Having done a bit of biology, I would not want to use the word "evolution" and "simple" in the same sentence. ;-) Certainly not things that have evolved over many generations.

(Even artificial) evolution sometimes does really weird things.

https://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs4601/refs/papers/es97thompson... (page 399) "Fig 7 [...] The cells shaded gray cannot be clamped without degrading performance, even though there is no connected path by which they could influence the output"

I don't mean to diss evolution. It is simple in terms of a program, the simplest it could possibly be - but it's also massively parallel; every molecule of or around any living thing participates in it. All life, constantly, everywhere, all at once. And then it had literal billions of year to run on this rock, to get to the point of complex life in complex environment.

Like a brute-force enumeration running on a supercomputing platform, it's mighty, but it's also simple.

Also, the process is simple. The output not so much.

We both agree on the output being non-simple and, to be fair, that's what I was thinking about when I wrote it. ;)

Taking it a step further though; Of course evolution happened to the very mechanisms by which biological organisms evolve.

Because of course it would.

(eg.

* Eukaryote -> Meiosis : This is obviously a means to create/tailor Variation. (Evolution ~= Variation->Selection )

* Reproduction in Metazoa in general, with all kinds of complex methods to exchange DNA.

* Vertebrates. Just. Vertebrates. (specifically: Sexual reproduction thereof.)

* Simple but still strange: Viruses with multiple reading frames. Sure they successfully evolve, but it's never going to be straightforward!

)

> It is simple enough to be reachable by a dumb, brute-force, random-walking, incremental process of evolution;

I'm not an expert in this field, but from what I heard brute-force natural selection is the naive explanation we're given in school. There are many more factors at play other than random chance: e.g. there is also sexsual selection. Sexual selection selects some characteristic that isn't necessarily an advantage in the current environment, but it is somehow preferred by the opposed sex. According to some research, the reason why we lost the bone that other primates have in their penis is due to sexual selection.

One intuition that helps is to see evolution as a random search through solution space. Another thing to realize is that -in evolutionary algorithms- the distribution of random trials will be strongly biased around existing solutions.

It helps to understand that in some situations, a search algorithm with some level of randomness can arrive at a solution faster than a systematic/random approach, on average. In other situations, a search with added randomization might be slower, but its ability to escape local optimae (to some degree) means that it is much more likely to find the global optimum (or at least a better local optimum :-P ).

Compare also: Monte-Carlo methods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm

Interesting points. But I would add that sexual selection can select for some trait that is actually counterproductive, a famous example being peacock tails. Female peacocks use them to evaluate the health of potential partners, so it is an indirect measure of fitness to the environment. But at the same time, it is clear that healthy peacocks would still be better off without carrying around such big tails. If tails weren't so important for reproduction, they would have likely shrunk by now. I wonder how a comparison with the methods you mentioned would capture this.

So I was watching a clip about black holes and entropy today that seems to fit in this somewhat. That complexity behaves like entropy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLOHdW7dLug