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by lukebitts 1108 days ago
That’s not true at all. If something is a waste but doesn’t meaningfully change yours odds of suvival, “evolution” won’t care
1 comments

Out there food and energy are often scarce. Evolution does care about efficiency in that particular case a lot. True, there are ecosystems with plenty of free food but they are rarity.
Evolution doesn't care about anything.
it is possible this is not quite true
No, that is not possible.
At least in plants there is some evidence that mutations produced and then acted on by natural selection are not fully random. It is a long held assumption this should not be possible, but there are interesting lines of evidence suggesting it may be. It would open the chance of there being a kind of (limited) underlying logic.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04269-6.pdf

This is an example. Epigenetically driven evolution in arabodopsis, which protects certain regions from mutation. In a very limited sense, evolution might be said to "care" about something here, as it is kind of taking direction from the environment, not simply acting on uniformly random mutations. Nothing like this is known in animals or most anywhere else afaik.