[miohtama]

Would be nice to understand how natural selection lead to this material and what were the steps. First you had a moth with some fur that absorbed maybe 0.1% ultrasound and then it started to increase from there generation and generation?

[meowface]

I wonder if some of these processes might start out with a kind of genetic anti-resiliency that's selected for. Moths seem to have a wide variety of wing patterns and heavily rely on them for camouflage and mimicry (like when eyes are mimicked). Maybe the genes related to wing surfaces reduced in number over time, making wings more sensitive to mutation and variation. Kind of like increasing the wing learning rate at an evolutionary level.

That could increase the odds that they'd eventually stumble upon things like this anti-sonar texturing, and that more advanced versions of it would start to appear. Maybe it could also have a role in the infamous peppered moth/pollution story.

And by contrast, maybe nature would also select for extreme resiliency of critical genes, like ones related to heart function and efficiency of resource use, so that they'd be less sensitive to generational variation.

I'm sure this could all still be explained even without that, but it's interesting to think about.

[lemiant]

I love that you wrote this. I wrote a very similar whitepaper about meta-evolution (evolving methods to propose better mutations) a few months ago: https://lemiant.github.io/PhilosophyCircle/papers/evolution_...

[meowface]

I was actually about to use the term "meta-evolution" while writing that post, since that's what it seemed like, though I wasn't sure if meta-evolution was already considered just a subset of overall evolution.

Your whitepaper definitely makes a lot of sense to me. Has there been a lot of other research done on this?

[amurale]

Something like that. Evolution = natural variation + natural selection.

In any given population there is natural variation: fastest moth, hairiest moth, whitest moth, etc. After evolutionary pressure is applied, the other moths are preferentially devoured, and the hairiest moth becomes the dominant variation with the most offspring.

For a similar historic account, read about the black form of the peppered moth which rapidly took over the moth population, caused by evolutionary pressure + single mutation in the year 1819.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36424768

[andy_ppp]

Well the ones that didn’t do this got eaten by bats, it’s very easy to see how survival of the fittest works CB in this case. Designing an eye with evolution seems somewhat harder...

[jfim]

They just evolved in multiple steps, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye

[imtringued]

>Designing an eye with evolution seems somewhat harder...

It's absolutely trivial. You just start with light sensitive skin. Then evolve a cavity to create a pinhole lens and then finally fill the hole with a lens. Making the eyeball move is optional but shouldn't be too tricky.

[douglaswlance]

A single moth had a mutation that made it wings ever so slightly scaled in a way the absorbed a tiny fraction of bat sonar. This allowed it to reproduce slightly more than the rest of the population, so its mutation was reinforced.

[vmception]

With our current understating of placing all specialization on mutation and natural selection, it requires the unsaid of millions of useless iterations and dead moths and starving bats.