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I would expect this way of thinking about evolution would be common but unfortunately it isn't. I feel the way we say "X animal evolved to do Y" sets the ton as

I would expect this way of thinking about evolution would be common but unfortunately it isn't. I feel the way we say "X animal evolved to do Y" sets the ton as if it was a active, thought out decision. Instead, it was just 1000s of mutation happened and maybe a certain kind was able to survive while other wasn't. It is more of a mathematical concept than conscious one.

uh_uh 9mo ago
I find it hard to believe that evolution is completely blind. The search space that it can explore via mutations is astronomically large. Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years doesn't really save the argument as it takes some specimen years to develop and get feedback on their fitness. It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips". I'm not trying to suggest woo here, but there has to be some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat.
- lotsofpulp 9mo ago
  That mechanism is a set of genes failing to procreate.
  - yes_man 9mo ago
    Epigenetics can arguably be an example of what the comment means by narrowing the search space. You can have heritable changes to gene expression that are not part of your genome, but are a result of feedback from the environment (and not random mutations, viability of which natural selection will judge over future generations)
- DonHopkins 9mo ago
  As a general rule of thumb: truth = claim.replace(/I'm not (.*?), but (.*)/, "I'm $1."); Then again this is a discussion about "Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations" so maybe woo is appropriate, and you should embrace it.
  - FunHearing3443 9mo ago
    Is there a way their question could have been phrased that would have not drawn you to make that assumption, which seems to be an ethos attack, or are you predisposed to reply in such a way about any philosophical evolution question?
    - DonHopkins 9mo ago
      When people say /I'm not (.*?), but (.*)/, they invariably are what they're claiming they aren't. That's what that phrase means. For example, we've all heard it a million times from people defending their vote for Donald Trump. There's even a wikipedia page about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist,_but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist,_but... If you really mean $2, then just say $2, you don't have to preface it with "I'm not $1, but". That's a waste of words, beating around the bush, a rhetorical shield, that reveals that you really are $1 and you feel the need to be defensive about it. The word "but" in that context means the thing before it is false, just air escaping from the folds of your fat, and you can ignore everything before the "but". "But" is a contrastive conjunction, signaling the clause before "but" is expected, socially required, or reputationally protective, and the clause after "but" is the actual communicative payload. It means to discount or ignore $1 and evaluate the speaker by $2. Saying “I’m not $1, but $2” does not strengthen $2, it does't make $2 safer or clearer, it just signals defensiveness, and undermines credibility. Again, this is a discussion about psychedelic mushrooms, fairytale-like hallucinations, and machine elves, so woo away all you want! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO2dPIdEaR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO2dPIdEaR4
  - uh_uh 9mo ago
    I have little patience for intelligent-design and the likes, if that's what you are getting at. All I'm saying is that blind enumeration of mutations seems combinatorially infeasible due to the vastness of the search space. It is already known that mutation bias exists, so what I'm saying shouldn't be that controversial.
    - DonHopkins 9mo ago
- wyldfire 9mo ago
  > some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat. Your perspective has the unfortunate bias of being posed at the end of a long stream of evolution that happened to emerge with an intelligence far superior from other living things. > Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of planets conduct the experiment, ours just happens to have resulted in intelligence. > It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips". Mutations introduce randomness but beneficial traits can be selected for artificially, compounding the benefits.
  - uh_uh 9mo ago
    > It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of planets conduct the experiment, ours just happens to have resulted in intelligence. My argument doesn't depend on the existence of an intelligent species on the planet. The problem already arises when there are multiple species on ONE planet. If you calculate the pure combinatorial distance between the DNA of 2 species, you must find that you can't just brute force your way from one to the other before the heat-death of the universe. This is why mutation bias exists: not all mutations are equally likely, evolution favours some kinds over others.
    - uplifter 9mo ago
      > If you calculate the pure combinatorial distance between the DNA of 2 species, you must find that you can't just brute force your way from one to the other before the heat-death of the universe. Can you expand on this? I'm not seeing why it is implausible for one genome to mutate into another, that seems like it could be accomplished in reasonable time with a small, finite number of mutations performed sequentially or in parallel. After all the largest genome is only about 160 billion base pairs, and the average is much smaller (humans are 3 billion base pairs). So what's the difficulty in imagining one mutating into another?
    - coriny 9mo ago
      Your maths doesn't seem right. You can estimate mutation rates very easily, and you don't end up at crazy numbers. The sequence space explored by evolution is tiny compared to the possibilities and closely interlinked. A simple example is comparing haemoglobin sequences from different animals.
- PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
  The search space is highly constrained. All life on this planet is based on hydrocarbon chemistry, more or less, and must operate in the face of high rates of oxidation and water as pretty much the only available solvent. Even with such constraints, the differences between what has evolved (bacteria to blue whales! viruses to polar bears! algae to orchids!) are staggering. The fact that you find something hard to believe doesn't say much at all. Humans have all kinds of things that we find hard to believe - for example, I find it almost impossible to believe that there is only one object I can see in the night sky with my own eyes that is outside of our galaxy - but that doesn't make them any more or less true.
  - uh_uh 9mo ago
    Let's take human DNA as an example. It contains 3.2B GTCA base pairs. This gives rise to 4^3.2B possible combos. It's just not possible to navigate this space blindly. There is not enough atoms in the universe to do that. It is known that there is bias in what mutations are favoured.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
      Only a tiny percentage (around 1%) of the DNA in chromosomes codes for proteins. And yes, certain mutations are favored precisely because of the chemistry constraints (an extremely basic one is which base pair changes actually alter the resulting protein; a more sophisticated one is which amino acid changes alter the physical functionality of the protein).
    - Supermancho 9mo ago
      There are multiple constraints that I can immediately identify. Maximal temperature extremes, barometric pressure, atmospheric/substrate compositions, etc. The bias is inherent to the history of the planet Earth and the gradients present across that time and space. I'd say it's highly constrained.
    - uplifter 9mo ago
      Of course there is bias, the bias is provided by the natural environment where the organisms coded by the genome must thrive or die. The bias is applied after the mutation occurs, but the mutations themselves are random, or nearly so. Probably there is some differential rate between the likelihood of each of the four base pairs to mutate into each of the others, but I would guess its nearly parity, because that would probably be close to optimal (though that depends on the details of the genetic coding scheme, ie the triplet code that translates nucleotide triples into amino acid codons).
- BobbyTables2 9mo ago
  Look at software fuzzing, particularly the coverage guided mutators (basically a simple “genetic algorithm”. It’s amazing what a few random bit flips combined with a crude measurement can do. To me, evolution at first seem implausible. Monkeys banging on a typewriter aren’t going to write Shakespeare. But add a crude feedback loop to them, and soon they’ll be dishing out Charles Dickens too!
  - summa_tech 9mo ago
    The monkeys in my last experiment got there in 221 years, in particular.
- bavell 9mo ago
  Maybe won't be viewed favorably by the HN crowd, but I enjoyed the most recent Bret Weinstein interview on Joe Rogan [0] where Bret talks about his pet theory on natural selection / evolution (maybe 2/3 way through the interview). Basically, the "junk" DNA we have may be "variables" that influence form and morphology, thus giving natural selection a vastly reduced design space to search for viable mutations. E.g. not much chemical difference between a bat wing and another mammals hands - mostly a difference of morphology. Allowing for more efficient search of evolutionary parameters instead of pure random walk. [0] https://youtu.be/WX_te6X-0aQ https://youtu.be/WX_te6X-0aQ
  - DonHopkins 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - bavell 9mo ago
      1) No one asked why it's being down voted (to... -1, the horror). I'm not here for internet points. 2) This isn't my field - I am not making any claims, merely relaying what I thought was an interesting concept/mechanism I hadn't heard of before, that I thought other curious individuals here might also think was interesting. Isn't that the entire point of HN? I would have very much appreciated links or something to Google over this bizarre analysis of why my comment is downvoted. I didn't know this wasn't novel and was accepted science. 3) I understand Bret/Joe aren't looked upon favorably by certain crowds, particularly on this forum. I tried to get ahead of the "but didn't you know they can't be trusted!" comments and attempt to focus on the substance. If the substance is wrong, great! Let's talk about that. 4) You are assuming malice where there is none, and calling me disrespectful and insisting I must know things. I find that quite disrespectful and uncalled for. Not everyone has your opinions or knows what you know. 10k a day and all that https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ HN guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
      - DonHopkins 9mo ago
        You obviously know they can't be trusted, you just said so. Why not just say that as a disclaimer to the video, instead of attempting to "get ahead" of other people who also know that, and will call you on omitting it. Don't dismiss HN users as "certain crowds" and preemptively try to head them off at the pass for pointing out what you chose to omit. What "certain crowds" would that be, people who don't tolerate bullshit? It's not about "certain crowds" who know Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein are full of shit, it's about Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein being full of shit, and you knowingly repeating and recommending their shit. FIFY: >Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein are full of shit, but I enjoyed the most recent Bret Weinstein interview on Joe Rogan [0] where Bret talks about his pet theory on natural selection / evolution (maybe 2/3 way through the interview), which is bullshit. Then don't just repeat their bullshit without question. You could have even gone as far to explain WHY they're full of shit, and who they really are, and what other malicious bullshit they spew, instead of just propagating their bullshit without warning, as if "certain crowds" are trying to suppress that vital information. When you uncritically recommend and parrot bullshit, and try to preempt comments from "certain crowds" who you know rightfully disagree, it sure comes off looking like you believe it, which is not a good look. The strongest plausible interpretation is that you enjoy listing to deceptive idiots make fools of themselves and spread misinformation, and I'll give you that. "Junk DNA as variables that reduce search space" is a very old idea, but it's routinely introduced in popular media as if it fixes a flaw in evolution — usually the "pure random walk" strawman. That framing is a huge tell, because evolutionary biology abandoned that view generations ago. Weinstein and Rogan’s signature move is to take settled science, remove its context and literature, and rebrand it as contrarian revelation, implying experts missed something obvious or are hiding it. That move reliably revives strawmen, Intelligent-Design-adjacent language, and manufactured doubt, while producing zero new knowledge. Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein are notorious not because they're unpopular, but because they're dishonest and corrosive.
