indexador2 comments on Open Thread Feb 22 - Feb 28, 2016 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Elo 21 February 2016 09:14PM

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Comment author: Lumifer 22 February 2016 08:42:37PM 11 points [-]

LW might find that interesting:

I'm becoming a Christian, not just one who occasionally went to church as a kid, but a real one that believes in Christ, loving God with all my heart, etc.

Most ex-atheists who become deists turn to Buddhism, so I thought I'd be clear why they are all wrong (Robert Wright!). I'd like to thank Mencius Moldbug, Dierdre McCloskey, Mike Behe, Tim Keller (four names probably never listed in sequence ever), and hundreds more...Below are snippets (top and bottom) from my Christian apology: I came to Christ via rational inference, not a personal crisis.

Comment author: indexador2 22 February 2016 08:55:07PM *  14 points [-]

If evolution is untrue, it changes everything.

Just by reading this phrase, I can conclude that everything else is probably useless.

Comment author: Viliam 23 February 2016 08:58:43AM 5 points [-]

Here is a shortened version:

Darwin’s grandfather believed in something similar to abiogenesis. Later in Darwin’s life, scientists found something that appeared to be the first proto-cell, but later they found a progenitor to this in oceanic mud. Darwin believed that the discovery of the first life form would occur soon, but it didn't happen. Organisms that reproduce, metabolize energy, and create a cell wall, require at least a hundred proteins, each of which has approximately 300 amino acids, and all need to be able to work with each other.

To reach this level of sophistication via chemical evolution defies explanation. The experiments in 1953 created some of the amino acids found in all life forms, but this is a far cry from creating proteins. The origin of life is one of those puzzles that has been right around the corner, for the past two centuries. Imagining something is not a scientific argument, but simply speculation. Many present all evolution as similar to how wolves changed to sheepdogs, or the way in which bacteria develop resistance to penicillin, but such change will not create radically new protein complexes or new species.

If evolution is untrue, it changes everything. After I accepted that a creator exists, I found myself attending church, engaging in Bible study, and reading Christian authors. Various facts all began to make much more sense.

Comment author: Jiro 23 February 2016 03:37:00PM 4 points [-]

I think he's equivocating on "if evolution is untrue, it changes everything". That statement is literally true in the same sense that "if I'm a brain in a jar, it changes everything" or "if the world was created by Zeus, it changes everything" are true. But that's not what he's using it to mean.

Comment author: Viliam 24 February 2016 08:38:27AM 4 points [-]

Of course; "it changes everything" doesn't mean "I can stop using logic and just take my preferred fairy tale". There are many possible changes.

Also by "evolution" he means "creating a life from non-life, in the lab, today", because that's the part he is unsatisfied with.

So, more or less: "if you cannot show me how to create life from non-life, then Santa must be real".

Comment author: MrMind 23 February 2016 01:48:41PM *  9 points [-]

The experiments in 1953 created some of the amino acids found in all life forms, but this is a far cry from creating proteins.

But, apparently, it's not a far cry from a supernatural person to create all universe(s).
My two cents, extrapolating from this and other converts (e.g. UnequallyYoked, which I still follow): there's a certain tendency of the brain to want to believe in the supernatural. In those people who have this urge at a stronger level, but who come in contact with rationality, a sort of cognitive conflict is formed, like an addict trying to fight the urge to use drugs.
As soon as a hole in rationality is perceived, this gives the brain the excuse to switch to a preferred mode of thinking, wether the hole is real or not, and wether there exists more probable alternatives.
Admittedly, this is just a "neuronification" of a psychological phoenomenon, and it does lower believers' status by comparing them to drug addicts...

