>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
> It says that it is impossible for complex features such as wings, eyes etc to evolve because they will require a series of mutations that do not individually confer any evolutionary advantage.
This is just false. Evolutionary theory requires no such thing and there's plenty evidence that each step towards the evolution of things like the eye provides marginal advantage to the organism even though it's not fully an eye.
> It's how evolution is supposed to work: a simple organism gets some random changes and becomes more complex.
Er, no, that's not how evolution is supposed to work.
There is nothing in evolutionary theory that indicates a necessary preference for increasing complexity.
If (and this is a premise outside the scope of evolution) life starts with the something very close to the simplest form which can be "alive", it is unsurprising and consistent with evolution for evolution to produce some forms which are much more complex, and for the average complexity to increase over time -- especially if its not constrained by an upper bound on viable complexity.
But you, for instance, start with a bag of zeroes, periodically randomly add or subtract 1 to each number in your bag and then throw out any that are less than zero, over time the highest number and the average number in your bag is going to increase -- the change process isn't biased, but the selection process is.
It IS strange, using the evolutionary framework itself, that useless mutations will hang around for thousands or millions of years (countless generations) before dropping perfectly into an extremely complex system, that itself is but a small part of a larger complex system.
Evolution teaches that small, immediately useful mutations build upon one another, reinforcing the beneficial nature of the mutation. It's impossible to build large, complex life systems (with a large number of prerequisites at each step) this way. For example, the Heart, Blood Vessels and Blood. They're each extremely complex but useless without the other two.
How would evolution slowly evolve a heart with no blood or blood vessels?
How would evolution slowly evolve blood but no blood vessels or heart?
How would evolution slowly evolve a network of blood vessels but no blood to carry or heart to pump?
> 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.
> it seems presumptuous to believe that humans will suddenly figure out a way to do the same thing a trillion times more efficiently.
Why?
I think it might be confusion on your part on how incredibly inefficient evolution is. Many times you're performing random walks, or waiting for some random particle to break DNA just right, and then for that mutation to be in just the right place to survive. Evolution has no means of "oh shit, that would be an amazing speed up, I'll just copy that over" until you get into intelligence.
> 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.
> But again you're starting with a fairly complex system already, the molecular pump.
Yes, but it's less complex, and it in turn evolved from even simpler forms. The point is a single mutation doesn't need to create a working flagellum from scratch, it just needs to make it from what's already available. Flagella are complex structures that did not arise until after a lot of other things had already developed.
> And my (limited) understanding is that changes that are not useful or helpful would get lost.
This misunderstanding again comes from the distinction between the features and the instructions. If a mutation isn't harmful, it doesn't get reverted and in fact will spread throughout a sizeable fraction of the population. The thing is that without evolutionary pressure as more mutations occur, they will eventually break whatever the original mutation did, so the feature it coded will eventually disappear, though it can take a long time and it may change significantly before it does. There are some caveats though - a gene might code for multiple features, or may exist on a part of the DNA where further mutations are suppressed anyway, and thus even though the feature provides no advantage on its own there will still be evolutionary pressure to preserve the gene, and thus a neutral or even a slightly bad mutation might be retained indefinitely.
> And additional to that, if an organism has a pump (which it needs to function properly) and that pump suddenly is no pump, it's a very bad flagellum, that organism has a very big problem. It's like if we swapped our arms for wings. Wings are cool, but we wouldn't be able to fly anyway, and we'd have serious problems as humans with no arms and hands.
In this particular case, cells have many molecular pumps, so converting some to flagella is not a very big problem. The benefits of a shitty flagellum did outweigh the cost of losing some molecular pumps, but this is a very real limitation to what evolution can produce. Humans certainly won't evolve wings naturally without a lot of other changes happening first. But at the same time wings have evolved - in the case of birds their ancestors evolved an extremely efficient respiratory system more than 100 million years before they took flight, which helped them survive the great dying and subsequently take advantage of the oxygen rich Mesozoic era. Among these a mutation for hollow bones aided agility on the ground, among these adaptations for feathers helped with retaining body heat, among these adaptations for lunging their arms forward helped them grab prey, among these adaptations for tree climbing allowed them to become better ambushers, and it was among these that sacrificing some of their arm capabilities for shitty wings was a net gain.
>>Evolution is not a plan with a goal, it is a blind algorithm that chooses survivors, regardless of the survivors' traits, with the single requirement that they are the fittest for the environment in which they find themselves.
Well that does sound like a goal driven algorithm to me. Except that you can't actually say if a move made by the algorithm will actually produce a acceptable outcome to the algorithm itself. Due to the sheer number of variables, the only option the algorithm has is to do a kind of A/B testing. To make changes to a smaller subset of subjects and see if they survive, if they do they do. If they don't, well then you can kill that test and move on more modifications.
Evolution is an optimization algorithm, which makes changes, tests and makes more changes/corrects based on feed back.
> The science behind the former is established (mutations favored by environment); the science behind the latter is not.
That's not even an example of a paradigm shift. Continuous transformation trivially gets us between superficial differences like mere body shape, there are many examples of us applying selection pressure to other species to make that category of thing happen, including our crops, livestock, and pets.
> You are mixing the two together and complaining the second one is non-sense, but is it?
What I'm calling nonsensical is your description. You're calling for the time complexity for a brain to invent changes that aren't caused directly by brains.
> Somehow fish had to learn to walk ("evolution from one organism to another") in a limited time including complex mechanics that our computers can't solve exactly
1) Exact solutions aren't necessary; 2) computers have solved walking; 3) the boundary between walking and floundering is an arbitrary one. And 4 after the next quote…
> I am waiting for any computational biologist to give us some mechanism behind it that is realistic,
One of the ways computers solve problems like this is simulated evolution.
> So far nothing and people keep mentioning local adaptations only.
Do you also insist nobody has ever climbed Mount Everest on the grounds that nobody has legs long enough to do it in one step?
>> Evolution is not a plan with a goal, it is a blind algorithm that chooses survivors, regardless of the survivors' traits, with the single requirement that they are the fittest for the environment in which they find themselves.
> Well that does sound like a goal driven algorithm to me.
Not in the way most people mean. When people hear there's a scheme to evolution, many assume this means a gradual ascent in complexity or intelligence, but that's not necessarily so. There's no relationship between natural selection and any specific endpoint.
> Evolution is an optimization algorithm ...
No, it's an adaptation algorithm. Its outcome are never optimal, only the best approximate response to environmental changes, in an ever-changing environment.
Really? I think it kind of does invent. Trial and error. Back propagation. Mutation. Some randomness at conception. Sure it's a personification, but not a bad one.
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.
Evolution isn't a guided process. Its just random mutations which occasionally workout preferably. Its like rolling a billion sided die a bunch of times and thinking you should have rolled a 7 by now.
> Evolution is OK at adapting current things to new uses, or doing a massively-parallel search on what you can do with just a tweak to a gene, but if the task can't be done with one of those things, it just loses and the organism dies. Or, to put it another way, it's good at climbing slopes one step at a time, but if you present it with a cliff it just fails.
As long as a mutation isn't drastically harmful, it may persist in the population to be built upon later.
> It's essentially the same reason why nothing has evolved a resistance to a human gardener yanking them physically out of the ground and leaving them to die on the concrete...
They have evolved quite a few of these. Try and clear a lawn of dandelions and you'll discover they regenerate from their taproot if you leave any of it in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry indicates another, where false flax has evolved based on a human invention, winnowing machines, to evade them.
Rye grain evolved so effectively based on human activity that it went from weed to useful crop, even.
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
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