a beached fish doesn't grow legs. the problem isn't what you're willing to pay here, the problem is what you are willing to learn.

my fees are not conditional on you liking the lessons. they are to be paid upfront. i accept the higher offer though.

> a beached fish doesn't grow legs

Can you prove it? Show me some sort of an environment where a water-based complex organism is able to survive and thrive in dry environment prompting it to grow a new movement organ useless in the water but needed on surface and give me some less-than-exponential algorithmic complexity bound for it. If you can't do it, you don't offer valuable lessons.

i told you something that you claim to be true isn't what is claimed to happen by the theory of evolution by natural selection, and you want me to provide proof that it does in fact happen? have you taken leave entirely of your senses?

edit: sorry dang, I fell for it again, didn't I?

edit 2: actually treprinum, I have a sensible answer here, although you're not going to like it. if you were smart enough to understand what you are asking, you really wouldn't have picked body plan as your "gotcha". you would have picked something truly wonderful like the genetic code, or the ribosome, or mechanisms of gene regulation, or embryology, or eukaryotic cells.

the evolution of new body plans is very well understood. i won't explain it to you though, until and unless I get paid. I believe we agreed £50,000/h for an hour minimum lesson which is three hours of prep - so £200,000 total for the first paid lesson? this one here is free.

The Lungfish survives prolonged droughts where its freshwater habitat dries up. It has evolved the ability to breath fresh air, secrete a mucous membrane to form a protective cocoon that helps it retain moitsture, and its fins are heavily modified to aid with land based locomotion. Lungfish are the closest relatives to tetrapods who likely evolved under similar conditions.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/west-afric...

> where n is the number of neural spikes in frontal cortex

If neural spikes had anything to do with it, if any of this worked like that, bacteria wouldn't develop resistance to antibiotics (they can), and I would be able to shapeshift (I can't).

So that question is like asking for a route finding algorithm that's O(n) where n is the number of letters in the destination.

The point was to give me a correct estimate based on some measure of time. Pick whatever works for you and give me a formula one can use.

And my point is the the question suggests a worldview so incorrect that the question is meaningless.

If you seek understanding, you must decide upon a specific better question of your choice; if you leave it up to us to devise the question, we can do that, but it's overwhelming unlikely that our free choice will connect with whatever it is that led you to ask the question in the first place.

For example, I could ask you to consider a model of a fish where each bone length is controlled by some gene, and then evolution converting fins to legs is some function of the magnitude of reproduction selection pressure on those changes over multiple individuals and generations… and nothing at all to do with one individual's brain.

Or were you thinking of a specific fish species which develops legs when it reaches adulthood?

You were giving examples of local adaptations (bacteria building resistance) instead of paradigm shifts (beached fish growing legs). The science behind the former is established (mutations favored by environment); the science behind the latter is not. You are mixing the two together and complaining the second one is non-sense, but is it? Somehow fish had to learn to walk ("evolution from one organism to another") in a limited time including complex mechanics that our computers can't solve exactly; I am waiting for any computational biologist to give us some mechanism behind it that is realistic, i.e. computable. So far nothing and people keep mentioning local adaptations only.

> The science behind the former is established (mutations favored by environment); the science behind the latter is not.

That's not even an example of a paradigm shift. Continuous transformation trivially gets us between superficial differences like mere body shape, there are many examples of us applying selection pressure to other species to make that category of thing happen, including our crops, livestock, and pets — no more than 10k years separated Chihuahuas and Corgis from Newfoundlands and Afghan Hounds. Likewise even more extreme changes between crops and their wild relatives, the wild versions are almost unrecognisable except to experts.

> You are mixing the two together and complaining the second one is non-sense, but is it?

What I'm calling nonsensical is your description. You're calling for the time complexity for a brain to invent changes that aren't caused directly by brains.

> Somehow fish had to learn to walk ("evolution from one organism to another") in a limited time including complex mechanics that our computers can't solve exactly

1) Exact solutions aren't necessary; 2) computers have solved walking; 3) the boundary between walking and floundering is an arbitrary one. And #4 after the next quote…

> I am waiting for any computational biologist to give us some mechanism behind it that is realistic,

4) One of the ways computers solve problems like this is simulated evolution.

If you don't consider the working demonstrations to be realistic, that's a "you" problem, not something the rest of us care to waste time on.

> So far nothing and people keep mentioning local adaptations only.

Do you also insist nobody has ever climbed Mount Everest on the grounds that nobody has legs long enough to do it in one step?

Or that motion pictures are impossible because each frame is stationary?