While your objection is technically correct it can still be useful (ie simple, straightforward, etc) to phrase things in terms of a goal. Since a goal (pursued by an intelligent being) and optimization pressure (a property of a blind process) are approximately the same thing in the end. In other words, Anthropomorphization can be useful despite not being true in a literal sense.

Certainly this can be misleading to the layman. The term "observer" in quantum mechanics suffers similarly.

No.

"Optimization pressure" makes it sound as if there is a single metric for optimization, whereas there are a constantly shifting set of different metrics. Worse (or more precisely, more complex) there are frequently multiple different "solutions" for a given metric, and evolution doesn't care. Put a little differently, there is no "optimization" pressure at all: evolution is not attempting to optimize anything (*).

Trying to fit anthropomorphized design onto a process that is absolutely the opposite of that in every way (no intent, multiple outcomes, no optimization) just leads people to not think clearly about this sort of thing.

(*) no, not even "reproductive fitness" - rates of reproduction are subject to massive amounts of environmental "noise", to the degree that minor improvements in offspring survivability will often be invisible over anything other than the very long term. Further, the most desirable rates of reproduction will also vary over time, leading to what once may have appeared to be an improvement into a liability (and vice versa, of course).

Right. It's extremely unlikely that "unable to synthesize Vitamin C" would ever have actively been selected for. But it was also unlikely to be strongly selected against in any version of humans or their near ancestors which have access to basically any common food.

So, randomly this pathway is deleted in our species, but there won't be a satisfying "just so" explanation, it's just blind luck. I happen to think we should fix it, most people either don't care or believe we shouldn't.

Framed in anthropomorphized terms this would look something like the goal of humans as a species is not the synthesis of vitamin C but rather mere survival. Walking a path where we come to depend on external sources is not necessarily at odds with that.

Or more generally: Why did I do that specific thing? No particular reason, it just happened to work. After all, I managed not to fall off the platform for another few seconds. No telling what the future will bring.

As long as we're thinking about anthropomorphization it's amusing to note that vitamin C synthesis can be framed as a species level tragedy of the commons. In that case you are simply advocating that we as a species make the responsible choice not to participate in a race to the bottom!

You're being overly literal. It's not "trying to fit anthropomorphized design onto a process" but rather "using anthropomorphization as a descriptive tool". This situation is not unlike when someone takes issue with an analogy due to erroneously interpreting it as a direct comparison.

> here are frequently multiple different "solutions" for a given metric

So too are there multiple different options when working towards any nontrivial goal in the real world. In the context of stochastic optimization the multi-armed bandit problem is a rather well known concept.

> evolution is not attempting to optimize anything

For the purpose of communication (of some other idea) it could be reasonable to say that the human race merely wants survival first and foremost. That is what evolution is after, at least in a sense. Of course that is not technically correct. Pointing out technical inconsistencies isn't going to convince me that I'm in the wrong here because I've already explicitly acknowledged their presence and explained why as far as I'm concerned objecting to them is simply missing the point.

Switching to a technical angle, to claim that evolution is not optimizing is to claim that water doesn't flow downhill but rather molecules just happen to vibrate and move around at random. It's completely ignoring the broader context. Evolution happens at a species level. It's an abstract concept inherently tied to other abstract concepts such as optimization and survival.

and you are missing my point that trying to help people understand a process that has no design element as if it was one that did actually does them (and the process) a disservice, possibly a great disservice.

I've told people off for using the pathetic fallacy too, in the past, I guess I just said "what do mushrooms want" for the sake of rhetoric. Well, because it would be funny. Fine then, I was trolling.

Thanks to your discussion though, I'm now wondering how to square the idea that evolution produces knowledge with the idea that it doesn't optimize even for reproductive fitness. I think you're technically incorrect there: it's that it doesn't optimize exclusively in the short term or by any one obvious strategy. The bottom line is that what survives survives, though, you can't argue with a tautology. Even if what survives is a sloth or a sleeper shark or a bristlecone or (imagine) a single infertile but incredibly tough organism, it still had to find a way (alright, stumble into a way). Maybe your objection is just that "optimize for" implies intent, but intentless-purism in language for biologists is as hard as pastless-purism in language for time travellers.

I laughed!

"What do mushrooms want?" Is hilarious given your evolution context!

Sometimes, it can make sense to step back and laugh.

The number one response to words we do not like is righteous indignation.

It is almost always a bad idea too. Funny that!

Humor can be powerful as can giving benefit of doubt followed by one or more probing questions.

Amazing conversations often follow.

> how to square the idea that evolution produces knowledge with the idea that it doesn't optimize even for reproductive fitness

Its really fairly simply: natural selection requires two things: heritable genetics and a source of variation in the genetics between individuals. Mutation is the most basic source of variation, and that produces new information. But new information isn't necessarily knowledge. Assuming a scientific testing gloss, each new genetic code variation X can be considered as a hypothesis, that "variant X is fit", and then natural selection events that act on copies of X (for or against) serve as experiments testing the hypothesis. Through iterative experiments, we weed out the copies of the variants where the hypothesis of them being fit was proved by natural selection to be false, and what remains should be those copies of genetic variants which have (mostly) proven to be true. Learning and understanding which variants are fit (where the hypotheses are true) is knowledge, and in this way evolution produces knowledge while not having any optimization goal (in the intent sense, which I agree is a requirement for something to be meaningfully "optimizing" anything, because you can't aim in a direction without a sense for that direction).

> Assuming a scientific testing gloss, each new genetic code variation X can be considered as a hypothesis, that "variant X is fit", and then natural selection events that act on copies of X (for or against) serve as experiments testing the hypothesis

this is the problem i have with natural selection... it has no predictive power. You can never use natural selection theory to say if an organism is "fit" before it exhibits its fitness. what good is this?

This may be more a problem with how "fit" is defined and used than with natural selection theory itself. Fitness can be hard to define beyond the trivial "these organisms which survived the selection event must be the fit ones," and natural systems are usually so noisy with inputs that its hard to figure out what was actually important in retrospect, or likely to evolve in the future.

Only in situations with a powerful selection pressure (like an asteroid strike causing a nuclear winter, or antibiotic applied to a petri dish) can one have a hope of reliably predicting which variants will be selected for or against.

