Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by TravisCooper 885 days ago
Strange that an uncoordinated, random walk of mutations would keep a profound number of changes in tact, ready for some other random bit to take place and it all just "fall into place". The eye didn't evolve. Hearing didn't evolve. Smell didn't evolve.

This line of thinking is just hopeful projections of desired causality.
2 comments
mrphoebs 885 days ago
The profound number of changes are in tact only if those changes aid in the natural selection of the organism against selection pressure.

Such changes are replicated more successfully (more offspring) making the change/mutation more resilient to disappearing from the genepool.

Over time any organism that's living/thriving is going to have a lot of these mutations stacked on top of one another in a resilient way(size of population with the same mutations). Any mutations that are disadvantageous to natural selection and proliferation are weeded out of the genepool (go extinct)

link
MrVandemar 885 days ago
> The eye didn't evolve. Hearing didn't evolve. Smell didn't evolve.

I don't know if you're being somehow pedantic for some definition of "eye" or "evolve", or if you're one of those "Intelligent Design" creeps.

link
pfdietz 885 days ago
I think people are misled because it's difficult to really grasp the very high dimensionality of the space ("morphospace") in which organisms sit. There are many, many directions for incremental change to go in, and evolution just needs there to be an improving step at each point along the path. In a low dimensional space it would be easy to get stuck in local minima, but as the number of dimensions increases that's harder and harder.

Evolution can be very easy given time. Trees independently evolved from non-tree plants something like 100 times, for example.

link