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Lumifer comments on Open Thread, October 20 - 26, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Evolutionary suicide seems to be someone's theoretical idea. Is there any evidence that it happens in evolution in reality?
In any case, are you basically trying to find the directionality of evolution? On a meta level higher than "adapted to the current environment"? There probably isn't. Evolution is a quite simple mechanism, it just works given certain conditions. It is not goal-oriented, it's just how the world is.
However if I were forced to find something correlated with evolution, I'd probably say complexity.
This doesn't seem to be the case either
Depends on your time frame. Looking at the whole history of life on Earth evolution certainly correlates with complexity, looking at the last few million years, not so much.
I understand the argument about the upper limit of genetic information that can be sustained. I am somewhat suspicious of it because I'm not sure what will happen to this argument if we do NOT assume a stable environment (so the target of the optimization is elusive, it's always moving) and we do NOT assume a single-point optimum but rather imagine a good-enough plateau on which genome could wander without major selection consequences.
But I haven't thought about it enough to form a definite opinion.
Species of nightshade tend to evolve to become self-fertile, before dying out due to lack of genetic diversity.
Is this your source?
Link? Lots of plants are self-fertile and do quite well...
Better example: parthenogenic lizard species.
What makes that example better?
Damn it. It was going to be a better example because I was going to give the actual genera (Aspidoscelis and Cnemidophorus) of whiptail lizards whose species keep going down this path and then I got distracted and didn't do that. Oops.
Complexity in what way? Kolmogoroph complexity of DNA?
No, complexity of the phenotype.
How would you go about measuring that complexity?
I don't know. Eyeballing it seems to be a good start.
Why do you ask? Do you think that such things are unmeasurable or there are radically different ways of measuring them or what?
I have a hard time trying to form a judgement about whether a human is more or less complex than a dinosaur via eyeballing.
Is a grasshopper more of less complex than a human?
Well, would you have problems arranging the following in the order of complexity: a jellyfish, a tree, an amoeba, a human..?
Yes.
I think you just don't give an amoeba much credit because it's no multicellular organism. It's genome is 100-200 times the size of the human. As it's that big it seems like we haven't sequenced all of it so we don't know how many genes it has.
We also know very little about amoeba. Genetic analysis suggests that the do exchange genes with each other in some form but we don't know how.
Amoeba probably express a lot of stuff phenotypically that we don't yet understand.