The Wonder of Evolution

Eliezer,

Could you -- perhaps in another thread -- discuss how "The Evolution of Cooperation" (as Robert Axelrod put it) fits or does not fit with Huxley's comment. Can Axelrod and Huxley both be right?

John

The wonder of evolution is that it works at all.

It's a process that, given certain rudimentary facts about existence, MUST occur. It's totally mindless, relies on trial-and-error, and is unspeakably powerful. You can't make designs better than it can - you can't even make designs as well as it can. At most, you can take incredibly complex systems it's created and point out a few places where you could put a patch to make things even better. You can do this by using a brain evolution is responsible for.

Evolution doesn't recognize your inherent 'specialness' at all. Nothing in the universe does, come to think of it, except a few other people. Almost the entirety of the universe is utterly indifferent to your existence: no stars in the sky heralding your birth, no suns dimming at your passing, no cosmic phenomena that mirror what you think, what you feel.

How that must vex you!

caledonian

evolution is contingent. so are we. what's your point?

Caledonian, in reply to the first half of your post: some of evolution's designs are quite impressive, yes. They took billions of years to produce. Just wait until we've had a billion years to design stuff - then you'll be really impressed.

Also, your taunting is not useful. Stop it.

Certainly life has been evolving for billions of years, and there's no way to guess at what humans might design over a similar period of time.

So let's look at evolutionary algorithms - specifically, those implemented in computers and used to generate microchip designs. What human designer even comes close to what a repeated cycle of mutation and selection has been demonstrated to be capable of?

Our models of the world are necessarily imperfect approximations of the underlying reality. Evolution is a functio nof the reality itself, not an approximation of it, and as such it will always have a power that no amount of rational analysis can even approach. It's like flowing water - unable to look at the surrounding territory and adjust its behavior accordingly, but unerring in responding appropriately to its immediate environment.

The most sophisticated information-processing device in the known universe was not only designed by evolution, but operates on evolutionary principles. If you insist upon attempting to impose design, you will never accomplish what letting order arise from chaos can.

What evolutionary algorithm, operating over a non-immense period of time, even comes close to what a talented human is capable of? It wasn't evolution that built your computer, although small parts of it (that humans are unusually bad at designing) may have been constructed by evolutionary algorithms.

Humans are also functions of reality, unless you're a dualist. We have imperfect models, but evolution doesn't have a model at all, which is why it's stupid. Even if it did inerrantly respond to the immediate environment (and it doesn't - look at the effect of a sense of taste adapted to a very different environment, for instance), it necessarily can't plan for the future. You really sound like you're genuflecting at a sacred mystery, not being rational.

Re specialness: it's annoying to smugly point out things that people are already perfectly aware of.

It wasn't evolution that built your computer

Which one? Because my human-built computer is inferior is virtually every way to the one evolution produced. The only real advantages the electronic model has are that it's easy to make backups for it, and people have been writing viruses for it for a shorter period of time.

We have imperfect models, but evolution doesn't have a model at all, which is why it's stupid.

Its stupidity is still smarter than the most brilliant human.

it necessarily can't plan for the future

True. But it never fails to react appropriately to the local conditions, which humans are actually quite bad at doing. Neither are we very good at planning for or anticipating the future. But perhaps you don't consider triggering the Sixth Great Extinction to reflect poorly upon humanity's ability for forethought.

it's annoying to smugly point out things that people are already perfectly aware of

It is very important to point out things that people are already perfectly aware of but choose to ignore. The annoyingness is just a bonus. And as the readers of this site are already quite aware, the methods that make thought most powerful are those that are most antithetical to natural human modes of thought: logic and mathematics. Bayes' Theorem is smarter than the humans that use it. Funny, that.

