Evolution doesn’t have any goals or agenda. That’s why whales still have vestigial hip bones despite having no hips whatsoever. Because it’s not a significant parameter in their survival. Same with barbed stingers of bees.
> unprovable, unfalsifiable, and have the same circular logic as bad religion.
You said:
> There is no contradiction here. They evolved as the fittest in their own constraint set. If bees weren’t fit enough, they would have gone extinct and replaced by bees with non-barbed stingers. There is no magic that makes them survive.
Sure, there's no contradiction, but this is totally circular reasoning that could be used to prove anything.
The connection graph between "They survive because they're the fittest" and "They must be the fittest because they survive" is just a circle disconnected from all other knowledge.
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality.[0]
But with this circular understanding of natural selection, you could be given a description of absolutely any conceivable configuration of organism and your response would be the same: "they must be the fittest, because they survive, because only the fittest survive" and you haven't gained any understanding at all.
There will never be a contradiction, because the argument is disconnected from any larger system of reasoning that could plausibly contradict it.
"Hey, there is a random monkey in the Amazon that has 3 hoops on its head and a big hole through its abdomen, isn't that weird? Why are they like that?"
"Ah, the hoops and the holes are required for Fitness. Only the Fittest survive, you know. So if they have 3 hoops on their heads and big holes in their abdomens, that is what makes them Fittest. Amen."
"Why aren't other monkeys like that then?"
"Other monkeys don't need hoops and holes for Fitness. Otherwise they too would have hoops and holes. :)"
A better understanding of natural selection would be confused about the hoops and the holes, and that confusion would correlate with either the random monkey species actually not existing, or the model being wrong.
As regards the bees: there probably is a reason that dying when stinging confers Fitness. But we should find out what that reason is, rather than state "Fitness because Survival" and feel like we've answered the question.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-stren...
Maybe a better title for the post would be something like, “Isn’t it weird that bees die when they sting? Shouldn’t they have evolved away from that?”
I'm not at all sure this is true - I don't know the evolutionary history of bees, but it seems unlikely that some kind of solitary proto-bees would have died after a sting. And even if this were true, we should still wonder why that proto-bee evolved to have this suicide stinger in the first place.
"It's not a big disadvantage to survival" can't be the explanation for a trait, unless that trait is a remnant from an ancestor where it brought an advantage (like the hip bones in whales - hip bones are obviously useful in land-based mammals, and whales are descendants of those).
Sp the question is: why did some organism ever evolve a stinger that kills it, how was that ever something that made some organism survive better than its brethren that didn't have this trait?
I don't see how you arrived at this conclusion, this logic seems to be flawed.
Of course it can be an explanation for a trait. If you are genetically predisposed to high cholesterol, is that advantageous or disadvantageous? There's simply too little pressure to do anything about it.
Phenotypes aren't required to change in the smallest imaginable step. It's not implausible that nature decided "hey this next bee gets some furry yellow stripes, but also barbs" and here we are.
Not everything is optimal in the extreme. For all we know there have been many, many bees without barbs, but the bar to pass that on as an advantage is very high. The odds of a bee reproducing aren't even that high to begin with.
If barbed stingers were a variation that occurred in some individual bees, but many other bees didn't have them, like predisposition to cholesterol in humans, then I'd agree.
But a trait can't be universal in a species, and even in many related species, unless there is explicit selective pressure for that trait, or if it's a remnant from a common ancestor that had it. Your high cholesterol predisposition example is actually perfect, it shows what happens with traits that don't have significant pressure for or against them: they remain confined to a subset of the population.
> Phenotypes aren't required to change in the smallest imaginable step. It's not implausible that nature decided "hey this next bee gets some furry yellow stripes, but also barbs" and here we are.
They generally are. The likelihood of a random mutation that produces several phenotypal changes but leaves the organism still viable is extremely low.
What makes you believe they are not a "variation" in individual bees? Colony genetics are fascinating and can facilitate some pretty extreme variation.