Comment author: efalken 23 February 2016 03:33:19PM 7 points [-]

I'm a big Eliezer fan, and like reading this blog on occasion. I consider myself rational, Dunning-Kruger effect notwithstanding (ie, I'm too dumb or biased to know I'm not dumb or biased, trapped!). In any case, I think the above is pretty good, but I would stress the ID portion of my paper, which is in the PDF not the post, is that the evolutionary mechanism as observed empirically scales O(2^n), not O(n), generally, where n is the number of mutations needed to create a new function. Someday we may see evolution that scales, at which point I will change my mind, but thus far, I think Behe is correct in his 'edge of evolution' argument (eg, certain things, like anti-freeze in fish, are evolutionarily possible, others, like creating a flagellum, are not). As per the Christianity part, the emphasis on the will over reason gives a sustainable, evolutionarily stable 'why' to habits of character and thought that are salubrious, stoicism with real inspiration. Christianity also is the foundation for individualism and bourgeois morality that has generated flourishing societies, so, it works personally and for society.

My younger self disagreed with my current self, so I can empathize and respect those why find my reasoning unconvincing, but I don't think it's useful in figuring things out to simply attribute my belief to bias or insecurity.

Comment author: ChristianKl 23 February 2016 05:06:28PM 3 points [-]

eg, certain things, like anti-freeze in fish, are evolutionarily possible, others, like creating a flagellum, are not

The evolution of the flagellum works because proteins used in it are useful in other context:

The best studied flagellum, of the E. coli bacterium, contains around 40 different kinds of proteins. Only 23 of these proteins, however, are common to all the other bacterial flagella studied so far. Either a “designer” created thousands of variants on the flagellum or, contrary to creationist claims, it is possible to make considerable changes to the machinery without mucking it up.

What’s more, of these 23 proteins, it turns out that just two are unique to flagella. The others all closely resemble proteins that carry out other functions in the cell. This means that the vast majority of the components needed to make a flagellum might already have been present in bacteria before this structure appeared.

Comment author: efalken 23 February 2016 05:32:47PM 2 points [-]

Of the millions of proteins on the planet it is unremarkable most exist elsewhere, just as it's likely most parts in a car can be found in other machines. Further, these aren't identical proteins, merely 'homologous' ones, where there's a stretch of, say, a 70% match over 40% of the protein, so that makes this finding not surprising (lug nut in engine A like fastener in engine B). A Type 3 Secretory System has about 1/3 of the proteins in a flagellum (depends which T3SS, which flagellum), but to get from one to the other needs probably ten thousand new nucleotides in a specific constellation, and nothing close to that kind of change has been observed in the lab w/ fruit flies or E. coli. So, it's possible, but still improbable, like turning one of my programs into another via random change and selection, there are many similarities in all my programs, but it just would take too long. Possible is not probable, and unlike cosmological improbabilities, there's no anthropic principle to save this. Pointing out homologs still leaves the problem of tranversing a highly spiked fitness landscape, but if this is ever demonstrated on say, a new protein complex in E. coli, I'd say, you win (but more complex than moving a gene closer to a promoter region as in the citT).

Comment author: ChristianKl 23 February 2016 05:59:07PM *  2 points [-]

Any present version of a protein that evolved >1,000,000,000 years ago is only homologous and not identical to it's predecessor.

just would take too long

A billion years does happen to be really long, especially if you have very many tiny spots of life all around the planets that evolve on their own.

What works in a lab in a few years is radically different than what works in billions of billions of parallel experiments done for billions of years.

Pointing out homologs still leaves the problem of tranversing a highly spiked fitness landscape, but if this is ever demonstrated on say, a new protein complex in E. coli, I'd say, you win

How do you judge something to be a new protein complex? Bacteria's pass their plasmides around.

E.coli likely hasn't good radically new protein complexes in the last millions of years so anything it does presently is highly optimized and proteins are only homologous to their original functions.

I think you are more likely to find new things in bacteria's that actually adept to radically new enviroments.

Comment author: efalken 24 February 2016 01:21:57AM 3 points [-]

The years thing seems to make everything probable, because we have basically 600 MM years of evolution from something simple to everything today, and that's a lot of time. But it is not infinite. When we look at what evolution actually accomplishes in 10k generations, it is basically a handful of point mutations, frameshifts, and transpositions. Consider humans have 50MM new functioning nucleotides developed over 6 million years from our 'common ape' ancestor: where are the new unique functioning nucleotides (say, 1000) in the various human haplogroups? Evolution in humans seems to have stopped. Dawkins has said given enough time 'anything' can happen. True, but in finite time a lot less happens.