To stay unbiased about all of the commenters here, do not visit this link and search the page for names. (sorry, but - wait no, not sorry)

So it seems to me that the smaller you can make a quine in some system with the property that small changes in it mean it produces nearly itself as output, the more likely that system is going to produce replicating evolution-capable things. Or something, I'm making this up as I go along. Is this concept sensical? Is there a computationally feasible way to test anything about it? Has it been discussed over and over?

Maybe we can do far better than evolution, but if we could design a good parallelizable "evolution-friendly" environment and see whether organisms develop that'd still be phenomenal.

Evolution resolves the infinite regression, not by being super-clever and super-efficient, but by being stupid and inefficient and working anyway. This is the marvel.

Stupid and inefficient is sometimes much better (and faster) than a meticulously designed process. If you've ever dealt with fitting of really complex data, a random walk is often suprinsingly more efficient than any of the refined fitting algorithms. In itself it's just stupid "trial and error" in endless repetition, just like evolution, with a little bit of organizing in the background.

"Because my human-built computer is inferior is virtually every way to the one evolution produced."

From LOGI:

"Current computer programs definitely possess these mutually synergetic advantages relative to humans:

• Computer programs can perform highly repetitive tasks without boredom.
• Computer programs can execute complex extended tasks without making that class of human errors caused by distraction or short-term memory overflow in abstract deliberation.
• Computer hardware can perform extended sequences of simple steps at much greater serial speeds than human abstract deliberation or even human 200Hz neurons.
• Computer programs are fully configurable by the general intelligences called humans. (Evolution, the designer of humans, cannot invoke general intelligence.)"

"Its stupidity is still smarter than the most brilliant human."

Taking the earlier example of the eye, we've already surpassed it in just about every way. We have cameras which can see in much dimmer light, and cameras which can look directly at the Sun without getting fried. We have cameras that can see in radio and gamma rays and everything in between. We have cameras with higher resolution and better-quality optics. We have cameras that can actually detect the wavelength of every incoming photon, rather than being limited to the three-axis human color system. And so on and so forth.

"If you've ever dealt with fitting of really complex data, a random walk is often suprinsingly more efficient than any of the refined fitting algorithms."

See http://sl4.org/wiki/KnowabilityOfFAI. Only in AI would people design algorithms that are literally stupider than a bag of bricks, boost the results back towards maximum entropy, and then argue for the healing power of noise.

"Only in AI would people design algorithms that are literally stupider than a bag of bricks, boost the results back towards maximum entropy, and then argue for the healing power of noise."

I do not have the time to go through it now (which probably means I never will remember to do it) but I can offer a small observation.

When training neural networks, there is a very good reason why adding a random element improves the performance: it avoids getting stuck in suboptimal local minima. Training a network can be seen as minimizing errors on a surface in weight-space. This surface usually is littered with local minima of various sizes, so a deterministic training rule gets stuck while a stochastic one can get kicked out of them. Of course, one has to be careful not to add too much of a random element; this is usually done by using small steps in the training.

I do not know if this adds anything as once the training is complete, the net constitutes an algorithm that is deterministic. The point however is that optimization methods that (necessarily) rely on local information usually performs better with an element of noise.

Interesting series of articles. I like the theme.

Just a small observation-- you may define the origin of life outside the domain of evolution, but I think you could just as easily bring it under the umbrella of evolution, with discussion of replicator precursors such as chemical epicycles and whatnot. I see your point, but I think distancing evolution from such a question might be seen as 'passing the buck'.

Would it be too hard to believe that the very first replicators actually went extinct several times before the right accidents occurred in the right circumstances to give rise to sufficiently hardy descendants?

Certainly, the first replicator that gave rise to us might be seen as marvelous - but the first replicator //period// may have been plain pathetic.

Dawkins agrees with Huxley.

He describes nature as "the ruthlessly cruel process that gave us all existence", and describes the process that made us as "wasteful, cruel and low".

He says that nature gave us a brain capable of "understanding its own provenance, of deploring the moral implications and of fighting against them".

He describes humanity as: "the only potential island of refuge from the implications of [evolution]: from the cruelty, and the clumsy, blundering waste."