However, these situations are not irrelevant, especially if we can predict the likelihood of those situations developing. Real predictions of the theory of natural selection can be applied to managing antibiotic resistance in populations of bacteria. For example, we know that antibiotic resistance mechanisms that bacteria evolve will often have an energy metabolism cost to their maintenance. This means that, absent pressure to be resistant to antibiotics, we'd expect a population to gradually lose individuals with the genes for the resistance mechanism, because they would be incurring a metabolic penalty for possessing those genes. So natural selection theory accurately predicts that if you remove the selection pressure of the antibiotic, the bacteria will evolve to lose the resistance mechanism, and become susceptible to the antibiotic again over several generations of natural selection. Using this knowledge, some rural regions will discontinue use of a given class of antibiotics in agriculture to allow for resistant strains to decline, and then resume their use when they are again effective. By intelligently rotating use of antibiotics in this way, we can enjoy their benefits without incurring too much inefficiencies and worse tragedies from antibiotic resistance.

That is real & useful predictive power.

There is no broader context wherein natural selection can be considered to be an optimization process, that is a pernicious misconception of evolutionary theory. Fortunately, people with a computer science background have a distinct advantage towards correcting this fallacy, because their training affords them an understanding of information as a working concept that lay people rarely attain.

The key insight is that any algorithm implementation for a process which has an objective must, as an absolute minimal requirement, possess an encoding of that objective in its implementation. That is, a real representation of the goal must be in the process's make-up so that the goal can be pursued at all, because correct navigation requires assessing actions for whether they work towards the goal or not, and any such assessment requires meaningful reference to the goal. Without such a definition to refer to, differentiation between desirable and undesirable outcomes is impossible.

This goal encoding may be explicit (ie readily understandable by observers studying the implementation) or implicit (hard to parse), but either way, it must be instantiated in the make-up of the implementation, in some medium with the capacity to hold the goal definition, ie a way of storing the requisite number of bits within the implementation itself (or readily reading it from elsewhere, or constructing it from some combination thereof). This definition of the goal must be implemented in a manner that can be read and acted upon by the rest of the algorithm implementation, so that the system as a whole can pursue states that better match the goal. ie so that it can optimize.

With regards to evolution, how could nature select without having an idea of what it was selecting for? A reference definition of fitness must be available to nature if it is to measure each individual organism's fitness and select accordingly.

For a natural-selection-as-optimization-process algorithm implementation, there would need to be a component that encodes natural selection's optimization objective into the implementation's very make-up (or a ready way to read that goal from an external source).

What is the make-up of the natural selection algorithm's implementation? It is the entirety of nature itself, in whole and in part. Nature is literally everything in the universe, and literally anything in the universe, from the most massive galaxy to the smallest particle, can participate in natural selection events. And no part of nature, save for some animal brains, seems to contain a representation of a goal for natural selection.

Is it even conceivable that everything in the universe, down to the smallest particle, could encode a common goal? Does a volcano encode the goal of maximizing reproductive fitness for the populations living around it? Can a shower of cosmic rays encode the goal of making sure the creatures who's DNA it disrupts are the ones who should be removed from the populace? They don't appear to encode any such evolutionary goals, nor do they have the capacity to maintain any goal at all beyond following the physical laws of matter -- Volcanos are disordered piles of rock and churning lava, and cosmic rays are singular fundamental particles that are subject to wholesale transformation with every impact -- neither has any way of encoding a common objective for natural selection, nor is there evidence for them being able to collectively maintain one.

We can illustrate the paradox of an optimizing nature using your water molecule analogy. A collection of water molecules acting under a gravitational field will demonstrate downwards fluid dynamics which single molecules in space would not, but no matter how much H2O you put together, it will never spontaneously develop any concept of evolutionary fitness.

And yet a flash flood is a very real natural selection event that can reshape the genepool of a coastal town, but all the same it has no means of representing any goal of optimizing the population's fitness through who it drowns and who it spares; its just water. Flowing water performs natural selection, but it isn't optimizing for any goal, no matter how you try to spin it, because it has no way of maintaining a representation of a goal in its disordered and inconstant structure. It flows, yes, but it has no goal in doing so, its not pursuing any optimization objective, all the while it is a real instance of natural selection. It doesn't have or need any way of determining who is more or less fit than another, so how could it be optimizing for it? It's just flooding.

Whether its by deluge, an erupting volcano, a congenital heart attack, or a pack of rabid dogs, the processes making up natural selection events do not possess an encoding of a goal for natural selection. They do not possess the necessary information structure required to pursue a common optimization objective, and so they cannot be optimization processes in any meaningful sense.

> The key insight is that any algorithm implementation for a process which has an objective must, as an absolute minimal requirement, possess an encoding of that objective in its implementation.

I don't agree with this in any way, or perhaps more accurately, I don't agree that we know (and perhaps could know) the scope of the implementation even if this claim was true, which I don't think it is.

The idea that "people with a computer science background have a distinct advantage" is also plainly wrong to me. I have a background (as in, I quit my PhD in) computational biology, have been a software engineer for more than 35 years, and there are just as many people with as without computer science backgrounds who fall for the fallacy.

What part of it don’t you agree with? That an algorithm implementation must encode the goal that it pursues? How can something pursue a goal it has no access to a definition of? If you have an alternative way it could work, please propose it.

I’m not asking rhetorically, I’m truly interested in learning the flaws in my argument for why natural selection cannot be modelled as an optimization process. So if you have the time to reply with a more detailed rebuttal, I’d much appreciate it.

edit: Addendum: I recognize my claim that computer scientists might have an advantage in understanding this is contentious, and I was not implying that they (we) as a group have a better record of understanding evolution’s subtlety than biologists (which I studied in uni) or the average lay person. I just think they could have an advantage in understanding the version of the argument that I gave above, and I am interested in improving it for that purpose.

What is the algorithm implementation when it comes to the physical world? Does the implementation extend to remote galaxies? Is the strong force part of the implementation? We don't know ... there appears to be no way to know.

But even if you could know, it is just demonstrably wrong that the implementation must encode the goal. If you create selection pressure, and have a reproductive system that allows for mutations, then you may end up an "implementation" that encodes the goal implicit in the selection pressure. But anyone who messed around with genetic algorithms or artificial life in the 90s knows that you can trivially start out with no resemblance to "the goal" at all. Where life on earth in aggregate or any specific example of it in particular might be along that pathway is similarly impossible to say.