- username135 9mo ago
  Why does it need some kind of boundary? What if it was operating on a limitless trajectory?
- jyounker 9mo ago
  The constraint is a life-forms' existing form. A given genetic sequence can only move (in general) a small distance from the existing sequence. Since you're already starting with a successful sequence, the odds are that a small variant on that sequence is also going to be only marginally more or less successful than the original sequence.

uh_uh 9mo ago

I find it hard to believe that evolution is completely blind. The search space that it can explore via mutations is astronomically large. Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years doesn't really save the argument as it takes some specimen years to develop and get feedback on their fitness. It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips". I'm not trying to suggest woo here, but there has to be some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat.

lotsofpulp 9mo ago
That mechanism is a set of genes failing to procreate.
- yes_man 9mo ago
  Epigenetics can arguably be an example of what the comment means by narrowing the search space. You can have heritable changes to gene expression that are not part of your genome, but are a result of feedback from the environment (and not random mutations, viability of which natural selection will judge over future generations)
DonHopkins 9mo ago
As a general rule of thumb: truth = claim.replace(/I'm not (.*?), but (.*)/, "I'm $1."); Then again this is a discussion about "Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations" so maybe woo is appropriate, and you should embrace it.
- FunHearing3443 9mo ago
  Is there a way their question could have been phrased that would have not drawn you to make that assumption, which seems to be an ethos attack, or are you predisposed to reply in such a way about any philosophical evolution question?
  - DonHopkins 9mo ago
    When people say /I'm not (.*?), but (.*)/, they invariably are what they're claiming they aren't. That's what that phrase means. For example, we've all heard it a million times from people defending their vote for Donald Trump. There's even a wikipedia page about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist,_but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist,_but... If you really mean $2, then just say $2, you don't have to preface it with "I'm not $1, but". That's a waste of words, beating around the bush, a rhetorical shield, that reveals that you really are $1 and you feel the need to be defensive about it. The word "but" in that context means the thing before it is false, just air escaping from the folds of your fat, and you can ignore everything before the "but". "But" is a contrastive conjunction, signaling the clause before "but" is expected, socially required, or reputationally protective, and the clause after "but" is the actual communicative payload. It means to discount or ignore $1 and evaluate the speaker by $2. Saying “I’m not $1, but $2” does not strengthen $2, it does't make $2 safer or clearer, it just signals defensiveness, and undermines credibility. Again, this is a discussion about psychedelic mushrooms, fairytale-like hallucinations, and machine elves, so woo away all you want! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO2dPIdEaR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO2dPIdEaR4
- uh_uh 9mo ago
  I have little patience for intelligent-design and the likes, if that's what you are getting at. All I'm saying is that blind enumeration of mutations seems combinatorially infeasible due to the vastness of the search space. It is already known that mutation bias exists, so what I'm saying shouldn't be that controversial.
  - DonHopkins 9mo ago
wyldfire 9mo ago
> some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat. Your perspective has the unfortunate bias of being posed at the end of a long stream of evolution that happened to emerge with an intelligence far superior from other living things. > Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of planets conduct the experiment, ours just happens to have resulted in intelligence. > It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips". Mutations introduce randomness but beneficial traits can be selected for artificially, compounding the benefits.
- uh_uh 9mo ago
  > It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of planets conduct the experiment, ours just happens to have resulted in intelligence. My argument doesn't depend on the existence of an intelligent species on the planet. The problem already arises when there are multiple species on ONE planet. If you calculate the pure combinatorial distance between the DNA of 2 species, you must find that you can't just brute force your way from one to the other before the heat-death of the universe. This is why mutation bias exists: not all mutations are equally likely, evolution favours some kinds over others.