They've been looking at E. coli for 64000k+ generations. That's where we should see something, and instead all we get is turning a gene that is sometimes on, to always on (citT), via a mutation that put it near a different promoter gene. That's kinda cool, and I admit there's some evolution, but it seems to have limits.

But, thanks for the respectful tone. I think it's important to remember that people who disagree with you can be neither stupid or disingenuous (there's a flaw in the Milgrom-Stokey no-trade theorem, and I think it's related to the 'Fact-Free Learning' paper of Aragones et al.)

Comment author: ChristianKl 24 February 2016 09:20:13AM 4 points [-]

They've been looking at E. coli for 64000k+ generations. That's where we should see something

There's your flaw in reasoning. 64000k is relatively tiny. But more importantly bacteria's today are highly optimized while bacteria's 2 billion years ago when the flagellum evolved weren't. I would expect more innovation back then.

One example for that optimization is that human's carry around a lot of pseudogenes. Those are sequences that were genes and stopped being genes when a few mutations happened.

Carrying those sequences around is good for innovation as far as producing new proteins that serve new functions.

The strong evolution pressure that exists on E-coli today results in E-coli not carrying around a lot of pseudogenes. Generally being near strong local maxima also reduces innovation.

If you want to look at new bacterias with radical innovations the one's in Three Mile Island.

Consider humans have 50MM new functioning nucleotides developed over 6 million years from our 'common ape' ancestor: where are the new unique functioning nucleotides (say, 1000) in the various human haplogroups? Evolution in humans seems to have stopped.

No evolution in humans hasn't stopped.

It is strong enough that natives skin color strongly correlates to their local sunlight patterns. We don't only have black native people at the equator in Africa but also in South America. Vitamin D3 seems to be important enough to exert enough evolutionary pressure.

In area's with high malaria density in West Africa 25% have the sickle cell trait. It's has much lower prevelance in Western Europe where there's less malaria.

Western Europe has much higher rates of lactose intolerance than other human populations.

Those are the examples I can bring on the top of my head. There are likely other differences. Due to the current academic climate the reasons for the genetic differences between different human haplogroups happen to be underresearched. I would predict that this changes in the next ten years but you might have to read the relevant papers in Chinese ;)

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 26 February 2016 05:16:59PM *  3 points [-]

Evolution in humans seems to have stopped.

The 10,000 Year Explosion disagrees; to quote my own earlier summary of it:

60,000 years ago, there were something like a quarter of a million modern humans. 3,000 years ago, thanks to the higher food yields allowed by agriculture, there were 60 million humans. A larger population means there's more genetic variance: mutations that had previously occurred every 10,000 years or so were now showing up every 400 years. The changed living conditions also began to select for different genes. A "gene sweep" is a process where beneficial alleles increase in frequency, "sweeping through" the population until everyone has them. Hundreds of these are still ongoing today. For European and Chinese samples, the sweeps' rate of origination peaked at about 5,000 years ago and at 8,500 years ago for one African sample. While the full functions of these alleles are still not known, it is known that most involve changes in metabolism and digestion, defenses against infectious disease, reproduction, DNA repair, or in the central nervous system.

The development of agriculture led, among other things, to a different mix of foods, frequently less healthy than the one enjoyed by hunter-gatherers. For instance, vitamin D was poorly available in the new diet. However, it is also created by ultraviolet radiation from the sun interacting with our skin. After the development of agriculture, several new mutations showed up that led to people in the areas more distant from the equator having lighter skins. There is also evidence of genes that reduce the negative effects associated with e.g. carbohydrates and alcohol. Today, people descending from populations that haven't farmed as long, like Australian Aborigines and many Amerindians, have a distinctive track record of health problems when exposed to Western diets. DNA retrieved from skeletons indicates that 7,000 to 8,000 years ago, no-one in central and northern Europe had the gene for lactose tolerance. 3,000 years, about 25 percent of people in central Europe had it. Today, about 80 percent of the central and northern European population carries the gene. [...]

