EvolvedClockwork comments on Natural Selection's Speed Limit and Complexity Bound - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 November 2007 04:54PM

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Comment author: EvolvedClockwork 06 November 2007 05:27:00AM 0 points [-]

Humans can do things that evolutions probably can't do period over the expected lifetime of the universe. As the eminent biologist Cynthia Kenyon once put it at a dinner I had the honor of attending, "One grad student can do things in an hour that evolution could not do in a billion years." According to biologists' best current knowledge, evolutions have invented a fully rotating wheel on a grand total of three occasions.

FYI, God did not design humans, we are all naturally evolved. Evolution can and has indeed designed lots of fully rotating wheels and any other fancy contraptions, it just wound up using the clever approach of first evolving some grad students.

Anything that a human can do, natural selection can do, by definition. We're nothing more special than cogs in the evolutionary machine, albeit special cases of cogs that work a lot better than previous generations.

Or did you think that human thought is some kind of deus ex machina?