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shminux comments on Rationality Quotes November 2013 - Less Wrong
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Comments (388)
SMBC comics on the relative proximity of excretory and reproductive outlets in humans.
Evo-devo (that is to say, actual real science) gives an even better account of that accident of evolutionary history. For simple sessile animals, reproduction often involves dumping quantities of spores or gametes into the environment. And what other system already dumps quantities of stuff into the environment...?
Okay, but why should the reproductive outlets be there too?
I agree connotationally, but the comic only answers half of the question.
I am a fan of SMBC, but the entire explanation is wrong. The events that led to the integration of reproductive and digestive systems happened long before a terrestrial existence of vertebrates, and certainly long before hands. To get a start on a real explanation you have to go back to early bilaterals:
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/chb/lectures/anatomy9.html
As near as I can tell it was about pipe reuse. But you can't make a funny comic about that (or maybe you can?). Zach is a "bard", not a "wizard." He entertains.
Try carrying the fetus and giving birth from any other location. I suppose having the fun parts somewhere else than the reproductive dumping tube could be nice, but wouldn't make any sense.
Consider the chicken, with its ingenious production line of eggs. Constant fertilization from a different orifice seems ideal, as (the source I just Googled suggests that) chickens have very short fertilization cycles. (They don't have separate orifices. Poor cloacas.)
Since fertilization occurs at one end of a long tube, and birth occurs at the other, I wouldn't be surprised if the optimal arrangement involved separate organs.
Natural selection also led us to breathe and eat through the same hole. Seriously???? This causes so many problems. Well, not enough problems for natural selection to change it, I guess.
Having two (three, technically) holes you can breath through has its advantages. Ever had a nasty head cold that clogs your sinuses so bad you can't breathe?
You still have just one pharynx, though.
Being able to smell what you're chewing is a huge advantage. I suppose achieving that some other way could get pretty convoluted.
I've read horses can only breathe through their noses.
I've never heard this, but I have read and just re-checked, and apparently whales and dolphins have separate passages for breathing (connected to their blowholes) and eating, and thus cannot choke on food.
It's all a matter of which fish we evolved from and what solution evolution came up with, in the development from that water-breathing creature to air breathers. It could have produced separate air and foodways, as it did for whales and dolphins. But the blind idiot has no foresight and it can't get there from here any more.
Dolphins and whales have the same fish ancestors we do; they're former terrestrial mammals who returned to the sea and share the same common ancestors of all mammals.
" a morally blind, fickle, and tightly shackled tinkerer" (1) who "should be in jail for child abuse and murder"(2)
(1) POWELL, Russell & BUCHANAN, Allen. "Breaking evolution's chains: the prospect of deliberate genetic modification in humans." In: SAVULESCU, J. & MEULEN, Rudd ter (orgs.) “Enhancing Human Capacities”. Wiley-Blackwell. 2011.
(2) BOSTROM, Nick. “In defense of posthuman dignity.” Bioethics, v. 19, n. 3, p. 202-214, 2005.
There is no escape from evolution (variation and selection).
Deliberate genetic selection is just more complicated evolution.
Sure there is. Organisms could, in theory, create perfect replicas without variation for selection to act on. Contrariwise, they could create new organisms depending on what they needed that would bear no relation to themselves and would not reproduce in kind (or at all).
If I could write an AI, the last thing I'd want is to make it reproduce with random variations. If I could genetically engineer myself or my children, I'd want to introduce deliberate changes and eliminate random ones. (Apart from some temporary exceptions like the random element in our current immune systems.)
I think you're overusing the term "evolution". If you let it include any kind of variation (deliberate design) and any kind of selection (deliberate intelligent selection), you can't make any predictions that would hold for all "evolving" systems.
In which theory? I don't think this is true if temperatures are above absolute zero, for example.
I suspect that you're being too restrictive- it doesn't seem like variation has to be blind, and selection done by replication, for 'evolution' to be meaningful. Now, blind biological evolution and engineering design evolution will look different, but it seems reasonable to see an underlying connection between them.
True, you can't create perfect physical copies or even keep a single object perfectly unchanged for long. But macro-scale systems designed to eliminate variance and not to let microscopic deviations affect their macro-scale behavior can, for practical purposes, be made unchanging. Especially given an intelligent self-repairing agent that fixes unavoidable damage over time.
So, what kind of statements are valid for all kinds of evolution?
The direction (and often magnitude) of expected change over time is generally predictable, for example.
Can you be more specific? What is the expected direction of change for all evolutionary processes?
In general, the entities undergoing evolution will look more like the complement of their environments as time goes on.
I'm sorry, I don't understand. What is the "complement of the environment"?
What about AGI? Radical human enhancement? Computronium? Post-biological civilizations? All impossible?
Offhand, I think they'd all include variation and selection.
I've seen an argument that a nanotech organism with a reasonable level of error-correction could with high probability make error-free clones of itself until the heat death of the universe.
That assumes the lack of black swans. Not a very good assumption when we extrapolate things until the heat death of the universe.
True, but it would have to be an exceedingly black swan to result in evolutionary-like mutations rather than simple annihilation.
First, annihilation is good enough -- a destroyed nanobot fails at making "error-free clones of itself until the heat death of the universe".
Second, all you need to do is to screw up the error-correction mechanism, the rest will take care of itself naturally.
That seems plausible to me, but it's still likely to be subject to selection because of competition for resources. Depending on its intelligence level and ethical structure, it might also be affected by arguments that it should limit its reproduction.
The point is there'd be no variation for evolution to select on.
Why do you think there'd only be one sort of nanotech organism to select on and/or that perfect self-replication is the best or only strategy?
Well, the organism would need to be preprogrammed to survive in whatever environment it might find itself in until then.