People in certain areas have more mutations giving them a resistance to malaria than people in others. The human skeleton has become more lightly built, more so in some populations. Skull volume has decreased apparently in all populations: in Europeans it is down 10 percent from the hight point about 20,000 years ago. For some reason, Europeans also have a lot of variety in eye and hair color, whereas most of the rest of the world has dark eyes and dark hair, implying some Europe-specific selective pressure that happened to also affect those.

As for cognitive changes: there are new versions of neurotransmitter receptors and transporters. Several of the alleles have effects on serotonin. There are new, mostly regional, versions of genes that affect brain development: axon growth, synapse formation, formation of the layers of the cerebral cortex, and overall brain growth. Evidence from genes affecting both brain development and muscular strength, as well as our knowledge of the fact that humans in 100,000 BC had stronger muscles than we do have today, suggests that we may have traded off muscle strength for higher intelligence. There are also new versions of genes affecting the inner ear, implying that our hearing may still be adapting to the development of language - or that specific human populations might even be adapting to characteristics of their local languages or language families.

Comment author: efalken 29 February 2016 12:45:32AM 1 point [-]

Allele variation that generates different heights or melanin within various races, point mutations like sickle cell, the mutations that generate lactose tolerance in adults, or that affect our ability to process alcohol, are micro-evolution. They do not extrapolate to new tissues and proteins that define different species. I accept that polar bears descended from a brown bear, that the short-limb, heat-conserving body of an Eskimo was the result of the standard evolutionary scenario. I have no reason to doubt the Earth existed for billions of years.

Humans have hundreds of orphan genes unique among mammals. To say this is just an extension of micro-evolution relies on the possibility it could happen, but you need 50MM new nucleotides that work to arise within 500k generations. Genetic drift could generate that many mutations, but the chance these would be functional assumes proteins are extremely promiscuous. When you look at what it takes to make a functioning protein within the state-space of all amino acid sequences, and how proteins work in concert with promoter genes, RNA editing, and connecting to other proteins, the probability this happened via mutation and selection is like a monkey typing a couple pages of Shakespeare: possible, but not probable.

This all argues for a Creator, who could be an alien, or an adolescent Sim City programmer in a different dimension, or a really smart and powerful guy that looks like Charlton Heston. The argument for a Christian God relies on issues outside of argument by design

Comment author: Viliam 24 February 2016 08:48:40AM *  3 points [-]

Evolution in humans seems to have stopped.

White skin, blue eyes, lactose digestion in adulthood... (some people say even consciousness)... are relatively recent adaptations.

What did you expect, tentacles? ;)

Comment author: MrMind 24 February 2016 08:33:41AM *  3 points [-]

Someday we may see evolution that scales, at which point I will change my mind, but thus far, I think Behe is correct in his 'edge of evolution' argument

This is the part I cannot wrap around my mind: let's say that evolution, as it's presently understood, cannot explain the totality or even the birth of the life evolved on this planet. How can one jump from "not explained by present understanding of evolution" to "explained by a deity"? I mean, why the probability of the supernatural is so low compared to say, intelligent aliens intervention, panspermia or say a passing black hole that happens to create a violation of the laws of biochemistry?

As per the Christianity part, the emphasis on the will over reason gives a sustainable, evolutionarily stable 'why' to habits of character and thought that are salubrious, stoicism with real inspiration.

Have I understood correctly that, once estabilished for whatever reason that a deity exists, that you choose which deity exactly based on your historical and moral preferences?

Comment author: entirelyuseless 24 February 2016 02:28:46PM *  1 point [-]

It is a serious mistake to assume that because something could happen by natural laws, it is automatically more probable than something which would be a violation of natural laws.

For example, suppose I flipped a coin 10,000 times in a row and always got heads. In theory there are many possible explanations for this. But suppose by careful investigation we had reduced it to two possibilities:

  1. It was a fair coin, and this happened by pure luck.
  2. God made it happen through a miraculous intervention.

Number 1 could theoretically happen by natural laws, number 2 could not. But number 2 is more probable anyway.

