[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.