Eliezer_Yudkowsky 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: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 November 2007 07:01:00AM 0 points [-]

Anything that a human can do, natural selection can do, by definition.

Ah, yes, the old "Einstein's mother must have been one heck of a physicist" argument, or "Shakespeare only wrote what his parents and teachers taught him to write: Words."

Even in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity / algorithmic information, humans can have complexity exceeding the complexity of natural selection because we are only a single one out of millions of species to have ever evolved.

And the things humans "do" are completely out of character for the things that natural selection actually does, as opposed to doing "by definition".

If you can't distinguish between human intelligence and natural selection, why bother distinguishing between any two phenomena at all?