Could a single queen's mutation be responsible for all barbs? You have some hidden constraints here that I don't think we agree on.
> They generally are. The likelihood of a random mutation that produces several phenotypal changes but leaves the organism still viable is extremely low.
This is simply wrong. There are always plenty of potential mutations that cripple viability, sure. But pleiotropy in general is relatively common. In some species more than others.
Your reasoning here is heavily flawed. You firmly believe evolution and genetics work in a particular way that simply does not reflect reality. You are putting your belief in "survival of the fittest" first. I encourage you to broaden your horizons.
Why not? Honest question.
Intuitively, I'd say that there are plenty of traits that propagate as long as they aren't expensive in terms of genetic survival. It's the nature of random genetic mutation, random traits will develop and some of them won't really affect survival and may propagate.
I don’t know where you got that. It seems perfectly plausible that the stingers evolved in the superorganism, and that the selective pressure was something like “drones protect the hive via stingers which kill them” versus “drones can’t sting at all”.
But they can die, and yeah, a big part of the reason why is that dying isn't as large of a cost for bees as you might expect from a human perspective.
And looping back, another part is that given the very high risk of being intentionally killed when stinging an enemy who you want to sting, improving the much smaller rate of accidental death isn't really worth much. But even though it isn't worth much, it's worth something, and work has been done on the project.
You should read better sources.
Here, an example of how bees behave after stinging meat: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7wH8dYiGbig
Or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-C77ujnLZo
A bee that stings meat will pull itself out unharmed, if you let it.
All those bee rescue videos you see where the beekeeper doesn't wear a veil are not telling you the whole story. Before they go work on extracting the hive they'll first check that those bees are not hot and angry. If those bees are africanized then they'll use a suit and smoke and they will not bother making or posting a video about it. I.e., those videos are all cherry-picked experiences, all the good ones.
This is clearly false. Why repeat it?
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/u9YDf9w6Ps8
Here is another one:
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/fMxZ4vKmOZo
So I've countered your two anecdotes with two anecdotes of my own. Can we go back to looking at what people studying bees have written?
For example, this article interviews two bee scientists that confirm that the majority of honeybees die via self-disembowelment after stinging a human:
https://www.livescience.com/do-bees-die-after-stinging
However, they mention an interesting other thing, that may actually help explain what happens much better: bees don't die when they sting other insects or spiders, they only die when their needles get stuck in our thick skin. So perhaps the most likely explanation for the evolution and survival of the barbed stinger trait is that it's beneficial when bees fight their common enemies, and that bees simply don't interact that much with mammals and their thick skins.
The average bee has no reason to ever fight a mammal. Optimizing for a rare event like that makes no sense. It's only once humans started domesticating honey bees that the interaction between honey bees and mammals has become a frequent occurrence.
Surviving attacks against humans that help you survive is a really strange priority.
This can't possibly be true; the honeyguides are a family of birds whose evolved behavior is to find humans and lead them to wild beehives so that the humans can forage the honey (and the honeyguide can forage the leftovers).
No? You claimed that bees stinging meat cannot survive. Your anecdotes do nothing to support that. Decide what you want to say, then look for support. Where do you get the idea that two examples of something happening provide just as much support for the idea that it always happens as four examples of it not happening do for the idea that it doesn't always happen?
But for what it's worth, Aristotle wrote in the 4th century BC that bees stinging humans often recover, but that they will inevitably die if they lose their stinger.
Dying after a sting does not have to confer extra fitness to exist, right now. rather it had to have conferred some fitness relative to the alternative traits circulating at the time it was selected. obviously if you go by gradient descent you are not guaranteed to reach a global minimum or even a local one, given a constantly changing fitness landscape.
In most of these discussions, optimizing nature of evolution is taken as granted - we do not need to prove how evolution works yet again - there are plenty of evidence and discussion elsewhere - take it or leave it.
