I would disagree. You can play the violin firstly because the violin was designed so that it could produce beautiful sounds under _human_hands_. This way, not another.

It seems you are actually in agreement with the underlying argument. Humans were able to use their body, originally developed for hunting large prey, to design, build and play violins.

> Your hands were designed for throwing a stone at the eye of a mammoth.

No, they weren't designed at all.

And utility in fine as well as gross manipulation of the type you describe is clearly part of what they were selected (not designed) for.

> But you can play the violin with them

Violins, unlike human hands, were designed, and specifically for people with human hands to use. They aren't just something existing outside of humans in nature that hands happen to work with.

So, it's not at all surprising that they can be used with human hands.

> This is one of the hallmarks of human civilization.

This is one of the hallmarks of evolution.

How do you think wings evolved? By repurposing an appendage that was already had a purpose other than flight.

We didn’t evolve to play instruments though, we adapted and created them to suit our existing physical form

Our hands were not designed, and they have no “intended purpose”. We have hands because throughout the extremely long line of evolutionary adaptations the individuals that had them ended up surviving and procreating, and so we ended up having them.

This is not true of a violin, which is of cause the product of intelligent design and is designed to fit our hands, no Awkwardness intended. Though naturally there are constraints dictated by the physics of the sound generation.

Nope, we use stones because we can lift and throw it with our hands, not the other way around.

I see what you're saying, but the violin was designed for human hands.

Nothing in nature was necessarily "designed"

I'd go so far to say that linguistically nature is the antithesis of artificial (made by hands).

Avoiding silly theological tropes, evolution is often mistakenly referred to as a designer when it's just an emergent property of competing, replicating agents. People don't normally bother with precision though, so we are where we are.

I always like to see it the other way around, it eliminates entities that are not a good fit, and the remainder is what drives adaptation. Of course, people could argue that's just like Michelangelo [1], and we're back at 'designed'.

[1] “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

> it eliminates entities

But evolution doesn't eliminate entities. Low fitness entities are eliminated by hunger, or predators, or lower reproductive rates.

The marble on the other hand is eliminated by Michelangelo.

There's a linguistic confusion where because evolution is a noun, we think we can treat it as a subject. But in the person/place/thing/idea delineation, it is an idea.

Not only does it not design, not only does it not eliminate: "it" doesn't do anything!

Of course 'evolution' is not an actor, it's just the overall pattern we give a name to. And the pattern we observe is that low fitness entities are eliminated. That plus variation yields adaptation.

Well, yeah.

The process of evolution is more than just the elimination of unfit specimens. That suggests that a tiger is just a tiger, and the only kind of evolution that can occur in the tiger is for it to become a better (faster, stronger) tiger. But in fact there was a time when carnivores didn't even exist, and then some random genetic flux produced an animal that was inclined to start eating other animals and a new ecological niche was discovered. Evolution is therefore a creative process of adaptation and specialization under constantly changing circumstances.

> That suggests that a tiger is just a tiger,

Not at all. Everything can come from variation (mutation, cross over) + elimination of the worst. It's just that 'worst' is not a global minimum. Are we as humans superior to animals in strength, agility, speed, etc? Not at all. But some distant ancestor had some bigger brain, and that gave it all the edge it needed compared to weak and dumber siblings that were eaten, while our ancestor hid on a tree.

When some animal mutated to be able to eat meat in addition to plants, it had some advantage and was less likely to be eliminated when food got scarce. That's all you need to eventually arrive at something tiger-like.

That said, some animals seem to have reached a local maximum: sharks haven't changed in millions of years, cockroaches seem pretty successful, too.

But there's nothing 'creative' about it.

In my interpretation entities != organisms

Entities could be alleles, genes, or gene products

If you consider a "design" to result from a process where someone sketches out a plan, builds it, and it works first time. I've designed a lot of systems, and it is clearly an iterative process. Balancing tradeoffs, figuring out the essentials, build prototypes, test, etc. If you are patient and diligent a solution emerges. That sounds a lot like evolution, so in my mind everything in nature has been designed by the collective intelligence of an iterative process that rewards useful optimizations.

