= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ChristianKl comments on Open Thread, October 20 - 26, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (211)
Plenty of people predict that increased antibiotica use will lead to a raise in antibiotica resistance among bacteria.
Organisms like bacteria that have much more iterations behind them then humans also tend to have less waste in their DNA.
Grasses beat trees at growing in glades with animals that eat plants. Why? Grass has more iterations behind them and is therefore better optimized for the enviroment than the trees.
A tree has to get lucky to survive the beginning. If it surives the beginning it can however grow tall and win.
Let's say you keep the enviroment stable for 2 billion years. Everything evolves naturally. Then you take tree seeds and bring them back to the present time. I think there a good chance that such a tree would outcompete grass at growing in glades.
Fossils don't really get used as the central evidence of common descent anymore. These days common descent usually get's determined by looking at the DNA. In my experience people who discuss evolution online that do focus on fossils are usually atheists who behave as if their atheism is a religion. They think it's important to defend Darwin against the creationists. On the other hand they aren't up to date with the current science on evolution.
You seem to be predicting that grasses have smaller genomes than trees, but wheat is famous for having a huge genome. Here's a table of a few plants. Maybe wheat is an outlier and I'd be interested if you had documentation of some pattern, but I've always heard that there is none.
What do you mean, "predict"? It has been empirically observed, a lot.
Huh? It doesn't work like that at all. For one thing, the "environment" isn't stable.
cousin made the claim that we can only say something about evolution that happened in the past. I say that we can confidently predict that increasing antibiotica resistance among bacteria will continue in the future.
Firstly describing complex system in a ew words is seldom completely accurate. The question is whether it's a useful mental model for thinking about it. In this case the idea I wanted to communicate is that it's very useful to think about the speed of iterations and the competitive advantage that a specis gets by having as advantage of hundred of millions of iterations over their competitors.
The enviroment doesn't have to be stable for the argument that I made. In changing enviroments a spezies with faster iterations adapts faster. A lot of genetic adaptions are also about housekeeping genes that are useful in most enviroments.