Finally, even defining "the goal" is tricky. Consider the well-documented case of moth evolution in industrial (and later, post-industrial) northern England. Their camouflaging wing tones changed to respond to the typical color on vertical surfaces, twice within a human generation or three. Was "the goal" flexible coloration across generations, or was it "light, then "dark" and then "light" again? That's a philosophical question as much as anything ...

> What is the algorithm implementation when it comes to the physical world?

It is the physical world, nature is the implementation of the natural selection algorithm. Yes, the strong force is part of the implementation, because the strong force can play a role in selection events, cf nuclear bombs and radiation. The gravitational pull of remote galaxies can also influence selection events by changing planetary orbits minutely.

I don’t see these as problems for my argument because I am not the one claiming they encode an objective, I just see them as natural forces which can influence selection without any overarching purpose or goal. It is those claiming natural selection is an optimization process who must show how it could work. The onus is on them to show where their supposed objective of natural selection is encoded in its implementation.

> If you create selection pressure, and have a reproductive system that allows for mutations, then you may end up an "implementation" that encodes the goal implicit in the selection pressure.

What goal are you referring to?

> But anyone who messed around with genetic algorithms or artificial life in the 90s knows that you can trivially start out with no resemblance to "the goal" at all. Where life on earth in aggregate or any specific example of it in particular might be along that pathway is similarly impossible to say.

I am one of these people, but I don’t know what goal you are saying these systems came to demonstrate. Are you saying these artificial evolution systems had objectives they pursued? What caused them to follow these objectives? What is this “pathway”?

>Consider the well-documented case of moth evolution in industrial (and later, post-industrial) northern England. Their camouflaging wing tones changed to respond to the typical color on vertical surfaces, twice within a human generation or three. Was "the goal" flexible coloration across generations, or was it "light, then "dark" and then "light" again?

There was no goal at any point in the process. Moths with colors that matched their contemporaneous environment were less likely to be eaten by predators than those which stood out. Calling it a goal is a confusion, its trying to add a conceptual framing that isn’t necessary and adds nothing to the understanding of the system. Neither the soot levels in the air nor the birds hunting for moths have a goal of adjusting the balance of moth coloration phenotypes. They are just the context, along with everything else in their environment, in which evolution of moth coloration may occur.

In what sense is there any goal in the example? And if it is a goal, why is it not optimization? I claim there is no goal, no optimization objective to natural selection. Its not just a philosophical side question, it is the question.

edit: typo

> It is the physical world, nature is the implementation of the natural selection algorithm.

But you don't know (and to some degree, cannot know) which parts of it. So you cannot really know if the implementation encodes a goal or not.

> What goal are you referring to?

Whatever goal was being used in the case of genetic algorithms or artificial life systems. Those systems have goals, but the early stages do not embody the goal in any way you could recognize.

> There was no goal at any point in the process.

So in the case of natural evolution, we happen to agree. However, I don't agree with your claim that "the implementation must embody the goal" is a useful way to think about this, and I also have some sympathy for the idea that there could be huge-time-scale teleology associated with evolution that we cannot discern.

Its conceivable that the universe could encode a goal somehow, after all its so vast, but that conceivability alone is not evidence for the existence of an encoded goal any more than the conceivability of extra-terrestrial intelligence, or of a higher design to reality, is proof of their existence. What science tells us is that the only goal nature seems to embody is following the physical laws we've been able to determine, and nothing more. I'd apply the same interesting hypothesis status to huge-time-scale teleology that we cannot discern, and perhaps it is both real and we will never be able to discern it. Personally I find the notions very interesting, but I don't see reason to believe in them. If there were good evidence for them, they'd be the subject of scientific study already.

But we seem to agree that natural selection doesn't have a goal. In my observation, any purported overarching goal that is ascribed to natural selection, including the measure of inclusive fitness[0], can be reduced to some function of the context in which it is being observed, like moth coloration was influenced by soot levels.

As to my main claim, I do believe it is necessary that an encoding of a goal is necessary for choice among actions in pursuit of a goal, because some kind of reference to a goal is necessary to compare options in a decision algorithm. In the case of a-life systems which have goals, that encoding is somewhere in the algorithm of evolution rules combined with the initial state of the simulation. In the case of nature, I don't see a place where that encoding could exist, except the trivial "goal" that all elements will follow the laws of physics.

Please note though that I never put it that "the implementation must embody the goal," I was more careful with my language by saying that it must have an accessible or working encoding of the goal, one its decision process or evolution rule would need to reference in order to make decisions that favored it. The encoding need not be internal (so embody is definitely not necessary), and none of these things are necessarily explicit or well partitioned (e.g. an evolution rule can implicitly encode a goal).

edit: addendum: [0] On inclusive fitness being reducible to situational factors, I'm just following the direction of M.A. Nowak, C.E. Tarnita and E.O. Wilson on this: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09205

A more intuitive and natural phrasing, even though it's invalid in a technical sense. I've noticed this happens when people talk about computers/software as well ("it thinks the variable is set", "it freaks out if it doesn't get a response", etc). Outside of formal writing/presentations, using only technical terminology seems to take a suboptimal amount of effort for both speaker and listener compared to anthropomorphizing (unless, as you mention, the listener is a layman who gets the wrong idea).

It definitely is not useful. Your model should at least attempt to approximate reality, not to depart from it by putting effect before the cause. That way lies madness.

It is not a model. It is a description. I'm torn on whether it would be correct to refer to the approach as constituting a sort of analogy.

No idea why you think the effect is being put before the cause. I'm hungry so I head to the kitchen. An observer says "he wants to eat". Antibiotics are administered. Only the bacterial cells expressing a certain set of proteins survive. An observer says "the infection wants to be resistant".

> An observer says "the infection wants to be resistant"

I can confidently claim that literally nobody says this because a google search for this exact phrase has only one result, and its this thread.[0]

Really though, I have never met a biologist who thought this way. All of the ones I've met and worked with knew that development of antibiotic resistance is not in any way like a decision process, and they usually understood on an intuitive level that bacterial cultures don't have a goal of developing the capability. Its just something that evolves, which is a distinct category of process.