The same thing might well be true about explanations such as "a passing black hole that happens to create a violation of the laws of biochemistry." I see no reason to think that such things are more probable than the supernatural.

(That said, I agree that Eric is mistaken about this.)

Comment author: MrMind 25 February 2016 09:02:48AM 1 point [-]

But suppose by careful investigation we had reduced it to two possibilities:

Just to be clear, this is obviously not what is happening with Eric. But let's run with the scenario:

Number 1 could theoretically happen by natural laws, number 2 could not. But number 2 is more probable anyway.

I would contest that this is not the case. If you think that n° 2 is more probable, I would say it's just measuring that the probability you assign to the supernatural is higher than 2^10k (besides, this is exactly Jaynes' suggested way to numerically estimate intuitive probabilities).
But your probability is just a prior: while n° 1 is justifiable by appealing to group invariance or symmetric ignorance, n° 2 just pops out of nowhere.
It certainly feels that n° 2 should be more probable, but the wrong answer also feels right in the Wason selection task.
This is what I was asking Eric: by what process were you able to eliminate every other possible explanation, so that the supernatural is the only remaining one?
I suspect also that, in your hypothetical scenario, this would be the same process hidden in the sentence "by careful investigation".

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 24 February 2016 09:23:48PM 0 points [-]

The question is: Would somebody who builds his argument on one more missing step reverse his stance when that more step is also found or would he just point out the next currently missing bit?

Comment author: Houshalter 24 February 2016 02:11:59PM 0 points [-]

Here is a great video that explain how abiogenesis happened.

Here is another great video on the evolution of the flagellum.

All of his videos are fantastic. And there is a great deal more stuff like that on youtube if you search around. It's really inexcusable for an intelligent person to doubt evolution these days. The evidence is vast and overwhelming.

Comment author: gjm 24 February 2016 02:33:08PM *  2 points [-]

I'm not sure Eric is denying common descent (the subject of your last link). My impression is that he's some sort of theistic evolutionist, is happy with the idea that all today's life on earth is descended from a common ancestor[1] but thinks that where the common ancestor came from, and how it was able to give rise to the living things we see today given "only" a few billion years and "only" the size of the earth's biosphere, are questions with no good naturalistic answer, and that God is the answer to both.

[1] Or something very similar; perhaps there are scenarios with a lot of "horizontal transfer" near the beginning, in which the question "one common ancestor or several?" might not even have a clear meaning.

[EDITED because I wrote "Erik" instead of "Eric"; my brain was probably misled by the "k" in the surname. Sorry, Eric.]

Comment author: Jiro 24 February 2016 09:57:10PM 1 point [-]

I'm not sure Eric is denying common descent

Well, he says:

Many present all evolution as similar to how wolves changed to sheepdogs, or the way in which bacteria develop resistance to penicillin, but such change will not create radically new protein complexes or new species.

If he doesn't believe that species can become other species, he can't believe in common descent (unless he believes that the changes in species happen when scientists say they happen, but he attributes this to God).

Comment author: gjm 25 February 2016 12:11:53AM 0 points [-]

unless he believes that the changes in species happen when scientists say they happen, but he attributes this to God

This is approximately what many Christians believe. (The idea being that the broad contours of the history of life on earth are the way the scientific consensus says, but that various genetic novelties were introduced as a result of divine guidance of some kind.)

I'm not sure whether this is Eric's position. He denies being a young-earth creationist, but he does also make at least one argument against "universal common descent". Eric, if you're reading this, would you care to say a bit more about what you think did happen in the history of life on earth? What did the scientists get more or less right and what did they get terribly wrong?

Comment author: Houshalter 24 February 2016 05:41:43PM 0 points [-]

Only the last link is about common descent. And it isn't agnostic on theistic evolution; there's a whole section on experiments for testing evolution through Random Mutation and Natural Selection. The first link covers abiogenesis, and the second the evolution of complicated structures like the flagellum.

I don't think theistic evolution is that much more rational than standard creationism. It's like someone realized the evidence for evolution was overwhelming, but was unable to completely update their beliefs.

