You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

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

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

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

Comments (228)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

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: 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? ;)