Talking about it the other anthropomorphic way, like you claim is normal and acceptable, just confuses things; it is the opposite of helpful analogy. Infections don't "want" anything, they are better understood using the details of their actual biomolecular mechanics, which are about as far different from how brains work as could be imagined.

[0]https://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+infection+wants+to+be...

> An observer says "the infection wants to be resistant".

That's complete bs. Infections don't want anything. You're stuck in a loop of your own making, the only way out is to backtrack, not to keep on digging.

These lines of thinking were discredited many years ago and since then the field has seen enormous progress, anthropomorphize all you want but reality does not care.

try telling that to quantum physicists... theyll just give you the wave function and say "well it works doesnt it"?

That's a bad take. I'm sure you can do a lot better than that.

i dont think youve understood it correctly

Except for the decades of experiments yielding validated predictions?

youve missed the point entirely

It’s a useful start to move away from “it’s just random” but it’s just so different it doesn’t help in many cases. It’s not approximately the same.

> like to think of evolution as intelligent

Evolution is more intelligent than people assume.

The selection is driven by each species choices, and the more intelligent the species, the more intelligence played a role in it.

Survival of the fittest is also a wrong way to think about evolution that leads many people to make assumptions that are backward.

Selection doesn’t pick winners, it picks losers. But bad luck also picks losers, and good luck pick winners, so things with small negative or positive effects can be swamped, and anything neutral has no pressure to be phased out at all. So if being born with blue hair turns out not to have any effect on your survival, because for instance none of your predators can see blue any better than they can see what every color your mate is, then there will continue to be blue babies at some rate. And if you or your mate have other genes that do boost your survivability, then there will be a lot of blue babies. But not on the merits of being blue. However the animals involved may just decide to involve blueness in their mate selection criteria. Because correlation.

Then many generations later, if your habitat changes, or your range expands, maybe blue fur protects more or less well against UV light, or moss growing in your fur, or some new predator. Now the selection works more like people think it works. But it’s been sitting there as genetic noise for perhaps centuries or eons, waiting for a complementary gene or environmental change to create a forcing function.

Nowadays evolution is waiting to be called "backpropagation".

0) What do humans have to do with it? We're not the only animals that eat mushrooms.

that's exactly the point, the _lack of_ humans during its evolution is what it has to do with us, a mushroom may be poisonous to the species that it evolved around, while at the same time not being poisonous to humans

Hmm. I'm not sure there are many mushrooms poisonous to other mammals but not to us. We have almost exactly the same biochemistry after all.

I would expect this way of thinking about evolution would be common but unfortunately it isn't. I feel the way we say "X animal evolved to do Y" sets the ton as if it was a active, thought out decision. Instead, it was just 1000s of mutation happened and maybe a certain kind was able to survive while other wasn't. It is more of a mathematical concept than conscious one.

I find it hard to believe that evolution is completely blind. The search space that it can explore via mutations is astronomically large. Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years doesn't really save the argument as it takes some specimen years to develop and get feedback on their fitness. It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips".

I'm not trying to suggest woo here, but there has to be some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat.

The search space is highly constrained. All life on this planet is based on hydrocarbon chemistry, more or less, and must operate in the face of high rates of oxidation and water as pretty much the only available solvent. Even with such constraints, the differences between what has evolved (bacteria to blue whales! viruses to polar bears! algae to orchids!) are staggering.

The fact that you find something hard to believe doesn't say much at all. Humans have all kinds of things that we find hard to believe - for example, I find it almost impossible to believe that there is only one object I can see in the night sky with my own eyes that is outside of our galaxy - but that doesn't make them any more or less true.

Let's take human DNA as an example. It contains 3.2B GTCA base pairs. This gives rise to 4^3.2B possible combos. It's just not possible to navigate this space blindly. There is not enough atoms in the universe to do that. It is known that there is bias in what mutations are favoured.

Only a tiny percentage (around 1%) of the DNA in chromosomes codes for proteins.

And yes, certain mutations are favored precisely because of the chemistry constraints (an extremely basic one is which base pair changes actually alter the resulting protein; a more sophisticated one is which amino acid changes alter the physical functionality of the protein).

There are multiple constraints that I can immediately identify. Maximal temperature extremes, barometric pressure, atmospheric/substrate compositions, etc. The bias is inherent to the history of the planet Earth and the gradients present across that time and space. I'd say it's highly constrained.

Of course there is bias, the bias is provided by the natural environment where the organisms coded by the genome must thrive or die. The bias is applied after the mutation occurs, but the mutations themselves are random, or nearly so. Probably there is some differential rate between the likelihood of each of the four base pairs to mutate into each of the others, but I would guess its nearly parity, because that would probably be close to optimal (though that depends on the details of the genetic coding scheme, ie the triplet code that translates nucleotide triples into amino acid codons).

I don't think this is true at all. There are multiple sources talking about how the mutation rate is context-dependent.

But is the diversity really that staggering? I mean most animals including possibly dinosaurs that have ever existed share a lot of internal organs, in the same place. They have eyes, brain (with a lot of the same brain areas, even birds have something like a prefrontal cortex but it's called something different). They all have legs, torso, head. I would say there is a lot more commonality than difference. The differences come from slight variations on a basic template that works, and then the body looks different and so on.

I'm not sure how to think about the diversity that evolution creates and how diverse it actually is. I would say there are _a lot_ of repeating patterns all across history, with variations on those repeating patterns always changing.

You're choice of samples is rather skewed towards ones sharing a relatively recent common ancestor. Octopus and Sea Squirts are also animals, and they don't have legs or torsos or, in the later case, heads or eyes. Octopus brains are also rather different from those of vertebrates, and they have 8 mini-brains for more distributed/localized control of each major limb.

That said, I agree with you that there is a lot of commonality in life. Even in the case of Octopus we share a lot of DNA. I just mostly think that is due to common ancestor and common environmental pressures, not to some fundamental limit in the breadth of evolutionary potential itself. Its probably worthwhile to wonder at how that actually works though. Maybe evolutionary potential could be improved.

> some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat.

Your perspective has the unfortunate bias of being posed at the end of a long stream of evolution that happened to emerge with an intelligence far superior from other living things.

> Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years

It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of planets conduct the experiment, ours just happens to have resulted in intelligence.

> It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips".

Mutations introduce randomness but beneficial traits can be selected for artificially, compounding the benefits.

