potato comments on Science as Attire - Less Wrong
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That seems unfair. Do they mean evolutionary biology when they say evolution? What if they just mean heredity, variation, and selection? I use "evolution" to describe how technologies spread throughout culture, because it spreads by those three mechanisms, and those seem to be the mechanisms of biology as well. I think of evolution as a class of algorithms which optimize for something (or "select") without doing prediction, but restraining the search space by keeping only those that pass certain tests, and trying only those nodes out which are closed to ones that passed. and we see the failures in optimization we would expect from such an algorithm in many non-biological mechanisms.