[zb3]

I didn't say that evolution finds the optimal state, just wanted to highlight how far it was able to go, much farther it seems.. (like evolution of the eye)

But your comment was refreshing, could you briefly expand on the "multicellular" life part? Did you mean that it enabled more non-locally-optimal transitions, or that it required them to appear?

[Rhapso]

I think cooperation is never a locally optimal strategy. Somebody allways gets to pick second at the prisoner's dilemma table, and locally optimal behavior is to eat the trusting idiot.

Takes a lot of luck to evolve cooperation multiple times at once, much more likely to happen in a situation where the selection pressure is lower, not higher.

[dasil003]

Now you get into the definition of "locally". Gene pool local or individual local? I think it's evident that cooperation has proven highly effective at the gene pool level. Will it prove to only be effective short-term local and flame out over longer-time spans remains to be seen. Will there be anyone to document it? Not sure, but it's been a helluva ride.

[corimaith]

Pretty sure those non-cooperative strategies quickly burn themselves to extinction though. The selection pressure itself would be regulated towards an equilibrium.

The thing about evolution is that you are sampling many times in different directions. So "luck" isn't that hard to achieve.

[Rhapso]

> Pretty sure those non-cooperative strategies quickly burn themselves to extinction though.

> Pretty sure those non-cooperative strategies quickly burn themselves to extinction though.

Um, most life hanging out in the same tropic level or lower is heavily predated upon. Competition is the norm.

Luck is hard for cooperation because it is a coordination problem. You basically have to evolve cooperation entirely as a unexpressed trait then trigger it in the population almost simultaneously. The mechanisms of cell cooperation are critical dividers on our evolutionary trees for a reason, they are rare and dramatic in consequence. Cell populations regressing in terms of coordination behavior (see cancer) is one of their most problematic failure modes and it is only very weakly selected against.

[corimaith]

>Um, most life hanging out in the same tropic level or lower is heavily predated upon. Competition is the norm.

I'm referring to the predator-prey population cycles. If you overexploit your prey you are going to run out of food and see your population thin out rapidly from starvation. Hence hyper-competitive strategies would get outbreeded by less competitive but sustainable strategies.

High predation levels would require equally high cooperation levels amongst prey to ensure rapid reproduction to sustain the food supply. If we go down the food chain it's the same thing, plant life, celluar life, etc, has to be flourishing to sustain the upper levels.

[jfoutz]

You quoted this part,

> Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

But then seemed to indicate evolution disagrees.

I might be misunderstanding your point, but it sure seems like, evolution tries a bunch of stuff, and whatever reproduces kinda wins.

That seems like, take chances, make mistakes, get messy. That seems like the core of evolution.

Could you clarify or refine what you’re saying? The two seem at odds.

[zb3]

So that was a bad quote, I only wanted to address the part that mentioned monotonic-only improvement, since to me, evolution has achieved more than I'd imagine, evolving organs like the eye incrementally.

I got inspired by this article: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/05/why-does-biologi...

[Rhapso]

Basically, the root disagreement was "monotonic improvement". Evolution is awesome, but it couldn't work with only monotonic improvement.

I used to do an "optimization" on my genetic algorithms. I'd ensure the highest scoring genome of the last population was a member of the new one. It made sure every single generation improved or stood still.

It was a good idea to keep a copy of the "best" genome around for final output, but by keeping it in the search space, I was damaging the ability of the algorithm to do it's job by dragging the search space constantly back to the most recent local optima.