[smusamashah]

When you notice these flaws you are seeing it in very very short term. What we are today is what eventually worked for a million years. The design you see today is the way it is because it had to be robust enough (including those problems) to survive to this day.

The examples you quote do look like a problem today, but I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.

[wruza]

They must work just well enough. Nature doesn’t strive for an ideal, cause it has no ideas. It’s a semi-working minimum based on another semi-working minimum. A duplicated bone is just infinitely more likely than a completely new organ. And you don’t have to be free from cancer or arthritis or heart diseases if your population leaves just enough offspring in time.

Iow, it’s not only robust enough, but just robust enough and never pretended to be ideal or durable, except for few accidental cases like sharks, crocs and turtles. Who surely can suffer from long-term non-killing issues but cannot whine to their GP about it.

The examples you quote do look like a problem today, but I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.

Nah, it’s a vast space. There may be natural trade-offs, but there’s no force to solve an issue in the best way possible. It solves randomly and if that creates a non-fatal problem - bad luck, now we just have it. You’ll always have a set of non-fatal problems just under fatality, and also a set of fatal problems just under a reproduction disabling line.

[cassepipe]

So evolution is a big pile of hacks ? :)

[wruza]

A concurrent optimization of stable reproduction (and nothing more) modulated by natural+emergent logistic maps.

Personally, and in hindsight ofc, I find abiogenesis much more miraculous than the life/evolution following it, cause the latter was sort of obvious and almost indestructible by its nature after it all started. It sort of just happens unamazingly in the complexity space it is lazily exploring (which itself is amazing that it exists).

Only intelligent agents can explore it with a goal different from (but still including) stable reproduction.

[beAbU]

Hacks imply some amount of intelligence, identifying a flaw or shortcoming, and trying some innovation to work around it.

[rakoo]

> I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.

No, the other consequence of evolution is that whatever we are today is not enough to kill us. Some of the things in our bodies and behavior are just useless, but not bad enough that they endanger our life and cut the genetic deviation responsible for it, so it just keeps on being there.

There's no good reason we still have 5 fingers on feet, but they're also not bad enough that having them all would endanger us as as species, so they just stay there.

[bena]

This is kind of wrong-ish.

There are parts that might be a million years old, but everything is in a state of flux at all times. Things are changing all the time. Evolution is a process with no end goal.

And just because that got us here today doesn't mean it's the best design. If that's the case, cats are equally the best design. As are dogs, and elephants, and mosquitos, and platypuses. Evolution is the ultimate form of the adage, "You don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than your friend". Good enough works well enough.

We are effectively held together with duct tape and string. Our eyes are wrong, our backs are wrong, our throats, nerves, circulatory, etc. are all wrong in some manner. And some of the fixes are simple. There is no reason for our ocular nerve to start from the inside of the eye. It just happened that way. And it worked well enough.

You can use a lead pipe to hammer nails, that didn't make it a good choice.

[nkrisc]

Yes, you’re describing evolution.

[smusamashah]

I am. I am also saying you can not design us any better than what we are today. You can't look into next billion years. Whatever becomes of us at the point will the best design at that point. The optimal design you are suggesting has zero guarantees to keep working.

If anything, your optimal design is just another mutation that may or may not survive time.

[lioeters]

> you can not design us any better

I disagree, evolution is not perfect nor intelligent (as far as we know). It's never the "best design" that survives, it's always "good enough for now", merely better than other solutions at the time. A billion years of good enough is not necessarily the best it can be theoretically.

I'm sure we can find examples of living processes that are dumb and inefficient, with obvious room for improvement, but have survived for millenia simply because it was good enough.

[latexr]

> I am also saying you can not design us any better than what we are today.

Of course you can. We could regenerate limbs like a lizard’s tail, keep growing teeth like a shark, not require so many different types of foods to survive healthily… The list goes on and on.

[wruza]

You absolutely can. Moreover, assuming enough technological and cultural evolution in e.g. 1000-10000 years, it will likely be done, if not completely replaced and redesigned.

The fact that conditions change doesn’t make your current form ideal.

Speaking of conditions.

In 5 billion years there will be no need for natural selection cause Earth will dip into the exploding Sun and evolution game will be over. Nothing will keep working. Even in 1B years it will be pretty hot outside. We’ll have no time for that “optimal” crap anymore, starting now tbh, considering our stupid tribal nature and the complexity of overcoming it.

Btw, if we fail to continue our current civilization, there will be no another civilization, cause we’ve drained all under-your-feet resources long ago. The next civilization will be forever farmers slowly burned by a star.

We absolutely can escape this fate by finding something much better than a bare minimum.

Edit: messed up numbers, fixed

[nkrisc]

You could if you were an intelligent designer designing humans completely from scratch a mere 10,000 years ago after you created the universe.

Which is the absurdity I’m pointing out.

[albedoa]

[flagged]

[9dev]

GP is arguing for something else though, namely that intelligent design is a fallacy. It’s advocacies argue that god created humans a mere 10k years or so ago, which obviously implies we didn’t evolve over millions of years, but were in fact created with inexplicable flaws. It’s all bullshit, of course, but there are people believing that.

[protonbob]

"It’s advocacies argue that god created humans a mere 10k years or so ago". This is false. There are plenty of ID advocates that believe in a scientific timeline, albeit, just with some intelligent guidance.

[nkrisc]

Which is conveniently unverifiable.

[fellowniusmonk]

And it would be a massively counter intuitive finding (if ID turned out to be anything but fantasy) because based on genetics and morphological lineage it looks exactly like a system/process that fits unguided evolution through selective pressure feedback loops.

[protonbob]

I'm just saying that your comment about 10k years is wrong and is not commonly held among intelligent design folks. I'm not arguing for that position though I do hold it.

[nkrisc]

Intelligent design is a code word for the creation myth of the Abrahamic religions in an attempt to make it seem like it has some basis in science.

Please point to a theory of intelligent design that is verifiable and doesn’t involve magic.

[protonbob]

I wasn't trying to dig into the specifics. I was just correcting your incorrect presumption that ID is about young earth creationism. Theology is about the why and not the how.

[dennis_jeeves2]

That is precisely the point he is trying to make....