Humans are the most successful new species in history according to the utility function of evolution.
Have you covered this before in more detail? This seems probably false to me at first glance (I’d expect some insects and plants to be more successful). Last I checked, population rates in industrialized nations were also sub-replacement. But I also haven’t thought about this that much.
Yes. I said “most successful new species in history according to the utility function of evolution”.
There are about 100k to 300k chimpanzees (similar for gorillas, orangutans, etc) for example, compared to ~8 billion humans. So we are over 4 OOM more successful than related lineages.
We are far and away the most successful recent species by a landslide, and probably the most successful mammal ever. There are almost as many humans as there are bats (summing over all 1,400 known bat species). There are a bit more humans in the world than rats (summing over all 60 rat species) - a much older ultra-successful lineage.
By biomass, humans alone—a single species—accounts for almost half of the land mammal biomass, and our domesticated food sources account for the other half. Biomass is perhaps a better estimate of genetic replicator success, as larger animals have more cells and thus more gene copies.
Your argument indicates that humans are successful (by said metric) among mammals, but doesn’t address how it compares to insects. As I understand it, some insect species have both more many more individuals and much more biomass than humans
I think I get the issue here. You seem to be aggregating over IGF of every human gene in the human population.
The sheer stupidity of our civilization and the rate at which we are hurtling towards extinction does imply that we are not ‘aligned’ to IGF, though—so I disagree.
The unit of selection is the gene, not the species. Aggregating over a species is not a proxy for the success of a gene replicator—why not aggregate over apes instead, or European-origin races instead?
I’d also like to hear more about why “evolution” is modeled as HAVING a utility function, rather than just being the name we give to the results of of variation and selection. And only then discussion of what that function might be.
I don’t see how decision theory or VNM rationality applies to evolution, let alone what “success” might mean for a species as opposed to an individual conscious entity with semi-coherent goals.
The entire argument of the sharp left turn presupposes evolution has a utility function for the analogy to work, so arguing about that is tangential, but it’ pretty obvious you can model genetic evolution as optimizing for replication count (or inclusive fitness over a species). We have concrete computational models of genetic optimization already, so there is really no no need to bring in rationality or agents, it’s just a matter of optimization functions.
I think there’s a terminological mismatch here. Dagon was asking about a “utility function” as specifically being something satisfying the VNM axioms. But I think you’re using it (in this comment and the one Dagon was replying to) synonymous with the more general concept of an “optimization function”, i.e. a function returning some output that somehow gets optimized for?
Number of individuals is not a conserved quantity. If you’re going to score contests of homeostasis, do it by something like biomass (plants win), or how much space it takes up in a random encounter table, or how much attention aliens would need to pay to it to predict the planet’s future (humans win).
Have you covered this before in more detail? This seems probably false to me at first glance (I’d expect some insects and plants to be more successful). Last I checked, population rates in industrialized nations were also sub-replacement. But I also haven’t thought about this that much.
Yes. I said “most successful new species in history according to the utility function of evolution”. There are about 100k to 300k chimpanzees (similar for gorillas, orangutans, etc) for example, compared to ~8 billion humans. So we are over 4 OOM more successful than related lineages.
We are far and away the most successful recent species by a landslide, and probably the most successful mammal ever. There are almost as many humans as there are bats (summing over all 1,400 known bat species). There are a bit more humans in the world than rats (summing over all 60 rat species) - a much older ultra-successful lineage.
By biomass, humans alone—a single species—accounts for almost half of the land mammal biomass, and our domesticated food sources account for the other half. Biomass is perhaps a better estimate of genetic replicator success, as larger animals have more cells and thus more gene copies.
We are the anomaly.
Your argument indicates that humans are successful (by said metric) among mammals, but doesn’t address how it compares to insects. As I understand it, some insect species have both more many more individuals and much more biomass than humans
I think I get the issue here. You seem to be aggregating over IGF of every human gene in the human population.
The sheer stupidity of our civilization and the rate at which we are hurtling towards extinction does imply that we are not ‘aligned’ to IGF, though—so I disagree.
I agree that conditional on humanity going extinct, the seeming success of our species by a genetic metric would only be a false success.
The unit of selection is the gene, not the species. Aggregating over a species is not a proxy for the success of a gene replicator—why not aggregate over apes instead, or European-origin races instead?
I’d also like to hear more about why “evolution” is modeled as HAVING a utility function, rather than just being the name we give to the results of of variation and selection. And only then discussion of what that function might be.
I don’t see how decision theory or VNM rationality applies to evolution, let alone what “success” might mean for a species as opposed to an individual conscious entity with semi-coherent goals.
The entire argument of the sharp left turn presupposes evolution has a utility function for the analogy to work, so arguing about that is tangential, but it’ pretty obvious you can model genetic evolution as optimizing for replication count (or inclusive fitness over a species). We have concrete computational models of genetic optimization already, so there is really no no need to bring in rationality or agents, it’s just a matter of optimization functions.
I think there’s a terminological mismatch here. Dagon was asking about a “utility function” as specifically being something satisfying the VNM axioms. But I think you’re using it (in this comment and the one Dagon was replying to) synonymous with the more general concept of an “optimization function”, i.e. a function returning some output that somehow gets optimized for?
Number of individuals is not a conserved quantity. If you’re going to score contests of homeostasis, do it by something like biomass (plants win), or how much space it takes up in a random encounter table, or how much attention aliens would need to pay to it to predict the planet’s future (humans win).