This node is well connected to other knowledge, and if you disagree, you need to convince a whole discipline of science, not me.
From the optimizing premise of evolution, various inferred hypotheses can be made, explaining a range of phenomena, just like, in physics, from the premise that probabilities of events are given by the amplitudes of solutions of certain pdes with specific initial conditions, we were able to devise tractable mathematical models of various nuclear reactions, here a model of development of certain abstract traits was explained (“altruism”).
The author fully acknowledged that this is a simplified model and does not match reality in some cases, and in other cases does not explain well enough. improvements to the model were proposed.
Isn’t that how science works, in the best cases?
No, you can attack the reasoning by looking into actual costs. It seems like it can explain anything because we don’t constantly see examples where it’s false.
Looking at the costs to bees you see what percentage of them die from attacking mammal flesh and yep it’s a tiny rounding error.
Hypothetically, in a world without constraints mice could have a 100 foot long teeth, but we don’t live in a world without constraints.
Oh boy, today's the day you learn something new about rodents.
The GP said that bees survived because they're "fit enough" not that they survive because they're "the fittest" and there are definitely species that don't seem to be surviving because they're not fit enough.
Because it takes the observation of Survival and uses it to infer Fitness, at the same time as saying that Fitness confers Survival.
That's a function of the explanation being an extremely good explanation. It rises to the top precisely because it has explanatory power all across nature without evident counter-example.
>There is no configuration of organism that would cause you to say "huh, I guess Survival doesn't depend on Fitness after all!"
This is where the argument falls apart. For starters, species go extinct all the time for reasons tied to their evolutionary trajectory. And there are species still living that unfortunately seem very imperfectly adapted to their constraints and likely to go extinct without a run of good luck or human intervention (e.g. pandas). We seem perfectly capable of recognizing when such species are "on the ropes". Additionally there are relative advantages we can clearly observe from animals in overlapping niches, and we can marvel at the effectiveness of adaptations in ways that don't involve circular assumptions (e.g. algae's capability for efficient growth is astonishing and without equal on the planet).
And, we could surely conceive of preposterous examples that defy expectations (e.g. the other commenter's example of mice with 100ft teeth).
It probably feels like it proves too much, because it's confirmed over and over again in nature everywhere, at all times. But in an alternate world where that wasn't the case, counter-examples would abound (such as the mouse with 100ft teeth). So re-iterating the core lesson about the role of natural selection is not just a circular assumption, it's the culmination of hard earned, accumulated evidence, ready at any moment to be falsified.
The honeybee is a perfect example, because the stinger does pose a real question about how we understand it's relation to fitness, and it requires delving into all kinds of complicated dynamics about genetically related drones are to the queen, the role of the sacrifice in supporting the hive and so-on. If we didn't have explanations like those, it would indeed pose a problem with explanations that presume fitness.
That's a real payoff from being alert to the need to have robust explanations; I don't think anyone is just saying "well it's fitness" and calling it a day so much as they're honoring the explanatory power of a well confirmed theory.
No, logically it is proved true because it is assumed to be true and then used to prove itself.
> For starters, species go extinct all the time for reasons tied to their evolutionary trajectory.
Again, this is circular logic. You assumed that the only reason that species go extinct is because it wasn’t fit enough. If you assume survival of the fittest then of course it is true.
Here’s another circular explanation: things are the way they are because God created it that way. This explanation rises to the top precisely because it has explanatory power all across nature without evident counter-example, right?
the part i think youre missing is that "survival of the fitness" is shown elsewhere, and used as a tool here to identify what the fitness is, and how and when certain traits were beneficial.
the case you are descibing is that all applicatioms of science(well, of anything) are circular reasoning. if you use newton's mechanics to predict motion of a mass undergoing acceleration, its circular because your result is proof of newtons mechanics, and newtons mechanics is proof of your result.
its just an "if and only if" relationship. that's not circular reasoning.
Also you don’t understand physics, the proof is that you can make predictions and then verify the results.