> It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of planets conduct the experiment, ours just happens to have resulted in intelligence.

My argument doesn't depend on the existence of an intelligent species on the planet. The problem already arises when there are multiple species on ONE planet. If you calculate the pure combinatorial distance between the DNA of 2 species, you must find that you can't just brute force your way from one to the other before the heat-death of the universe. This is why mutation bias exists: not all mutations are equally likely, evolution favours some kinds over others.

> If you calculate the pure combinatorial distance between the DNA of 2 species, you must find that you can't just brute force your way from one to the other before the heat-death of the universe.

Can you expand on this? I'm not seeing why it is implausible for one genome to mutate into another, that seems like it could be accomplished in reasonable time with a small, finite number of mutations performed sequentially or in parallel. After all the largest genome is only about 160 billion base pairs, and the average is much smaller (humans are 3 billion base pairs). So what's the difficulty in imagining one mutating into another?

Your maths doesn't seem right. You can estimate mutation rates very easily, and you don't end up at crazy numbers. The sequence space explored by evolution is tiny compared to the possibilities and closely interlinked. A simple example is comparing haemoglobin sequences from different animals.

Maybe won't be viewed favorably by the HN crowd, but I enjoyed the most recent Bret Weinstein interview on Joe Rogan [0] where Bret talks about his pet theory on natural selection / evolution (maybe 2/3 way through the interview).

Basically, the "junk" DNA we have may be "variables" that influence form and morphology, thus giving natural selection a vastly reduced design space to search for viable mutations. E.g. not much chemical difference between a bat wing and another mammals hands - mostly a difference of morphology. Allowing for more efficient search of evolutionary parameters instead of pure random walk.

[0] https://youtu.be/WX_te6X-0aQ

This is getting downvoted for the same underlying reason I’ve already pointed out elsewhere in the thread: it follows the same red flag "I’m not $1, but $2" pattern, just expressed in a different form.

"Maybe won’t be viewed favorably by the HN crowd, but..." is a rhetorical hedge that serves the same function: preempt criticism, then introduce a claim framed as rescuing evolution from an implied flaw. That’s social weasel-wording, not epistemic caution, and HN reliably downvotes it.

On top of that, citing an uncritical Bret Weinstein interview on Joe Rogan is about as many red flags as you can stack in one sentence. As you must know but don't state, both are infamous for repackaging long-settled evolutionary biology as contrarian insight, often using the same "search space", "random walk", and "junk DNA" language that shows up in intelligent-design adjacent arguments.

Nothing described here is new or controversial. Regulatory DNA, morphological variation on shared templates, and highly constrained evolutionary pathways have been mainstream biology for decades. Presenting them via a podcast anecdote, framed as a fix for "pure random walk", just reintroduces the same strawman of evolution that people have already corrected multiple times in this thread.

And recommending a Joe Rogan interview with somebody like Bret Weinstein, after admitting you know it won’t be viewed favorably (for very good but unstated reasons), is a disrespectful waste of people’s time.

That’s why it’s being downvoted.

1) No one asked why it's being down voted (to... -1, the horror). I'm not here for internet points.

2) This isn't my field - I am not making any claims, merely relaying what I thought was an interesting concept/mechanism I hadn't heard of before, that I thought other curious individuals here might also think was interesting. Isn't that the entire point of HN? I would have very much appreciated links or something to Google over this bizarre analysis of why my comment is downvoted. I didn't know this wasn't novel and was accepted science.

3) I understand Bret/Joe aren't looked upon favorably by certain crowds, particularly on this forum. I tried to get ahead of the "but didn't you know they can't be trusted!" comments and attempt to focus on the substance. If the substance is wrong, great! Let's talk about that.

4) You are assuming malice where there is none, and calling me disrespectful and insisting I must know things. I find that quite disrespectful and uncalled for. Not everyone has your opinions or knows what you know. 10k a day and all that https://xkcd.com/1053/

HN guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

You obviously know they can't be trusted, you just said so.

Why not just say that as a disclaimer to the video, instead of attempting to "get ahead" of other people who also know that, and will call you on omitting it.

Don't dismiss HN users as "certain crowds" and preemptively try to head them off at the pass for pointing out what you chose to omit. What "certain crowds" would that be, people who don't tolerate bullshit?

It's not about "certain crowds" who know Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein are full of shit, it's about Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein being full of shit, and you knowingly repeating and recommending their shit.

FIFY:

>Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein are full of shit, but I enjoyed the most recent Bret Weinstein interview on Joe Rogan [0] where Bret talks about his pet theory on natural selection / evolution (maybe 2/3 way through the interview), which is bullshit.

Then don't just repeat their bullshit without question. You could have even gone as far to explain WHY they're full of shit, and who they really are, and what other malicious bullshit they spew, instead of just propagating their bullshit without warning, as if "certain crowds" are trying to suppress that vital information.

When you uncritically recommend and parrot bullshit, and try to preempt comments from "certain crowds" who you know rightfully disagree, it sure comes off looking like you believe it, which is not a good look. The strongest plausible interpretation is that you enjoy listing to deceptive idiots make fools of themselves and spread misinformation, and I'll give you that.

"Junk DNA as variables that reduce search space" is a very old idea, but it's routinely introduced in popular media as if it fixes a flaw in evolution — usually the "pure random walk" strawman. That framing is a huge tell, because evolutionary biology abandoned that view generations ago.

Weinstein and Rogan’s signature move is to take settled science, remove its context and literature, and rebrand it as contrarian revelation, implying experts missed something obvious or are hiding it. That move reliably revives strawmen, Intelligent-Design-adjacent language, and manufactured doubt, while producing zero new knowledge.

Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein are notorious not because they're unpopular, but because they're dishonest and corrosive.

Whew boy, your comments are great examples of not being curious, understanding or promoting civil discussion.

> You obviously know they can't be trusted, you just said so.

A baseless accusation with no supporting evidence. I never asked anyone to trust anyone else. I didn't even assert the idea was true, just interesting to consider. I merely thought the idea was interesting as a layman with little knowledge of evolutionary biology.

> Why not just say that as a disclaimer to the video

Because you're putting words in my mouth that I don't believe.

> What "certain crowds" would that be

Curmudgeons like you.

> When you uncritically recommend and parrot bullshit

Really? I recommended something? I thought I said I enjoyed a video talking about a pet theory relevant to the topic at hand, which I had recently learned of.

