philh comments on Partial Transcript of the Hanson-Yudkowsky June 2011 Debate - Less Wrong

9 Post author: ChrisHallquist 19 April 2012 03:43AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (17)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: philh 19 April 2012 04:29:10PM 2 points [-]

These promoters can relatively easily mutate or in some cases epigenetically change to reactivate the gene, so on evolutionary timescales it's a good idea to keep it around, for flexibility.

Evolution can't decide to keep something around just because it might be useful for future evolution. If it's not currently causing an organism to have more/stronger children (or fewer/weaker), evolution doesn't pay attention to it.

Also, you're describing pseudogenes. I don't think they make up a large part of noncoding DNA, but I don't have actual numbers.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 19 April 2012 11:53:35PM 1 point [-]

Evolution can't decide to keep something around just because it might be useful for future evolution.

Evolution can't decide to do anything. It occurs that genes that aggressively root out recently abandoned genetic material are maladaptive.