Atomism had been “predicted” by Democritus, and still, it wasn’t accepted until Dalton. This is a big piece of evidence that atomism wasn’t obvious for people unfamiliar with weighing chemical compounds. The same would apply to natural selection. Saying that it is obvious once you understand it smells of hindsight bias; ideas often look obvious when known to be true. The ancient Greeks didn’t know that learned traits are not inherited, nor they had much evidence for this fact. They didn’t know that the boundaries between species aren’t unsurmountable, nor they had much evidence: almost no knowledge of fossils, not particularly good understanding of breeding and its history. It was perfectly reasonable for an ancient Greek philosopher to assume that a population of goats will forever remain a population of goats. The individual goats may vary, but the variability could be always constrained by some Platonic prototype of goat category whose boundaries are defined and maintained by gods or other eternal forces of nature. Not to mention that the important part of natural selection idea—that it is the driving force behind evolution—doesn’t automatically follow from only heritability, variation and selection. In a stable environment the populations may well occupy local minima in the fitness landscape and remain stable for a long time.
But what I am most bothered about is that this post appears as an attempt to declare natural selection and intelligence explosion as equally obvious, from today’s perspective.
They didn’t know that the boundaries between species aren’t unsurmountable
This is anachronistic. Ancients believed that the boundaries between some species were weaker than we do today, for example, that oats were degenerate barley.
I don’t know to what extent they thought species were transmutable. But they didn’t think it impossible.
Just as their false belief that the Earth was eternal may have enabled them to figure out evolution had they thought more clearly, so too with some of their other false beliefs, such as that some species could easily turn into another.
Atomism had been “predicted” by Democritus, and still, it wasn’t accepted until Dalton. This is a big piece of evidence that atomism wasn’t obvious for people unfamiliar with weighing chemical compounds. The same would apply to natural selection. Saying that it is obvious once you understand it smells of hindsight bias; ideas often look obvious when known to be true. The ancient Greeks didn’t know that learned traits are not inherited, nor they had much evidence for this fact. They didn’t know that the boundaries between species aren’t unsurmountable, nor they had much evidence: almost no knowledge of fossils, not particularly good understanding of breeding and its history. It was perfectly reasonable for an ancient Greek philosopher to assume that a population of goats will forever remain a population of goats. The individual goats may vary, but the variability could be always constrained by some Platonic prototype of goat category whose boundaries are defined and maintained by gods or other eternal forces of nature. Not to mention that the important part of natural selection idea—that it is the driving force behind evolution—doesn’t automatically follow from only heritability, variation and selection. In a stable environment the populations may well occupy local minima in the fitness landscape and remain stable for a long time.
But what I am most bothered about is that this post appears as an attempt to declare natural selection and intelligence explosion as equally obvious, from today’s perspective.
This is anachronistic. Ancients believed that the boundaries between some species were weaker than we do today, for example, that oats were degenerate barley.
I don’t know to what extent they thought species were transmutable. But they didn’t think it impossible.
Just as their false belief that the Earth was eternal may have enabled them to figure out evolution had they thought more clearly, so too with some of their other false beliefs, such as that some species could easily turn into another.
Or maybe not. It’s worth thinking about.