This whole "framing is a huge tell", and "reliably revives strawmen, Intelligent-Design-adjacent language, and manufactured doubt, while producing zero new knowledge" shtick is boring and wrong. I've been atheist since I could critically think for myself and it's silly how off-base you are.

Since you seem to be so knowledgeable on the subject and confident in your position, can you point me to something I can read instead of just taking your word for it? Otherwise you're no better than them. I skimmed a few wikipedia pages [0][1] and didn't find the morphology "variables" Brett was discussing.

Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if you just pattern matched on Rogan/Weinstein, typed out your reply and don't actually know what was being discussed. The tone and tenor of your comments so far would seem to indicate so. Your entire objection boils down to "I don't like them and no one should listen to them". Light on substance, heavy on the ad hominem - not exactly persuasive.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_DNA

Fair enough -- then let’s dive into substance.

I’m not objecting because I "don't like" Rogan or Weinstein, and I'm not saying you're religious or wittingly pushing ID. I’m objecting because the specific framing you're repeating is decades old, well studied, and routinely mis-presented in popular media as if it repairs a flaw in evolutionary theory that doesn't actually exist.

The idea that non-coding DNA, developmental constraints, or regulatory structure "reduce the search space" is not controversial, it’s foundational. What is misleading is presenting this as a fix for a "pure random walk" model of evolution. That model was abandoned generations ago and is mainly kept alive in popular discourse by critics of evolution (Creationists, the Discovery Institute, Intelligent Design proponents, Teach the Controversy perpetrators, anti-science podcasters, etc).

Weinstein calling this a "pet theory" is itself revealing. What he’s describing is not a theory in the scientific sense at all, and certainly not his. It’s a loose, personalized retelling of ideas that have been standard in evolutionary biology for decades -- regulatory architectures, developmental constraints, biased variation, and genotype–phenotype structure.

Labeling it a "pet theory" performs two rhetorical tricks at once: it makes old, well-established work sound novel and contrarian, and it subtly implies the field has overlooked something obvious that only an outsider is willing to say. That framing flatters the audience, but it misrepresents the science.

His "pet theory" is a non-refundable Monty Python dead parrot: widely known, long settled in the literature, yet periodically propped up and insisted to be alive as if it just said something profound.

Nothing here is hidden, suppressed, or newly discovered. What is new is the podcast packaging: stripping away the literature, resurrecting a long-abandoned strawman ("pure random walk evolution"), and then presenting the correction as a unique "pet theory" of personal insight rather than as settled biology. That move reliably generates the impression of deep insight without adding any.

If you want solid, non-Rogan, non-Weinstein sources, here are places to start:

Sean B. Carroll -- Endless Forms Most Beautiful: Classic introduction to evo-devo, gene regulatory networks, and why morphology is highly constrained and reusable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endless_Forms_Most_Beautiful_%...

Gerhart & Kirschner -- The Theory of Facilitated Variation: Explicitly addresses how biological systems bias variation toward viable outcomes. This is probably the closest rigorous treatment of what Weinstein gestures at, minus the hype.

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

Wagner & Altenberg (1996) -- Complex Adaptations and the Evolution of Evolvability: Shows how genotype–phenotype mappings are structured, non-uniform, and historically constrained.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2410639

Pigliucci & Müller -- Evolution: The Extended Synthesis: Covers developmental bias, constraint, and non-coding DNA without implying evolution was ever a blind bit-flip search.

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

Lenski et al. (2003–2015) -- Long-term E. coli evolution experiments: Direct experimental evidence of cumulative selection exploiting structured variation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex...

And if you insist on watching dramatic youtube videos about junk DNA instead of reading books:

Exposing Discovery Institute Part 10: Casey Luskin Again (Because He's Such a Loser Fraud)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOnb0SZYZUI

None of this is new, hidden, or suppressed, or invented by Weinstein. It’s in textbooks and review papers.

The reason I push back hard -- and people get downvoted for recommending Rogan/Weinstein (which you already knew, just not why) -- is that their signature move is to strip this literature of context, reintroduce a strawman ("random walk evolution"), present a well-known correction as contrarian revelation, and imply experts missed something obvious.

That pattern reliably manufactures doubt without producing new insight.

So no, my objection is not "don't listen to them".

It's: don't mistake and parrot repackaged, incomplete explanations for novel insight, especially when they're framed as fixing a problem experts allegedly ignored.

If you want to understand this topic deeply, the literature above will take you much farther than a podcast -- or Weinstein’s dead parrot -- ever will.

Look at software fuzzing, particularly the coverage guided mutators (basically a simple “genetic algorithm”.

It’s amazing what a few random bit flips combined with a crude measurement can do.

To me, evolution at first seem implausible. Monkeys banging on a typewriter aren’t going to write Shakespeare. But add a crude feedback loop to them, and soon they’ll be dishing out Charles Dickens too!

The monkeys in my last experiment got there in 221 years, in particular.

Why does it need some kind of boundary? What if it was operating on a limitless trajectory?

That mechanism is a set of genes failing to procreate.

Epigenetics can arguably be an example of what the comment means by narrowing the search space. You can have heritable changes to gene expression that are not part of your genome, but are a result of feedback from the environment (and not random mutations, viability of which natural selection will judge over future generations)

As a general rule of thumb:

truth = claim.replace(/I'm not (.*?), but (.*)/, "I'm $1.");

Then again this is a discussion about "Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations" so maybe woo is appropriate, and you should embrace it.

Is there a way their question could have been phrased that would have not drawn you to make that assumption, which seems to be an ethos attack, or are you predisposed to reply in such a way about any philosophical evolution question?

When people say /I'm not (.*?), but (.*)/, they invariably are what they're claiming they aren't. That's what that phrase means. There's even a wikipedia page about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist,_but...

If you really mean $2, then just say $2, you don't have to preface it with "I'm not $1, but" That's a waste of words, beating around the bush, a rhetorical shield, that reveals that you really are $1 and you feel the need to be defensive about it.

The word "but" in that context means the thing before it is false, just air escaping from the folds of your fat, and you can ignore everything after the "but".

This is a discussion about psychedelic mushrooms and fairytale-like hallucinations, so woo away!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO2dPIdEaR4

I have little patience for intelligent-design and the likes, if that's what you are getting at.

