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

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (105)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: EvolvedClockwork 06 November 2007 09:14:00PM 0 points [-]

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?

I'm not sure I correctly understood your comment, so I hope I'm not responding to something you didn't actually say.

I agree there's a distinction between human intelligence (and any other human trait), and natural selection, but I believe the distinction is that the former is a subset of the latter, rather than a separate and later entity.

In other words, I'm not claiming that nothing can ever create something better than itself, but that in the case of humanity's work it is still a part of natural selection (and hence natural selection can do anything humans do by way of the human activity that is part of natural selection).

Am I violating some existing convention on the usage of the phrase "natural selection"? It seems to me that it's purely through the same natural selection which evolves some wheels out of a bunch of organic and other materials that also evolve some wheels out of some human neurons and a bunch of organic and inorganic materials.

Is there a non-arbitrary point at which one stops counting the behavior of evolved systems as natural selection? (And calling human artifice the stopping point doesn't automatically make artificial evolution a non-subset of natural evolution.)