advantage. For example, if you don't have a sophisticated knowledge of bacteriology, in a hot climate, never eating pork is a good way of staying alive.
All sorts of things could injure or kill you in the forest after dark - if fear of wherewolves keeps you out, you're just as alive as if you'd used any other reason.
But once you /do/ understand things better, superstitions just hold you back.
That, and the energy requirements of the larger brain. But it's not really that much larger, is it?
Wikipedia:
Although the brain represents only 2% of the body weight, it receives 15% of the cardiac output, 20% of total body oxygen consumption, and 25% of total body glucose utilization.
(I assume that's the human brain. There is a citation, but it's dead tree and I didn't go looking.)
Brains are expensive things to maintain. If an organism can survive and replicate without one, then it's not worth the cost.
Sure, I could tell *you* knew what you were talking about. But if you're not precise with your words, the ID crowd get funny ideas.
So what I want to know is, what was it about human beings that caused us to develop the capacity to drive cars, build computers and walk on the moon?
I think the ability to construct "what if" scenarios in the brain is a useful trait for staying alive, and one where it's quite easy to see stepwise improvements as possible and beneficial. Increasingly sophisticated planning type activity, that could happen in increasingly evolved brains:
Maths comes somewhere in the middle.
What's special about humans? Only that we got there first. There's only room for one species of 'organisms that compensate for poor physical traits with cleverness and adaptability' and we took it.
this means the nascent potential evolutionary building blocks for intelligence are widely distributed in species in nature and given a chance will give riser to a smarter brain.
It takes more than a chance - it takes evolutionary pressure. If something's already perfectly adapted to its environment without a brain, then it's unlikely to evolve one. A brain might even reduce the fitness of an organism (by diverting energy that could be better used for other survival/reproduction mechanisms).
. as if following some pre-determined path to a completed, human state.
Or, as if there are a limited number of adequate solutions to the problem 'control a bunch of muscles in order to survive in a three dimensional environment in which other organisms are trying to do the same thing'.
It seems like what we're seeing is that *if* a species randomly goes down the brain route, it'll either die out, or develop a brain very like other brains. Note that many organisms survive very nicely with no brain at all. Where's their "pre-determined path to a completed human state"?
What I don't believe is the "many have assumed" bit.
Parallel evolution is evident in all kinds of animal and plant features. I can't imagine why intelligence would be any different.
I strongly suspect that most evolutionary scientists don't consider these findings to be surprising. Still, it makes a better headline if you pretend it's a shock discovery.
Assuming concrete is reasonably environmentally friendly this would be a pretty clean solution.
Concrete has a massive carbon footprint. The calcination of lime releases a lot of CO2, on top of the fossil fuels used in manufacture and transport.
I'd pump water UP to store the energy and let it flow DOWN to release the energy.
This is already mainstream technology. Traditionally it was used as a buffer between a constant power source (e.g. coal fired power station) and a variable demand (pesky consumers).
But it's not a big step to use the same technology to buffer between a variable source such as wind, and a variable demand.
OTOH I'm sure I've read statements by proponents of wind power stating that on a grid as large as the UK's (and the UK's not that big), drops in wind in one part of the country would almost always be compensated for by other parts of the country.
Evolution with a comparison function is called intelligent design.
That depends on the comparison function.
Pseudocode for the comparison function in natural evolution:
return (reproduces before dying)
People shouldn't still be anthropomorphizing natural phenomena.
Yeah, the universe hates that.
No mod points, so I'll follow up to highlight your very valid point: TFA doesn't speak of destroying the Earth. Only lesser achievements such as destroying (in increasing order of ambitiousness) civilisation, human life, all life.
Here's the rub: pay for the proprietary software and get service, deployment, and customization with varying degrees of quality. Or get open source projects that require customization and put the burden on your IT staff to make it happen.
I'm confused as to why you think OSS necessarily requires customisation. I'm even more confused as to why you thing non-OSS software necessarily does not require customisation.
Or, if you're saying that what you pay for proprietary software includes consultancy and support -- well, you must realise that you can buy that kind of thing for OSS. It may even cost less - but the real benefit is that you can shop around -- choose your application and your support package independently.