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Vaniver comments on Rationality Quotes November 2013 - Less Wrong
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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"?
Suppose a gazelle lives in a savannah; we should expect the gazelles to digest savannah grass, flee from cheetahs, be sexy to other gazelles, etc., and become that way if not already so. I think Dawkins has a good explanation of this somewhere, but I was unable to find it quickly, that genes are in some sense records of the ancestral environment.
Similarly, internet memes are in some sense a record of the interests of internet users, and car designs a record of the interests of car buyers and designers, and so on. Is that a clearer presentation?
It seems clear what you mean (though not why you called it the complement of the environment). But I still don't see what's common to all kinds of evolutions, so maybe I'm still misunderstanding.
It's certainly true that any evolved object is a function of its environment and we can deduce features of the environment from looking at the object. But this is also true for any object that has a history of being influenced by its environment. A geologist looks at a stone and tells you how it was shaped by rain. An astronomer looks at a nebula and tells you how it was created by a supernova. "Being able to learn about a thing's past environment from looking at its present shape" is so general that you must have meant something more than that, but what?
That's basically what I meant, actually, with the inclusion of "looking at a thing's present environment tells you about its likely future shapes." I chose "complement" because it seemed like a better word than "mirror," but I'm not sure it was the best choice, and think "record" might have been better.