All I'm saying is that blind enumeration of mutations seems combinatorially infeasible due to the vastness of the search space. It is already known that mutation bias exists, so what I'm saying shouldn't be that controversial.

In stark contrast to what you're claiming, I have absolutely zero patience for intelligent design and the likes -- that’s exactly my point.

All I'm saying is that the whole point of the theory of evolution is that blind enumeration of mutations is not required, and that combinatorial feasibility emerges in spite of the vastness of the search space. It is already well known that mutation bias exists, so none of this is controversial.

Multiple commenters here have already explained this from different angles, including chemical and environmental constraints (PaulDavisThe1st), developmental and functional constraints (Supermancho), and even software analogies like coverage-guided fuzzing and genetic algorithms (BobbyTables2). These are not fringe ideas; they are standard ways of explaining why your "astronomical search space" framing is a strawman.

You are hedging; I am not trying to weasel word or distance myself from evolution, or use red-flag rhetorical "I'm not $1, but $2" devices. I have read, agree with, and acknowledge the other replies to your message, because I understand that evolutionary theory already fully explains the concern you're raising.

Your claim that "blind enumeration of mutations seems combinatorially infeasible due to the vastness of the search space" flatly contradicts the theory of evolution.

This has also been directly challenged by other commenters asking you to justify the alleged combinatorial barrier in concrete terms (uplifter), and by others pointing out that genomes do not need to traverse all possible combinations to move between viable states.

The entire point of evolutionary theory is that blind enumeration is not required, and that combinatorial feasibility emerges from selection, heredity, population dynamics, and cumulative retention of partial solutions. No "woo" is required.

Evolution is blind with respect to foresight, but not blind with respect to feedback, structure, or retention.

Mutation bias, developmental constraints, and non-uniform genotype–phenotype mappings are foundational components of modern evolutionary biology, not ad-hoc patches.

People who doubt evolution tend to rephrase it into a strawman -- "random bit flips over an astronomical search space" -- and then declare that strawman implausible.

Several replies here explicitly reject your framing. For example, thrw045 points out the massive reuse of structural templates across species, and PaulDavisThe1st notes that only a small fraction of DNA even codes for proteins, further undermining the idea of a uniform, unconstrained search.

Your "I'm not pushing intelligent design, but evolution seems combinatorially infeasible" move closely mirrors the Discovery Institute / "teach the controversy" pattern: disclaim ID, then introduce a doubt-claim based on a strawman of evolution as uniform random search, then retreat to "just asking questions." That strategy is explicitly, insincerely, and unintelligently designed to manufacture doubt about evolution while insisting it is not religious.

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

We can see the sealioning pattern play out here in real time: repeated insistence that ID is rejected, followed by reiteration of the same mischaracterized impossibility claim, even after multiple substantive explanations have already been given.

I’m not hedging like you are here: evolutionary theory does not claim "blind enumeration over an astronomical space," and treating it that way is simply a misstatement of the theory.

I think I and other people recognize your rhetorical patterns and misunderstandings, even if you don't, thus the downvotes. Other commenters have fully addressed your doubts about evolution. To me, the big give-away was your "I'm not $1, but $2" wording.

In any case, this is a thread about psychedelic mushrooms and hallucinations, so if some machine elves want to weigh in with some woo about population genetics, I suppose that’s fair game.

great, but we still cannot say anything beyond "what survives, survives". fitness is a central concept to natural selection and ultimately evolution, but it seems to bother nobody that its an empty concept, a tautology. its a nice observation but doesnt actually explain anything, and I expect science to explain the world.

Science helps figure out “how”. If you want it to help you figure out “why” (beyond a probabilistic or mechanical model), you will be disappointed.

> Science helps figure out “how"

im not asking the why, im asking the how

Saying "what survives, survives" may bother Creationists, Discovery Institute, and Intelligent Design pushers, but not actual scientists who don't have an agenda to discredit evolution as revenge because it discredits their religious dogma.

Saying "what survives, survives" is like saying physics explains motion as "things that move, move." That’s not what the theory actually claims; it’s a caricature.

Evolutionary theory explains mechanisms, not slogans. "Fitness" is not the explanation, it’s a measurable consequence of those mechanisms.

If you want teleology or ultimate purpose, science won’t give you that, so take some shrooms and ask the machine elves. But evolution absolutely explains how structured complexity accumulates without foresight, and it does so with predictive, testable models.

Please inoculate yourself against believing and parroting anti-science Intelligent Design / Creationist talking points by understanding where they come from, and what they lead to.

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

Intelligent Design is a religious ideology, not a scientific theory. The Discovery Institute is the evangelical advocacy organization that systematized and promoted it.

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

After Intelligent Design failed legally and scientifically, the Institute pivoted to the "Teach the Controversy" strategy -- not to advance new science, but to manufacture doubt about evolution in public education.

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

That approach -- revealingly effective -- became a template for later efforts to reintroduce religious ideology into secular institutions. Project 2025 represents the political continuation of that same strategy at a much larger scale: shifting from attacking a single scientific theory to reshaping education, governance, and public policy along explicitly religious lines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

These are not isolated phenomena. They are successive adaptations of the same agenda after earlier versions failed.

Exposing Discovery Institute Part 1: Casey Luskin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRxq1Vrf_Js

>Have you heard of the Discovery Institute? Have you fallen under the impression that they know what they are talking about, or can be considered an even remotely legitimate source of information?

>Well, you've come to right place. They aren't. They're a propaganda mill, and all of their content is full of lies.

>They hide behind a paper-thin roster of scientists who have deluded themselves into dishonestly preaching outside of their expertise, and they blatantly misrepresent any scientific research or scientists they are referring to. Constantly. Sometimes they even commit slander.

>That's what this video is about, and it is the first installment in a series where I will expose the fraudulent activity of all the major contributors at the Discovery Institute, one clown at a time.

>Part 1 addresses Casey Luskin, and it is centered around some very serious slander he committed against an esteemed anthropologist.

>But don't worry, I cover lots of other lies and stupidity that come out of his mouth as well.

>If you're a fan of the DI, do please find the courage to watch this rather than running to the comments section to yell at me.

