Evolutionary biology is sincerely beautiful, the biological history of our species is a meta-history to human history.
On a grander scale, the biological history of life itself weaves the career of the human race into a context of profound interconnectivity.
It's natural to contemplate your origins, the place and culture you come from, your ancestors and the history of your family. It's even more profound to contemplate your biological origins, your ancestry into species unrecognizable from your own.
It really is a humbling experience to trace a path thousands and even millions of years into the past. The end result is an increased appreciation for the beauty of nature and for the inseparable unity of the human race.
But also remember that billions died so you could exist. Natural selection is what it is... selection, and those that are not selected.. are silenced.
Be awed by the beauty but also be wary of the horror that is existence.
Awe, beauty and horror are human concepts. Do not let that bias cloud your logic. When something is beautiful to you, you become blind to the horror. When something is horrible to you, you become blind to the beauty. Best way to view something, is to ignore both, and judge it dispassionately.
Nothing is beautiful, nothing is horrible. That is true understanding.
What's interesting is if you frame evolution as a system for producing and propagating increasingly efficient (given a context or state) behaviors through time (such that "living things" can amass more energy or manipulate their environment more), and take into account what makes humans unique, it's really eye opening as to the nature of intelligence, learning, emotions, and really just why we are the way we are. It seems the things that make humanity unique is how extremely efficient we are at propagating knowledge through time via means that are not merely genetic, yet our brains are still fundamentally limited by the chemical processes that make them up. What would happen if we were able to find a way to create a self-regulating, autofeedback system that made decisions at the speed of, say, electricity (nearly c)
It may not even be acyclic. For example it appears fetal DNA is permanently detectable in mothers and may even have health benefits that conceivably increase the mother’s evolutionary fitness.
Yup. Genetic recombination means some genotypes are the result of crossover of two parents. Horizontal gene transfer has a similar implication. This means the true structure is a directed hypergraph.
How can it be acyclic? A phylogenetic tree is a DAG. Organisms sharing DNA? That's definitely a cyclic graph.
If there were Schema.org/Animal and/or schema:AnimalInstance classes, what do you list under a :breed property to indicate that e.g. one parent is breed X and another is breed Y?! That's definitely not a DAG; that looks like a feature clustering dendrogram.
My assumption as someone not formally trained in advanced biology is that the phylogenetic tree has an implied arrow of time, and each node of the tree is a point where a mutation occurred that was sufficient to create a new and separate family/order/genus/etc afterwards, with leaf nodes representing species.
In this sense a cycle can’t occur because a branch would need to reach back in time and rejoin with an ancestral branch. It would be a different kind of grandfather paradox: who would be the ancestor and who the descendant in a cycle?
Maybe someone could help point out the flaws in this model.
Your assumption is true, but only for rooted phylogenetic trees. In unrooted trees the node representing the most ancestral state is absent and thus no directionality can be determined.
And who even knows how many different times high level intelligence has evolved. I think octopi, birds, and mammals are all good examples of separate intelligence tracks with similar results.
I believe Darwin envisioned that, and the Tree of Evolution was just an introductory notion (I never read his book) before going into subtler reasons for new traits.
Darwin believed that each successive generation of a species had increasing mutations leading to a gradual divergence. Another school of thought believes that a species remains at equilibrium until some environmental stressor activates a rapid divergence. If this "punctuated equilibrium" is true, climate change will give rise to many new species, as would all mass extinctions.
What Darwin knew about biology is incommensurate with a modern understanding of the word "mutation". A generation later than him, biologists still believed cells were formless blobs of jelly, so to speak.
Punctuated equilibrium is even less defensible given our present understanding of the molecular basis of genetics.
Mutation means the same thing now as it did back then. What has changed is that we now understand how it works. The concept of punctuated equilibrium was introduced in 1972. It is the leading theory based on present understanding. I'm not sure what you mean by "less defensible."
Punctuated equilibrium still involves gradual Darwinian change, but over very short periods of time compared to the long periods where the species is adapted as well as it can be (without major, unlikely changes) to its present environment.
I'm hoping that gradually over a very short period of time folks will realize the contradiction in terms that is called "punctuated equilibrium". It has no feasible molecular basis. Without such, it might as well be fairy dust for its explanatory power. But gradual fairy dust, that operates over very short periods of time.
The pertinent question remains: at the molecular level, how?
Seeing that the article was about the "Tree of Life" metaphor and Coral, it is surprising that it didn't mention that Darwin actually suggested that a "Coral of Life" metaphor was superior to a "Tree of Life" metaphor in his notebooks (or maybe I missed it?).
A couple of weeks ago, I went to Fiji and met my parents there. We stayed at Navini Island Resort, the kind of luxury I'd never choose for personal travels, but it was a nice holiday on an island in the South Pacific.
The corals were particularly memorable. My dad's also from a comp sci background, and noticed how the coral colours are RGB.
From other HN posts, I'd been thinking about the Tree of Life, and wondering about roots. Trees are basically mirrored around ground level. But coral grow without roots!
So yes, I like the "Coral of Life" metaphor. It fits well with the Big Bang model, of having a single starting point and growing from there.
Species are approximations that can be useful to discuss populations but they are very fuzzy at the edges. There is not single definition of species that applies in all cases. In that sense they are somewhat arbitrary but terms can be arbitrary and useful at the same time.
It seems the article is merely about the ‘wonder’ and ‘Eureka’ moment of realizing one’s definition of species is over or under inclusive.
To summarize the article (using a more familiar animal):
Polar Bears and Grizzly Bears are different species… Yet they can reproduce! Good god, that means they were once the same species, then different species, and now the same species again! My minds blown!
that was my thought too. the general principle hasn't changed, just the understanding of how much divergence is necessary before the branches are truly separate.
what's surprising is that it took so long to realize that.
we only need to look at dogs to see an immense variety that is still interbreedable.
and if dogs can, why not sharks or bears?
i think the only reason we don't don't see that more often is because they each live in different habitats and opportunities for interbreeding are rare.
i expect genetics will be able to give a better answer as to how much variety is needed before interbreeding no longer works.
There isn't a single answer to give re: the viability of interbreeding. It depends on the particular individuals and the particulars of their offspring and a whole lot of environmental luck besides. As individuals get farther apart, the chances of successful reproduction simply decrease. Beyond a certain point, fertilization simply ceases to take place and the issue is moot.
In general, the babies that are born have already passed through a nightmarishly difficult biological gauntlet to survive. If they fail at any stage, the pregnancy is simply terminated. The majority of fertilizations never lead to births as a result.
It isn’t a continuum, though.
There are distinct discontinuities.
Chromosome count is one such example. Polar bears and grizzlies have 74 chromosomes. A panda has 42.
You can’t gradually go from one to the other.
Absent some mechanism we don’t know about, conception simply doesn’t work when the sperm and eggs have different numbers of chromosomes.
To be clear, the concept of chromosome isn’t as objective as one might think… nevertheless, it’s an example of the type of genetic difference that simply precludes reproduction.
I find that a lot of things are really DAGs or full on graphs but are easier to reason about as roughly trees. Website structures, for example. All knowledge, even. For some reason, trees are so much easier to hold in the head.
On a grander scale, the biological history of life itself weaves the career of the human race into a context of profound interconnectivity.
It's natural to contemplate your origins, the place and culture you come from, your ancestors and the history of your family. It's even more profound to contemplate your biological origins, your ancestry into species unrecognizable from your own.
It really is a humbling experience to trace a path thousands and even millions of years into the past. The end result is an increased appreciation for the beauty of nature and for the inseparable unity of the human race.