In the end evolution is random, but exerts some pressure towards fitness in some environments. Some traits are legacy or are just plain random; just because an organism has a trait does not mean it is useful now, or indeed has ever been useful for fitness. The whole package must be reasonably fit for some environment, but that doesn’t mean all the traits improve fitness.
Again, I gave numerous examples, and you ignored mostly all of them.
Just to develop the point about extinctions a bit further. We know for instance of birds that had no natural fear of predators on the Galapagos Islands that upon human contact were driven to extinction or near extinction, and we don't need any circular assumptions to tie their fitness to their extinction.
And that's not to mention the rest of the examples I listed that you ignored, such as cases where we can observe that currently living species are doing well or poorly, like algae and pandas respectively, all of which hinge on knowledge of specific biological mechanisms.
So I don't know why you keep asserting that it's an assumption.
If you really analyze any word, it loses all meaning except what we've assigned it.
What you're saying is that "but why did you pick that specific ball, what were the factors at play?". I say "probability", and you call it circular reasoning. You expect me to explain the physical forces at play that pushed forward a specific ball on the top when you filled the jar, and made it collide with your fingers, and your brain's reasoning chain to pick the first ball that you touched, so you pick that one.
But, basically, you can't. It's impossible because 1) we can't time travel. 2) we can't stop the universe and examine all of its properties. We work with the mathematical model we have and expect everything to work aligned with it. "Why do certain monkey species have holes in their bellies?". You can reason about that question, you can even come up with some answers, but it would be impossible to prove due to our universe's observability constraints.
But the mathematical model works, it even works beyond our physical realm (e.g. it works to solve mathematical problems). And no, it will never explain why certain monkeys have holes in their bellies. That's an entirely different domain of causal analysis.
Or are incapable of studying/reflecting in depth.
In evolutionary biology, that definitionally is the ultimate answer. One species survived, another didn’t. Sometimes that’s because the adaptation helped them outcompete, sometimes it’s because they were already competitive and this preexisting disadvantage from an earlier round didn’t hurt enough to matter. We can try to find intuitive explanations past that which feel satisfying but it’s always going to be a rough approximation.
Let’s use chess as an analogy. Allow an engine to analyze a position and tell us the best path forward. But why did it choose that line? We can (and do) come up with explanations that help us fit a move into our understanding of the game: moving this pawn allows that knight to occupy a better spot where it can exert its influence on the rest of the board, or whatever. But that’s merely a convenient simplification for our gut understanding. It’s not really the actual answer. The ultimate “why” is “because it produces the best possible eventual outcome no matter the response”.
All creatures are very complicated. Thus reproduction doesn't produce perfect clones, "mutations" take place. This is largely because there are so many different ways to derive one individual out of two individuals' complex genitic material. This is all a feature. This is why individuals have unique characteristics. Think about how different humans are from each other, even though we're all humans. This same thing applies to all creatures. Every individual is different. Those who have "disabilities" (disadvantages in their context) are less likely to survive. So those with advantageous traits survive and pass their traits on through reproduction, making those specific traits more prevalent.
The answer to "why didn't x evolve to do y?" is usually just that that specific mutation might have never occurred or caught on randomly. This is also why different species do different things differently. It's all random mutations. Some were beneficial in their context and environment so those who had them were more likely to survive and pass those traits along.
It's not that "the objective of life is to survive" in a spiritual sense, it's that life randomly happens and some of it survives and it makes more life like itself. In some ways, I suppose the purpose of life is to create more life. Systems that replicate themselves successfully survive. We call these "life". It's really a linguistics thing.
Hope some of this makes sense. I enjoyed thinking about this.
Every single part of an organism goes through a recombination/mutation process countless times, the stinger evolved to be what it is today over a very long time and it's cool to study why it ended up the way it did. Tells us about their environment and history and evolutionary pressures, survival is a result of the random traits being successful in their context in specific ways.