However, there is no special reason for thinking these guys are right - either about the desirability or the realistic possibility of rebellion.

Evolution is biased at genes replication routes, at their alternative-splicing-steps junctions

A. A reply to one of my posts:

"Dov, you write: Life's evolution is not random. It is biased, driven by culture.

Be sure you understand that Darwin did not say that evolution is random. He said that evolution is not random. It is driven by natural selection."

B. I never wrote anything that Darwin said. Here, again, is what I say and wrote:

Culture is the universal driver of genetic evolution

The major course of natural selection is not via random mutations followed by survival, but via interdependent, interactive and interenhencing selection of biased genes replication routes at their alternative-splicing-steps junctions, effected by the cultural feedback of the third stratum multicells organism or monocells community to their second and prime strata genome-genes organisms."

Dov Henis (Comments From The 22nd Century) http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-P81pQcU1dLBbHgtjQjxG_Q--?cq=1

Life's Manifest http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/112.page#578

But to praise evolution too highly destroys the real wonder, which is not how well evolution designs things, but that a naturally occurring process manages to design anything at all.

Yes, but this "naturally occurring process" suits itself very well to automation and discovery.

So let us dispose of the idea that evolution is a wonderful designer, or a wonderful conductor of species destinies, which we human beings ought to imitate. For human intelligence to imitate evolution as a designer, would be like a sophisticated modern bacterium trying to imitate the first replicator as a biochemist.

It's certainly not a wonderful designer. But it can be an efficient way solve problems without human decisions. Human intelligence should not imitate evolution as a designer, but machine intelligence may well benefit.

I beg forgiveness but I am taking advantage of an aggressive mood after reading a few pages of the "evolution" track, to state my criticisms with some punch - as I think there is some worth to letting punch go.

First, I find the views expressed around here somewhat ethnocentric : the battle between evolutionism and creationism is an alien story to me, and evolutionist rallying cries I tend to perceive as a disagreeable form of representation of creationism - comparable, say, to how the typical aggressive tone of US rappers doesn't translate to my distant ears as rebel or anti-establishment but as directly representative of generic US arrogance as expressed in finance or military matters for instance. Speaking of US military matters, an issue I have with the dominance of fitness coefficients over explanations of evolution, is that fitness coefficients refer to exactly the same abstraction that failed to be spotted while it meant observing as severely pathological the differential of mortality as a function of side in war at the moment victors made Broadway.

I mean, twenty some years ago, at the end of operation Desert Storm.

I beg forgiveness again, punch :)

What this means on the face of it is that US and allies harbor an extended school of scientific thought inspired by economics that finds good enough the huge simplification of believing in fitness coefficients when the purpose is to criticize (with an eye on usefully controlling) the marvelously creative process of evolution, but not good enough when the purpose is to criticize (with an eye on usefully controlling) the disgustingly destructive process of war. (Double standard !)

One obvious abstract feature of the most regular type of war is that it distributes casualties over sides, in the minimal case, two sides. This is formally the same thing as a locus with two alleles. The relative fitness coefficients express the skew in casualties depending on side or allele.

For the sake of completeness and courtesy, I'll complement the above with an independent criticism tabooing the notion of criticizing military behavior.

The way population genetics results get threaded into your (I guess standard) exposition of evolution quite mixes levels when it starts with assuming differential fitness coefficients as if they were objective and stable quantities generally measurable in the wild. They aren't. I do not deny that in extreme cases natural evolution processes are streamlined to the point that population genetics models become a fit and explain observed quirks of evolution, but in the general case if you tell me evolution needs be viewed as blind, slow and stupid because of what population genetics tells us about it, my reaction is that this appears to be an artifact of investigating the prowesses of evolution only downstream and not upstream of those fitness coefficients that supernaturally enter your models just like Adam and Eve supernaturally learn morals from the forbidden fruit.

