> Of course evolving the pupa seems like it would be a lot more difficult
Once you have evolved one intermediate form others can follow more easily. It’s always important to remember that genes define recipes that create biological structures, not blueprints of what they look like.
It’s a different mechanism but genetic networks are good at repeating things like body segments, fingers, etc. Biology invented the REPEAT UNTIL loop a long time before we did.
I'm not a biologist or geneticists but from everything that I've read about cellular biology and genetics I get the strong feeling that there is a lot of encapsulation going on. Sure, it isn't 100% percent perfect but there is still encapsulation going on. Evolution would probably be way harder without it.
One hint is the human body, there are lots of encapsulations: eyes, heart, kidneys, digestive system, etc.
Evolution can repurpose an existing system for a completely different use with just some tweaking.
> In biological construction, there is no clearly defined blueprint that shows the final structure. Instead, our genes contain the information to make the structure by controlling a sequence of events during morphogenesis.
This seems obvious now, but it never occurred to me. It inspires me to try to stay more focused on good processes and less on desired outcomes.
> I think a reproducing pattern would be a pretty significant accomplishment in itself.
Reproducing patterns are relatively common now e.g. [0], but the whole game here is artificial life, which means different things to different people, but generally self-reproduction (even with mutation) is not considered sufficient as it does not advance in complexity as life systems seem to.
> If we can reverse engineer the mechanisms of evolution
Evolution is a very simple process, broadly speaking. You can implement your own model of it fairly easily. Survival is basically the only driving force, only those variations that survive to reproduce will be present in the next generation. It's a useful tool but we shouldn't let it guide us since it is quite blind.
> What is evolution driving us to become?
There is no destination for the evolutionary process. It's creation by subtraction really, everything that doesn't work gets eliminated. Mind you, it's always only applicable to the current circumstances. What works in one time and place will not always work in another. Hence the constant change.
> Evolution evolved to ensure the survival of the species, not the individual.
At some point in our evolutionary history the cells in our body made this choice. Evolution favors survival and potentially reproduction, because otherwise you are no longer in the game. So there was some evolutionary constraint that caused those genes not to regenerate parts.
It's possible we can change things so that those genes are active again. But we don't really understand these systems well enough to do that and won't anytime soon. But science carries on and I am sure you can make lab mice to test hypotheses of how this might work in mammals. And we probably will very soon, if not here then in China.
Evolution is perfectly fine even if you don't reproduce much, as long as you continue to survive in your environment. There are creatures out there that have changed very little and we know this because we have fossil records, and this is because they have been adapted to their environment and stayed adapted despite the environmental changes. And there are even immortal creature that die not because their bodies age and kill them but because they are eaten by other things, but still they don't change much over time. I guess you could say they are better evolved than other creatures that have to constantly change. They made better evolutionary decisions than other creatures very early on.
> but still the overall coordination seems so much more purposeful than something that would happen with a few initial mutations and then some further selection.
Isn't this just selection bias on a grand scale? You're looking at a specimen where the parts happened to end up arranged in a way that allows it to exhibit these properties that seem like coordination, while not paying much attention to the quintillions of specimens that did not.
>Evolution works through tiny incremental changes, but this flight sounds like an all-or-nothing scenario.
I never confirmed one way or the other, but I'm fairly positive evolution operates by large sudden changes followed by incremental improvements/optimizations -- it's difficult to explain many "weird" traits through incremental improvements, because most of them would get stuck in local maxima's before achieving any real benefit over the prior state.
Like you can't evolve a third arm by slowly iterating towards it, from a lump to a stump to a limb to a functional limb; it'd be entirely a loss until it becomes fully functional. You have to grow a shitty yet complete third arm first, but not so shitty that it doesn't offer benefit, and then iteratively improve it into a pretty nice arm
>since we recreating evolution is computationally prohibitive.
You don't see what you did there. The only way to 'bake in' these things is to create them via evolution in the first place. Also, these instincts are not 'baked' they continue to evolve with each generation.
Not sure about that, a lot of solutions in nature are honed by billions of years of evolution, sometimes creating feats even more impressive than we can do currently. There is an entire field about copying biology to solve our problems:
> There is a reason biology tugs on ropes and lets reaction surfaces slide around instead.
And that reason is that it's very difficult to have a rolling joint or muscle because you can't get blood into it. It's largely fundamentally inaccessible to an organism that must grow itself. There are massive advantages that are unexplored by evolution.
Even further, gears are inherently asymmetric, meaning they are even harder to evolve. Nevertheless nature DOES use gears[1] when it can.
> You can shape the surfaces the way you want for the movement you need.
>Having studied biology and genetics this is common sense to me. Genetic systems are probabilistic chemical systems where everything influences everything to varying degrees in parallel. They are nothing like the linear assemblies of modules that humans prefer to engineer.
I'm really glad that this mental model I've built up seems to reflect reality. The idea of neatly editing specific genes to produce a desired result always sat with me as the pinnacle of human hubris. The more I learn about Biology the more I just throw up my hands and say "magic".
>If you take two populations of otherwise identical people and then isolate them from each other, they'll diverge over time. Maybe the land is different, or the weather, and some genes are better adapted to one place or the other so they become more common there.
By these logic every form of life it's the same since all evolved from the same unicellular organisms.
And yet my cat doesn't have leaves while my plant I keep in the pot doesn't meow.
> how this evolution mirrors a simulated annealing algorithm how this behaviour forms species.
Before we did the full-on evolutionary stuff, I was fiddling with simulated annealing. There's definitely a connection.
It's all a subset of global optimization really. What makes evolution so fascinating is how it seems (at least in real life) to be able to direct its own path towards interesting solutions to particular problems. It's sort of like this mad genius, who keeps shouting brilliant things at you, but never listens. So you can never ask him a question -- you just have to set things up so he'll want to find an answer to the question you wish you could ask.
>One theory of why you see so much symmetry in biology is that it takes less information to build something using symmetry than specifying the whole directly.
This makes a lot of sense.
It works the same way in computer programming. Instead of rewriting generic code for every new program, components can be split off into separate files and called when needed in a standardized way. This speeds up development and leaves less room for error.
It's not very far fetched to think other life forms are using the same strategy unconsciously to fuel their own evolution.
Once you have evolved one intermediate form others can follow more easily. It’s always important to remember that genes define recipes that create biological structures, not blueprints of what they look like.
It’s a different mechanism but genetic networks are good at repeating things like body segments, fingers, etc. Biology invented the REPEAT UNTIL loop a long time before we did.
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