Comment author: gjm 24 February 2016 05:49:21PM 1 point [-]

Only the last link is about common descent.

That would by why I called it "the subject of your last link" rather than, say, "the subject of all your links".

there's a whole section on experiments for testing evolution through Random Mutation and Natural Selection.

I do not think anything on that page says very much about whether the evolution of life on earth (including in particular human life) has benefited from occasional tinkering by a god or gods. (For the avoidance of doubt: I am very confident it hasn't.)

I don't think theistic evolution is that much more rational than standard creationism.

I think it's quite a bit better -- the inconsistencies with other things we have excellent evidence for are subtler -- but that wasn't my point. I was just trying to avoid arguments with strawmen. If Erik accepts common descent, there is little point directing him to a page listing evidence for common descent as if that refutes his position.

Comment author: ChristianKl 23 February 2016 11:25:38AM 0 points [-]

Organisms that reproduce, metabolize energy, and create a cell wall, require at least a hundred proteins, each of which has approximately 300 amino acids, and all need to be able to work with each other.

In reality of course they don't need any proteins and it's quite possible that the first cells were simply RNA based.

Comment author: username2 23 February 2016 08:51:07AM 3 points [-]

Well, to understand rationality we should read about both successes and failures of human reasoning.

Comment author: Transfuturist 22 February 2016 11:42:03PM 1 point [-]

The equivocation of 'created' in those four points are enough to ignore it entirely.

Comment author: ChristianKl 22 February 2016 11:16:59PM *  1 point [-]

It does happen to be a bit frightening to see an economics PHD doubt evolution. I think it would be good if someone like Scott Alexander writes a basic "here's why evolution is true"-post.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 February 2016 11:28:39PM 4 points [-]

I think it would be good if someone like Scott Alexander writes a basic "here's why evolution is true"-post.

I don't think such a thing is possible. There's too many bad objections to evolution floating around in the environment.

Comment author: ChristianKl 23 February 2016 11:02:22AM 2 points [-]

The goal hasn't to be to address every bad objection. Addressing objections strong enough to convince an economics PhD and at the same time providing the positive reasons that make us believe in evolution would be valuable.

Comment author: Artaxerxes 23 February 2016 06:16:26AM *  2 points [-]

Dawkins' Greatest Show on Earth is pretty comprehensive. The shorter the work as compared to that, the more you risk missing widely held misconceptions people have.

Comment author: Viliam 23 February 2016 09:02:09AM 1 point [-]

It does happen to be a bit frightening to see an economics PHD doubt evolution.

I wouldn't expect economics PhD to give people better insights into biology. (Only indirectly, as PhD in economics is a signal of high IQ.) A biology PhD would be more scary.

Comment author: ChristianKl 23 February 2016 11:22:43AM 2 points [-]

An economics PhD should understand that markets with decentralized decision making often beat intelligent design.

Comment author: James_Miller 23 February 2016 03:26:58PM 6 points [-]

As an econ PhD, I'm theoretically amazed that multicellular organisms could overcome all of the prisoners' dilemma type situations they must face. You don't get large corporations without some kind of state, so why does decentralized evolution allow for people-states? I've also wondered, given how much faster bacteria and viruses evolve compared to multicellular organisms, why are not the viruses and bacteria winning by taking all of the free energy in people? Yes, I understand some are in a symbiotic relationship with us, but shouldn't competition among microorganisms cause us to get nothing? If one type of firm innovated much faster than another type, the second type would be outcompeteted in the marketplace.(I do believe in evolution, of course, in the same way I accept relativity is correct even though I don't understand the theory behind relativity.)

Comment author: ChristianKl 23 February 2016 05:20:55PM 5 points [-]

You don't get large corporations without some kind of state, so why does decentralized evolution allow for people-states?

In the absence of any state holding the monopoly of power a large corporation automatically grows into a defacto state as the British East India company did in India. Big mafia organisations spring up even when the state doesn't want them to exist. The same is true for various terrorist groups.

From here I could argue that the economics establishment seems to fail at their job when they fail to understand how coorperation can infact arise but I think there good work on cooperation such as Sveriges Riksbank Prize winner Elinor Ostrom.

