[HN Gopher] Extinction of Steam Locomotives Derails Assumptions ...
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Extinction of Steam Locomotives Derails Assumptions about
Biological Evolution
Author : wjSgoWPm5bWAhXB
Score : 33 points
Date : 2023-03-30 10:51 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (today.ku.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (today.ku.edu)
| fastaguy88 wrote:
| What a bizarre analogy. Steam engines disappeared because of an
| optimization choice by railroad managers. Organisms emerge,
| persist, and go extinct because of random events with local
| effects. Successful organisms may have been the "fittest" at some
| point in their evolutionary history, or they may just have been
| lucky and not seen much selection. But there was no decision
| maker that chose the end result, unlike steam engines.
| masklinn wrote:
| On the other hand, what is "an optimisation choice" but a
| competition?
|
| There are decision makers which choose to stop purchasing steam
| engines, but they don't make their decisions out of arbitrary
| whim, at least not purely so (and you can assimilate whim to
| luck).
| livelielife wrote:
| it's a creative analogy
|
| as you dug into it, you found it didn't hold quite as well
|
| but I think that all scientific theories are is just 'creative
| analogies' that people came up before we were even born (or at
| least, grown up enough to understand?)
| fastaguy88 wrote:
| I think that many discussions about evolution -- even by
| evolutionary biologists -- rely much to heavily on the idea
| that evolution involves some kind do optimization process (as
| in Genetic Algorithms). Evolution is a random process that
| only cares about survival. Optimization is an occasional side
| effect.
|
| Analogies that incorporate the optimization perspective can
| easily mislead.
| livelielife wrote:
| rudimentary (old) evolution does only care about survival
|
| but for "newer"(?) evolution it's a solved problem. so "it"
| appears as if to care about other things.
|
| it's not quite correct to contrast 'rudimentary or old'
| with "newer". I think it's more reasonable to think of it
| as more or less fundamental to life. closer or further from
| basis survival
| wjSgoWPm5bWAhXB wrote:
| original paper
|
| https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.221210
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| I found the press release pretty confused/confusing. It starts by
| saying there's little evidence for competition affecting
| evolution, which sounds like nonsense.
|
| I peeked at the paper's abstract which seems to be talking about
| "macroevolution". Looks like this refers to larger scale trends
| on the level of clades rather than competition within species or
| between more closely related species.
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| "But what we would argue is, in fact, when things start to adapt
| and shift directionally -- traditionally in evolution that's not
| a good time for a group. We'd argue it's a sign the group may be
| experiencing duress or pressure from other things."
|
| that seems like an unapologetically unacademic assertion used to
| support someone's underlying personal problems on aging, change,
| and mortality.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| How? It makes complete sense to me? "Selection pressure" is
| basically a euphemism, the mechanism of evolution is the
| differentiation between survivors and those that _fucking die_.
|
| If a lot of evolution is happening, if there's strong pressure
| and quick changes in response to it, then it means there is a
| lot of "selecting" going on, a lot of death or at least failure
| to reproduce which isn't experienced as much less distressing
| for most organisms.
| taylodl wrote:
| Isn't this just stating the obvious? Things evolve when there's a
| natural selection pressure, i.e. stress, to evolve? If variations
| within the species don't confer any special advantages then all
| the variations will continue. If the environment were to suddenly
| change such that only one or two of those variations would confer
| an actual competitive advantage then the species will rapidly
| evolve.
|
| I thought this has been known for quite some time? Am I missing
| something?
| derbOac wrote:
| It's an interesting article (press release?) that makes an
| interesting point, although I personally realized as I was
| reading it that I don't think of biological evolution in terms of
| competition as much as I do differential survival or inheritance
| rates in some ecological context, possibly changing.
|
| Sexual selection seems more directly relevant to the idea of
| competitive evolutionary processes though maybe?
| andrewclunn wrote:
| Invasive species have already shown this to be the case. I swear
| sometimes academics think something can't be "true" or "known"
| until there's a paper written about it with a new term to signify
| the phenomena.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| To be fair to the academic, this just looks like a poor summary
| by the university's PR department.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Consumers, or businesses, making choices (A) is a poor analog to
| species flourishing or going extinct (B).
|
| B may suggest something about A, but the converse is not true at
| all.
| hirundo wrote:
| Certainly gravity applies to both economic and ecological
| physical artifacts, and many aspects of evolution do too,
| including its sources in heritability, variation and scarcity.
| How is it that you can know categorically that choices by
| economic replicators don't implicate evolution in the same ways
| as choices by ecological replicators?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| You seem to be willfully misunderstanding science.
| "Implicate" is a political word, not a scientific one.
| @giraffe_lady has hit the nail on the head here.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Does a light bulb implicate the sun? In some very specific
| ways certainly, but believing it generally does will cause
| more errors than useful insights.
| hirundo wrote:
| Studying the physics of the sun is highly useful in
| understanding lightbulbs, and visa versa. It's not just a
| surface analogy but a deep physical commonality in which
| discoveries about one not infrequently informs both. The
| same is true of the study of replicators across domains
| that look very different on the surface.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| That's really not true though. The important concepts in
| incandescent lightbulbs, mainly blackbody radiation, did
| not give us better knowledge about the sun because the
| sun is an immensely more complicated system heavily
| reliant on very different effects.
| robochat wrote:
| There is a strong connection between the incandescent
| lightbulbs and the sun because the sun is almost a
| blackbody emitter too. Studying incandescent lightbulbs
| allowed researchers to discover the blackbody spectrum
| and Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation, which was then
| applied to the Sun to discover its apparent temperature.
| The spectral lines in the Sun's spectrum (the frequencies
| where it deviates from the blackbody spectrum) then
| allowed researchers to study elements present in the
| Sun's photosphere.
| steveylang wrote:
| I agree with your point, just wanted to add that
| 'implicate' is not even the right term to describe the
| paper in question. Metaphors and analogies don't prove or
| even implicate anything, but can provide new perspectives
| for considering a subject. Looking at the original paper,
| that seems to be why steam locomotives are discussed.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Still, "competition" among mechanical devices is
| inherently different from competition among species or
| clades.
|
| you're right that it may provoke questions, but the
| inherent differences would give biologists plenty of
| reasons to just dismiss them.
| allemagne wrote:
| That entirely depends on what suggestions are being made, no?
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| check "Summa technologiae" by Stanislaw Lem, from 1960ies, one
| chapter is comparing bio-evolution with all kinds of
| technological (r)evolution(s), lots of similarities.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Technologiae
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