I think that's a reasonable perspective to take, although I would argue that there is no clear goal in evolution besides survival and reproduction

The nice thing about a goal, is that one goal begets other sub-goals.

Or rather, a goal begets a strategy, and a strategy begets sub-goals. Beautifully at some point these sub-goals start being optimized for. A few steps of this is how I believe humans went from the sub goal "Survive, eat, reproduce" to "Make art, understand life, explore the world".

The cool thing is that I think this extends beyond humans to tools. Because at some point humans had a sub-goal of "hit thing hard" they made a hammer. And this hammer has a goal (or a purpose) which is "hit things hard". This purpose can be traced back, through human sub-goals, to the final goal of evolution: "reproduce".

Note that I am not saying that the point of a hammer is to produce more hammer. But the point of a hammer is (very indirectly) to allow a human to reproduce.

Interestingly there is a weird game of telephone that can happen, where the sub-goals are imperfect for achieving the final goal. I would argue that this is (part of) why humans can be truly selfless. Take a soldier going to a battle he considers unwinnable but going out of a sense of duty / fear of ridicule. This will not help him reproduce, since the battle is unwinnable it will not help his progeny reproduce either. From the 'ultimate' goal, this is an irrational step. But there are sub-goals at play. Things like "be honorable", "do your duty".

This idea that a sub-goal can subvert the 'ultimate' goal is very beautiful to me. It means that evolution is not some tyranny that sets our purpose in life. Instead evolution brought 'purpose' into the world. And then some stochastic process put you and me on into the universe with some, vaguely related, sense of purpose. But we have our own purpose. Sure our purpose was 'created by' the ultimate purpose of evolution. But our purpose is not subordinate to the ultimate purpose of evolution. A human life can have so much more value that just "continue the genetic line and have children". I find that freeing.

There is no plan in evolution. That's the point. It's a reactionary phenomenon. If it had a plan, it would be a proactive phenomenon. Evolution is happenstance.

Design has a goal, evolution has not.

Proponents of the anthropic principal disagree. Nevertheless, it's irrelevant to this thread.

No, its definitely relevant. Hands were not designed with any specific function in mind. There was not evolutionary pressure to "throw rocks at the eye of a mammoth"

Did orangutans evolve hands to throw rocks at mammoths? No, they did not

The parent comment is making ridiculous claims without evidence

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-do-orangutans-eat.h...

You've smoothly shot right past solid ground (evolution doesn't design things) to a fairly wild claim (rock-throwing apes didn't experience evolutionary pressure to get better at throwing rocks).

Orangutans aren't humans, so what are you saying, apes which don't throw rocks to kill their prey don't... throw rocks to kill their prey?

Perhaps my example is poor, but it shows that hands are not coupled to predation

I'm specifically talking about the evolution of hands, humans are not the only organism with hands.

The poster didn't say "hands", they said "your hands".

Your human hands, which co-evolved with throwing things, we have abundant paleontological evidence of this and you may read as many papers on the subject as you would care to.

Got links to any of those papers?

Are you vegan? Just curious.

No, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the topic at hand

Also unsure how that's an appropriate response to a request for citations?

This seems accurate to me.

Like complex brains are evolutionarily fit because they can solve lots of disparate problems, hands are evolutionarily fit because they can do lots of disparate things.

Of course, we do also then design violins for our specific dexterity.

I think you're assigning too much weight to the word itself. In informal settings, or even quasi-formal ones, it's not uncommon to use "designed" when we don't mean "literally designed".

The use of "design" in the context of the structure and capability of human bodies means precisely "literally designed" to many religious people, including many readers of HN.

So I don't think it's out of place for the GP to address this.

Thank you. This was exactly the point of my comment. While some readers interpret the word lightly, there are many who use it literally in the context of biology with a reference to creationism. There is no evidence for creationism

> Proponents of the anthropic principal disagree. Nevertheless, it's irrelevant to this thread.

The anthropic principle does not imply designed, it implies suited for.

Sculpted like a riverbed.