If I understand her right than the important thing for solving issues of tragedy of the commons isn't centralized decision making but good local decision making by people on-the-ground.

Comment author: James_Miller 24 February 2016 03:04:03AM 3 points [-]

The British East India company and the mafia were/are able to use the threat of force to protect their property rights. Tragedy of the commons problems get much harder to solve the more people there are who can defect. I have a limited understanding of mathematical models of evolution, but it feels like the ways that people escape Moloch would not work for billions of competing microorganisms. I can see why studying economics would cause someone to be skeptical of evolution.

Comment author: ChristianKl 24 February 2016 09:59:27AM *  1 point [-]

Microorganisms can make collective decisions via quorum sensing. Shared DNA works as a committment device.

I can see why studying economics would cause someone to be skeptical of evolution.

Interesting. Given that your field seems to be about understanding game theory and exactly how to escape Moloch, have you thought about looking deeper into the subject to see whether the microorganisms due something that useful in a more wider scale and could move on the economist's understanding of cooperation?

Beliefs have to pay rent ;)

Comment author: James_Miller 24 February 2016 05:17:01PM 0 points [-]

have you thought about looking deeper into the subject to see whether the microorganisms due something that useful in a more wider scale and could move on the economist's understanding of cooperation?

I have thought about studying in more depth the math of evolutionary biology.

Comment author: bogus 24 February 2016 01:12:52AM 0 points [-]

In the absence of any state holding the monopoly of power a large corporation automatically grows into a defacto state as the British East India company did in India.

The British East India Company was a state-supported group, so it doesn't count. But you're right that in most cases there is a winner-take-all dynamic to coercive power, so we're going to find a monopoly of force and a de-facto state. This is not inevitable though; for instance, forager tribes in general manage to do without, as did some historical stateless societies, e.g. in medieval Iceland. Loose federation of well-defended city states is an intermediate possibility that's quite well attested historically.

Comment author: ChristianKl 24 February 2016 09:43:29AM 1 point [-]

But you're right that in most cases there is a winner-take-all dynamic to coercive power, so we're going to find a monopoly of force and a de-facto state.

That wasn't the argument I was making. The argument I was making that in the absence of a state that holds the monopoly of force any organisation that grows really big is going to use coercive power and become states-like.

Comment author: bogus 24 February 2016 09:52:43AM 0 points [-]

Sure, but that's just what a winner-takes-all dynamic looks like in this case.

Comment author: Lumifer 23 February 2016 04:28:34PM 1 point [-]

I'm theoretically amazed that multicellular organisms could overcome all of the prisoners' dilemma type situations they must face.

You mean competition between cells in a multi-cellular organism? They don't compete, they come from the same DNA and they "win" by perpetuating that DNA, not their own self. Your cells are not subject to evolution -- you are, as a whole.

shouldn't competition among microorganisms cause us to get nothing?

In the long term, no, because a symbiotic system (as a whole) outcompetes greedy microorganisms and it's surviving that matters, not short-term gains. If you depend on your host and you kill your host, you die yourself.

Comment author: Vaniver 23 February 2016 04:45:59PM 3 points [-]

You mean competition between cells in a multi-cellular organism? They don't compete, they come from the same DNA and they "win" by perpetuating that DNA, not their own self. Your cells are not subject to evolution -- you are, as a whole.

Doesn't this line of reasoning prove the non-existence of cancer?

Comment author: Lumifer 23 February 2016 05:51:21PM *  2 points [-]

No, I don't think so. Cancerous cells don't win at evolution. In fact, is they manage to kill the host, they explicitly lose.

Survival of the fittest doesn't prove the non-existence of broken bones, either.

Comment author: Vaniver 23 February 2016 07:56:56PM *  5 points [-]

It seems to me that the better argument is more along the lines of "bodies put a lot of effort into policing competition among their constituent parts" and "bodies put a lot of effort into repelling invaders." It is actually amazing that multicellular organisms overcome the prisoners' dilemma type situations, and there are lots of mechanisms that work on that problem, and amazing that pathogens don't kill more of us than they already do.