You might be interested in this concept:
Either way, now imagine taking not your favorite, irregular, non-describable, non-computable, enormously complex processes-driven fractal that is the real nature, then picking a random point in one of its non-trivial regions, trying to explain what happens there. Now ask yourself the same question and what comes to mind.
More short analogy would be that biology is physics with all elementary particles being different.
But, doesn't this match the parent comment's point? If someone asks why a particular point and not, a nearby point is on the fractal, the reply is just that complicated program generated this number and not another number. It leads to the theme of incompressibility (is there a program of smaller length which can correctly check whether a point in a given region is on the fractal). Sometimes, programs are incompressible, and at other times there is a local explanation.
So, people writing on this topic should be careful to make this distinction and check if their local explanation (which is a 'compression' of the evolution process) actually classifies points into fit/unfit regions with the assumption that the points are in some common region(shared features in the environment).
Compare also with explanations of historical events(list of causes for a victory but with the same causes present, there is failure in another context) and atheist - religious debates on God's grace for a particular prayer and allowing the suffering of others. If a local explanation can't distinguish events, then the global explanation has to be validated by something else.
In the fractal analogy, the compressed theory does not predict that exactly this point does/does-not lie on the fractal, but predicting whether a small disc around the point intersects the fractal.
At a fundamental level causality doesn't even really make sense in evolutionary biology. You can ask the question "what benefits do this feature provide", but you can never really say that's why they evolved. In the end you have the traits you do because, at point in the species development, they didn't make you die faster and some helped you survive better, but it's not really possible to disentangle these.
Likewise people don't really understand that in evolutionary processes both the species and the environment are constantly changing. The notion that a species is "adapted for a particular environment" is somewhat nonsensical because "the environment" is never really fixed.
Mever considered this. Good stuff
For example, you ask a random person what his job is.
He: I fix TVs
You: Why?
He: Uh, that's what keeps a roof over me and keeps my family fed?
You: But clearly other humans do other jobs and still have roofs. So it's not a real "why". Your statement is falsified.
> Evolutionary explanations like these for "why" things are the way they are not just pure idle speculation, but they are also often unprovable, unfalsifiable, and have the same circular logic as bad religion
How DNA works at molecular level is science. How creators became what they are now is history. History usually doesn't have the same level of falsifiability as science does.
This typo somehow fits the theme in a discussion over evolution ;P
I guess because these are theories and best guess based on the evidence. There are many unknowns but that doesn't mean we should disregard what we know.
IMHO, the much better quote is:
> It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.
See https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/people/about-darwin/six-thin...
"None of the fake soundbites is more insidious than the first:"
i.e. it's a fake quote
That is what fit means.
Perhaps, survival of the fit. (period)
The explanation in the article does not reduce to a "survival of the fittest" truism and is not falsified by this example. The article explains at great length why that is, specifically referring to that example.
Evolution is not the survival of the fittest but the not-dying of the unfit. That explains why we have so many different species in the same ecological niche. The example he used was different types of grass on the same field. All of those were fit enough to not die.
The second thing he always repeated was that biology only observes what does or at some point did work. That leads to a huge confirmation bias that research needs to be aware of. Two species might be very similar but just across different sides of the boundary of survival.
Because the bees prayed for protection and got saucy about it.
Is that better? Are you really looking for equivalence? Is that fit enough?
Instead of spreading evolution FUD, there are many0laces you could educate yourself. S9meone with a HN acvount is more than able to seek these out. Therefore your motives for this comment seen more disingenuous.
I was once very curious about evolutionary science until I realised exactly what you said. It's everywhere. Once you see it you can't unsee it.
If you're going to go that route, at least have the sense to use the word "how", not, "why" and never "because". There's nothing causal in evolution.
Evolutionary explanations like these for "why" things are the way they are not just pure idle speculation, but they are also often unprovable, unfalsifiable, and have the same circular logic as bad religion. Why do species survive? Because they were the fittest, because they survived. But why?