EvolvedClockwork

• EvolvedClockwork 6 Nov 2007 21:14 UTC

  0 points

  on: Nat­u­ral Selec­tion’s Speed Limit and Com­plex­ity Bound

  Ah, yes, the old “Einstein’s mother must have been one heck of a physicist” argument, or “Shakespeare only wrote what his parents and teachers taught him to write: Words.”

  Even in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity /​ algorithmic information, humans can have complexity exceeding the complexity of natural selection because we are only a single one out of millions of species to have ever evolved.

  And the things humans “do” are completely out of character for the things that natural selection actually does, as opposed to doing “by definition”.

  If you can’t distinguish between human intelligence and natural selection, why bother distinguishing between any two phenomena at all?

  I’m not sure I correctly understood your comment, so I hope I’m not responding to something you didn’t actually say.

  I agree there’s a distinction between human intelligence (and any other human trait), and natural selection, but I believe the distinction is that the former is a subset of the latter, rather than a separate and later entity.

  In other words, I’m not claiming that nothing can ever create something better than itself, but that in the case of humanity’s work it is still a part of natural selection (and hence natural selection can do anything humans do by way of the human activity that is part of natural selection).

  Am I violating some existing convention on the usage of the phrase “natural selection”? It seems to me that it’s purely through the same natural selection which evolves some wheels out of a bunch of organic and other materials that also evolve some wheels out of some human neurons and a bunch of organic and inorganic materials.

  Is there a non-arbitrary point at which one stops counting the behavior of evolved systems as natural selection? (And calling human artifice the stopping point doesn’t automatically make artificial evolution a non-subset of natural evolution.)

• EvolvedClockwork 6 Nov 2007 5:27 UTC

  0 points

  on: Nat­u­ral Selec­tion’s Speed Limit and Com­plex­ity Bound

  Humans can do things that evolutions probably can’t do period over the expected lifetime of the universe. As the eminent biologist Cynthia Kenyon once put it at a dinner I had the honor of attending, “One grad student can do things in an hour that evolution could not do in a billion years.” According to biologists’ best current knowledge, evolutions have invented a fully rotating wheel on a grand total of three occasions.

  FYI, God did not design humans, we are all naturally evolved. Evolution can and has indeed designed lots of fully rotating wheels and any other fancy contraptions, it just wound up using the clever approach of first evolving some grad students.

  Anything that a human can do, natural selection can do, by definition. We’re nothing more special than cogs in the evolutionary machine, albeit special cases of cogs that work a lot better than previous generations.

  Or did you think that human thought is some kind of deus ex machina?