And when those mechanisms fail, the problems are just as dire as one would expect. Consider something like Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumor Disease, a communicable cancer which killed roughly half of all Tasmanian devils (and, more importantly, would kill every devil in a high-density environment). Consider that about 4% of all humans were killed by influenza in 1918-1920. So it's no surprise that the surviving life we see around us today is life that puts a bunch of effort into preventing runaway cell growth and runaway pathogen growth.

Comment author: ChristianKl 23 February 2016 05:23:52PM 0 points [-]

In the long-term cancer sells die with the organism that hosts them. Viruses also do kill people regularly and die with their hosts.

Comment author: Vaniver 23 February 2016 07:58:06PM 1 point [-]

Sure. The impression one gets from this is that an answer to James_Miller's question is that they frequently fail to solve that problem, and then die.

Comment author: James_Miller 24 February 2016 03:10:41AM 1 point [-]

In the long term, no, because a symbiotic system (as a whole) outcompetes greedy microorganisms and it's surviving that matters, not short-term gains.

OK, but I have lots of different types of bacteria in me. If one type of bacteria doubled the amount of energy it consumed, and this slightly reduced my reproductive fitness, then this type of bacteria would be better off. If all types of bacteria in me do this, however, I die. It's analogous to how no one company would pollute so much so as to poison the atmosphere and kill everyone, but absent regulation the combined effect of all companies would be to do (or almost do) this.

Comment author: Lumifer 24 February 2016 03:43:28PM 1 point [-]

If one type of bacteria doubled the amount of energy it consumed, and this slightly reduced my reproductive fitness, then this type of bacteria would be better off.

It's not obvious to me that it will better off. There is a clear trade-off here, the microorganisms want to "steal" some energy from the host to live, but not too much or the host will die and so will they. I am sure evolution fine-tunes this trade-off in order to maximize survival, as usual.

The process, of course, is noisy. Bacteria mutate and occasionally develop high virulence which can kill large parts of host population (see e.g. the Black Plague). But those high-virulence strains do not survive for long, precisely because they are so "greedy".

Comment author: Clarity 24 February 2016 02:05:59PM 0 points [-]

YSITTBIDWTCIYSTEIWEWITTAW is a little long for an acronym, but ADBOC for "Agree Denotationally But Object Connotationally'

Comment author: gjm 24 February 2016 02:37:13PM 0 points [-]

"Your statement is technically true but I disagree with the connotations if you're suggesting that ...", I guess. I'm hampered by not being sure whether you're objecting connotationally to (1) the idea that having an economics PhD is a guarantee of understanding the fundamentals of economics, or (2) the analogy between markets / command economies and unguided evolution / intelligent design, or (3) something else.

"... that economics is why evolution wins in the actual world"?

Comment author: Clarity 24 February 2016 03:26:51PM 0 points [-]

Even if 'markets with decentralized decision making often beat intelligent design', that doesn't mean decentralised decision making dominates centralised planning (what I assume he means by intelligent design)

Comment author: gjm 24 February 2016 04:05:27PM 0 points [-]

But ChristianKI is neither claiming nor implying that (so far as I can see); his point is that Eric is arguing "look at these amazing things; they're far too amazing to have been done without a guiding intelligence" but his experience in economics should show him that actually often (and "often" is all that's needed here) distributed systems of fairly stupid agents can do better than centralized guiding intelligences.

(I don't find that convincing, but for what I think are different reasons from yours. Eric's hypothetical centralized guiding intelligence is much, much smarter than (e.g.) the Soviet central planners.)

Comment author: username2 23 February 2016 10:28:17AM -1 points [-]

An economics PhD who works in academia will meet colleagues from biology department. They have plenty of opportunities to clarify their misconceptions if they are curious and actually want to learn something.

Comment author: James_Miller 23 February 2016 03:35:14PM *  1 point [-]

My understanding is that most biologists don't work on evolution and know little about the mathematical theories of evolution.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 23 February 2016 09:53:09PM 0 points [-]

Falkenstein does not work in academia.

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