There's a useful metaphor for this process, from a computing technique mathematicians sometimes use to find approximate solutions to numeric problems called "simulated annealing". Consider a graph with high points (called "maxima") and low points (called "minima") like this one:

IMAGE

Sometimes you know the equation, and can just solve it. But, at other times, the situation is like having a black box with some dials to twiddle, and a single output (which you want to be as big as possible). One way to search for the dial setting that produce the biggest output would be to set the dials all to zero then start systematically searching through all the possible settings, but that might take years. If the graph is simple, you can usually find the answer much faster by noting how large the output is for ten different random settings, then concentrating your search near the random setting that had the largest output and making some smaller random changes, narrowing down on the best of those, and then making some last very small changes to fine-tune your solution. This process is known as "simulated annealing" and the amount of random noise you use to vary the solution at each stage is known as the 'temperature'. You start off at a high 'temperature', making big random jumps, then slowly cool things down, making smaller and smaller changes:

IMAGE

If you lower the 'temperature' too fast, you can get stuck at a local maxima. To make the shift to a different maxima (perhaps a higher one), you'd have to increase the 'temperature' again.

Dawkins goes into details in his book "The Greatest Show on Earth" about how DNA isn't a blueprint - rather it is a series of instruction on how to do 3D origami. And the earlier an instruction is in the sequence, it harder it is to vary yet still come up with a functional end shape. (This is why there are local maxima that evolution finds it difficult to vary away from to perhaps better solutions that a designer could have found - such as not routing a nerve in a Giraffe's neck down via the heart before returning half way back up it again.)

If all science must be in theory falsifiable, and evolution is good science, can you give me some parameters or predictions that if they were found to be true would hurt the theory of evolution?

What would scientists need to find in the future that would seriously do damage to the theory?

Interesting. However, I seem to be confused reading your posts on evolution by statements like "Squirrels jump from treetop to treetop using just their muscles" - obviously they use at leat their bones, too; so maybe there are other cases where you use 'compression to obvious', and I begin to be afraid that I missed them. That I cannot understand your meaning in fullness when you begin talking about things that I know poorly. As to incremental evolution, we already know there are genes controlling development, and they are highly conserved. Evolution can happen when one such gene accidentally mutates, and the resulting monster turns out to be viable. It would have many different traits, not just one.

Even so, it was probably very improbable, considered in an isolated event—but it only had to happen once, and there were a lot of tide pools.

isn't it more likely that the "first replicator" was not a single event, but that it started multiple times and failed to survive in the vast majority of cases?

First comes some gene A which is simple, but at least a little useful on its own, so that A increases to universality in the gene pool. Now along comes gene B, which is only useful in the presence of A, but A is reliably present in the gene pool, so there's a reliable selection pressure in favor of B. Now a modified version of A arises, which depends on B, but doesn't break B's dependency on A/A. Then along comes C, which depends on A and B, and B, which depends on A* and C.

Can anybody point me to some specific examples of this type of evolution? I'm a complete layman when it comes to biology, and this fascinates me. I'm having a bit of a hard time imagining such a process, though.

What's our standard for intelligence? Evolution has, with a planet and a few billion years, produced many, many things that humans have not yet been able to replicate. Or which we can't replicate efficiently. That's starting to change. But a process that can outperform a few billion people with a few thousand years of accumulated knowledge is still pretty formidable.

I <i>do</i> think that there are many people in the biological sciences who portray evolution as being more 'stupid' than it is. And that is a problem because it's a false prediction.

https://bereanarchive.org/articles/biology/functional-dna-predictions

IDers seem to be cherry picking their 'early supporters of a functional genome. Most IDers I talked to during the early 2000s or so, in contrast, were very cagey about committing to any falsifiable theory. A highly functional genome was a sort of strawman argument against creationists, if you go back far enough. But it's a strawman which turns out to be more accurate than the actual arguments made by either mainstream scientists or creationists in the 70s.