What do you mean by “simple cases like this one?” Empirically, evolution quite often ends up in a Nash equilibrium of conflict where a negotiated solution would have less deadweight loss.
Simple cases like the ants or like toy problems where humans usually get the right answer (and some where we don’t). In cases where iterated reasoning can come up with a solution, evolution will be MUCH slower but will come up with answers as good as any modeled reasoning engine.
(note: I’m overstating this by quite a lot. The effects of path-dependency and search breadth for evolution and of modeling limitations and limited capacity for brains can make orders of magnitude difference in the solutions found. In simple theory, though, they’re roughly equivalent.)
The fact that evolution is adequate to produce ants doesn’t really have much bearing on anything here, unless there’s also reason to believe that lookahead can’t do better than ants, which is clearly absurd. Even if the moon were a rich source of calories (say, by having comparatively unimpeded access to sunlight), evolution just doesn’t know how to get there and can’t figure it out by iteration. Humans clearly can in principle, it’s hard for us but obviously within our reach as a species, and not by natural selection for flight.
Panspermia theories have vulcanic activity and meteor strikes moving bacteria world to world. It’s not clear it’s off limit to evolution (or one needs to do some tricky organic world vs inorganic world boundary drawing to get a motivated cognition result).
What do you mean by “simple cases like this one?” Empirically, evolution quite often ends up in a Nash equilibrium of conflict where a negotiated solution would have less deadweight loss.
Simple cases like the ants or like toy problems where humans usually get the right answer (and some where we don’t). In cases where iterated reasoning can come up with a solution, evolution will be MUCH slower but will come up with answers as good as any modeled reasoning engine.
(note: I’m overstating this by quite a lot. The effects of path-dependency and search breadth for evolution and of modeling limitations and limited capacity for brains can make orders of magnitude difference in the solutions found. In simple theory, though, they’re roughly equivalent.)
The fact that evolution is adequate to produce ants doesn’t really have much bearing on anything here, unless there’s also reason to believe that lookahead can’t do better than ants, which is clearly absurd. Even if the moon were a rich source of calories (say, by having comparatively unimpeded access to sunlight), evolution just doesn’t know how to get there and can’t figure it out by iteration. Humans clearly can in principle, it’s hard for us but obviously within our reach as a species, and not by natural selection for flight.
Panspermia theories have vulcanic activity and meteor strikes moving bacteria world to world. It’s not clear it’s off limit to evolution (or one needs to do some tricky organic world vs inorganic world boundary drawing to get a motivated cognition result).