Alicorn comments on Dealing with the high quantity of scientific error in medicine - Less Wrong

36 Post author: NancyLebovitz 25 October 2010 01:53PM

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Comment author: Alicorn 27 October 2010 01:41:44AM 3 points [-]

Every living thing you see around you is equally "evolved", since every living thing has the same "evolutionary age" - roughly 3.5 billion years.

Surely number of generations matters, too?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 27 October 2010 02:31:51AM 3 points [-]

I'm not sure that this is at all meaningful because things like selection pressure and mutation rate also arguably matter. If one has a species with lots of generations but an incredibly low mutation rate it isn't going to adapt to an environment as much as another species in the same environment with a higher mutation rate.

Comment author: Perplexed 27 October 2010 02:06:04AM 3 points [-]

Ok, then. Number of generations. Which makes human among the least evolved of all species on the planet. Well, maybe some tortoises are less evolved than us, and maybe elephants and whales and sequoias too, but we certainly have evolved through fewer generations than rats, jellyfish, mosquitoes, sunflowers, earthworms, amoebae, and E. coli.