>It's not all that long, and I promise that I make it extremely clear and undeniable that Casey is a liar. If you have a shred of honesty within you, you will quickly see that this is the case. Enjoy!

i think intelligent design is bunk.... was this a reflexive contrarian reply without even fully reading what youre arguing against?

I think you are psychoanalyzing me a little bit too much. Am I allowed to say that I'm an atheist and I don't believe in intelligent design, or are you going to explain to me that I'm confused about my own beliefs?

It's exactly because you’re rationally reachable that this matters.

I’m not questioning your beliefs, and I’m not saying you secretly believe in Intelligent Design. The issue is that some of the arguments you’re making didn’t originate organically or scientifically -- they were deliberately promoted through deceptive education policy and textbook standards, especially in large markets like Texas, precisely because that influence scaled nationally. People often absorb them without realizing their origin.

After Intelligent Design spectacularly failed in court, its proponents pivoted to influencing education standards rather than arguing science directly. In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), a U.S. federal district court ruled that Intelligent Design is not science and cannot be taught in public school biology classes because it is religious in nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_Schoo...

>[Creationist defense witness] Fuller memorably called for an "affirmative action" program for intelligent design, which did not win much favor with [Judge] Jones in his final decision.

That was one of the most jaw-dropping moments in the entire Dover trial: an unintentional confession that Intelligent Design cannot meet the standards of science and therefore must be smuggled into classrooms under a quota system. "Teach the Controversy" is affirmative action for bad ideas: a grievance policy masquerading as pedagogy.

>"Witnesses either testified inconsistently, or lied outright under oath on several occasions," [Judge] Jones wrote. "The inescapable truth is that both [Alan] Bonsell and [William] Buckingham lied at their January 3, 2005 depositions. ... Bonsell repeatedly failed to testify in a truthful manner. ... Defendants have unceasingly attempted in vain to distance themselves from their own actions and statements, which culminated in repetitious, untruthful testimony." An editorial in the York Daily Record described their behavior as both ironic and sinful, saying that the "unintelligent designers of this fiasco should not walk away unscathed." Judge Jones recommended to the US Attorney's office that the school board members be investigated for perjury.

So the bald faced liars and $1,000,011 judgement losers pivoted to "Teach the Controversy", and states like Texas were their key targets, because of their centralized textbook approval process and market size, which historically shaped textbooks used nationwide.

The "Teach the Controversy" framing was designed to insert doubt about evolution without explicitly promoting religion, and its language appeared repeatedly in state curriculum debates.

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

As a result, many people encountered these arguments against evolution in school without ever being told where they came from or what they were designed to accomplish -- and repeat them without realizing how the same strategy continues today in much broader political efforts, like Project 2025.

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

The constraint is a life-forms' existing form. A given genetic sequence can only move (in general) a small distance from the existing sequence.

Since you're already starting with a successful sequence, the odds are that a small variant on that sequence is also going to be only marginally more or less successful than the original sequence.

Also way too biased to humans, the fact that they poison us could just be a biochemistry coincidence, the author is operating from a very human-centric POV (like you say in (0))

> $insane_argument_against_evolution

That looks like Perl variable syntax. Arguably the most mushroom like programming language.

There’s more than one way to be a fungi.

If I understood correctly the argument in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins suggests that thinking about a genome as having a goal which it adapts itself to work towards, is absolutely a useful conceptual model.

He makes it very clear that the genome does not actually have intentionality, but also that this is the right way to imagine how organisms might evolve, as though they did have both goals and a plan.

In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins emphasized that the primary unit of evolution was the individual gene, not whole genomes. The genes were replicators and the genomes were just collections of replicators, and the way the selection pressure math worked out, there was too much diffusion of responsibility for whole genomes that typically evolution could not work coherently at that scale, or at least that's my best recollection of the book's main theory.

Regarding intentionality being a good practical assumption, I actually don't recall Dawkins recommending that, and it seems doubtful because that can lead to all kinds of fallacious reasoning. I mostly considered Dawkins a data-based neo-darwininian, so it would surprise me that he would recommend that.

Could you recall a quote or chapter from the book that bolsters your point?

edit: typo

> Could you recall a quote or chapter from the book that bolsters your point?

Yes, the second word of the title.

Yeah, that's not really good enough, by the author's own admission:

From wikipedia: 'In the foreword to the book's 30th-anniversary edition, Dawkins said he "can readily see that [the book's title] might give an inadequate impression of its contents" and in retrospect wishes he had taken Tom Maschler's advice and titled it The Immortal Gene.[2] He laments that “Too many people read it by title only.”' [0]

Furthermore, your concept that genes should be thought of as having a plan is just in stark contradiction with the Darwinian conception of natural selection, which Dawkins was largely a champion of.

My own recollection was that he described how genes readily had the appearance of acting in their own best interest, but he fell short of advocating that modeling them as having intention is a useful contrivance. Evolution does not have any sense for the future, there is no planning evolved, and Dawkins understands that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene

> he fell short of advocating that modeling them as having intention is a useful contrivance

Sorry, I remember differently. That "modelling them as having intention is a useful contrivance" is exactly the central argument of the book.

People misread the title by assuming that he was arguing that they actually did have intention.

That's fine, all I'm saying is that if genes don't actually have intention, then the utility of modeling them as though they do must be strictly limited, if not an outright liability in some contexts. Use the heuristic at your own risk, but don't sell it as gospel truth.

> but don't sell it as gospel truth.

i dont think he did

> So many people, even when they obviously know better, like to think of evolution as intelligent. It's obviously not. But every time someone says stuff like this, it reinforces the fallacy and then we get people saying things like "if evolution is real, why come $insane_argument_against_evolution?"

Tbh those kinds of people are beyond convincing. And I think most of them are trolling or have fallen under the spell of other trolls. There's clearly a network effect. We don't really have a flat earther movement here in Europe and evolution deniers are insignificant.

I don't think people saying these things actually think evolution is intelligent. They just use the phrase "want" to indicate the survival pressure that lead to the change propagating.

But the people that don't believe in evolution are so indoctrinated it doesn't matter what words we use.

Ps I do find it fascinating that a non intelligent process like evolution managed to create intelligence. Even though the state of the world often makes me doubt intelligence exists :)

> By the time our numbers were enough to provide evolutionary pressure, we started farming what we wanted, which kinda breaks the process

a lot of assumption in this sentence. proof needed