  - uplifter 9mo ago
    > If you calculate the pure combinatorial distance between the DNA of 2 species, you must find that you can't just brute force your way from one to the other before the heat-death of the universe. Can you expand on this? I'm not seeing why it is implausible for one genome to mutate into another, that seems like it could be accomplished in reasonable time with a small, finite number of mutations performed sequentially or in parallel. After all the largest genome is only about 160 billion base pairs, and the average is much smaller (humans are 3 billion base pairs). So what's the difficulty in imagining one mutating into another?
  - coriny 9mo ago
    Your maths doesn't seem right. You can estimate mutation rates very easily, and you don't end up at crazy numbers. The sequence space explored by evolution is tiny compared to the possibilities and closely interlinked. A simple example is comparing haemoglobin sequences from different animals.
PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
The search space is highly constrained. All life on this planet is based on hydrocarbon chemistry, more or less, and must operate in the face of high rates of oxidation and water as pretty much the only available solvent. Even with such constraints, the differences between what has evolved (bacteria to blue whales! viruses to polar bears! algae to orchids!) are staggering. The fact that you find something hard to believe doesn't say much at all. Humans have all kinds of things that we find hard to believe - for example, I find it almost impossible to believe that there is only one object I can see in the night sky with my own eyes that is outside of our galaxy - but that doesn't make them any more or less true.
- uh_uh 9mo ago
  Let's take human DNA as an example. It contains 3.2B GTCA base pairs. This gives rise to 4^3.2B possible combos. It's just not possible to navigate this space blindly. There is not enough atoms in the universe to do that. It is known that there is bias in what mutations are favoured.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
    Only a tiny percentage (around 1%) of the DNA in chromosomes codes for proteins. And yes, certain mutations are favored precisely because of the chemistry constraints (an extremely basic one is which base pair changes actually alter the resulting protein; a more sophisticated one is which amino acid changes alter the physical functionality of the protein).
  - Supermancho 9mo ago
    There are multiple constraints that I can immediately identify. Maximal temperature extremes, barometric pressure, atmospheric/substrate compositions, etc. The bias is inherent to the history of the planet Earth and the gradients present across that time and space. I'd say it's highly constrained.
  - uplifter 9mo ago
    Of course there is bias, the bias is provided by the natural environment where the organisms coded by the genome must thrive or die. The bias is applied after the mutation occurs, but the mutations themselves are random, or nearly so. Probably there is some differential rate between the likelihood of each of the four base pairs to mutate into each of the others, but I would guess its nearly parity, because that would probably be close to optimal (though that depends on the details of the genetic coding scheme, ie the triplet code that translates nucleotide triples into amino acid codons).
BobbyTables2 9mo ago
Look at software fuzzing, particularly the coverage guided mutators (basically a simple “genetic algorithm”. It’s amazing what a few random bit flips combined with a crude measurement can do. To me, evolution at first seem implausible. Monkeys banging on a typewriter aren’t going to write Shakespeare. But add a crude feedback loop to them, and soon they’ll be dishing out Charles Dickens too!
- summa_tech 9mo ago
  The monkeys in my last experiment got there in 221 years, in particular.
bavell 9mo ago
Maybe won't be viewed favorably by the HN crowd, but I enjoyed the most recent Bret Weinstein interview on Joe Rogan [0] where Bret talks about his pet theory on natural selection / evolution (maybe 2/3 way through the interview). Basically, the "junk" DNA we have may be "variables" that influence form and morphology, thus giving natural selection a vastly reduced design space to search for viable mutations. E.g. not much chemical difference between a bat wing and another mammals hands - mostly a difference of morphology. Allowing for more efficient search of evolutionary parameters instead of pure random walk. [0] https://youtu.be/WX_te6X-0aQ https://youtu.be/WX_te6X-0aQ
- DonHopkins 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - bavell 9mo ago
    1) No one asked why it's being down voted (to... -1, the horror). I'm not here for internet points. 2) This isn't my field - I am not making any claims, merely relaying what I thought was an interesting concept/mechanism I hadn't heard of before, that I thought other curious individuals here might also think was interesting. Isn't that the entire point of HN? I would have very much appreciated links or something to Google over this bizarre analysis of why my comment is downvoted. I didn't know this wasn't novel and was accepted science. 3) I understand Bret/Joe aren't looked upon favorably by certain crowds, particularly on this forum. I tried to get ahead of the "but didn't you know they can't be trusted!" comments and attempt to focus on the substance. If the substance is wrong, great! Let's talk about that. 4) You are assuming malice where there is none, and calling me disrespectful and insisting I must know things. I find that quite disrespectful and uncalled for. Not everyone has your opinions or knows what you know. 10k a day and all that https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ HN guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
    - DonHopkins 9mo ago
      You obviously know they can't be trusted, you just said so. Why not just say that as a disclaimer to the video, instead of attempting to "get ahead" of other people who also know that, and will call you on omitting it. Don't dismiss HN users as "certain crowds" and preemptively try to head them off at the pass for pointing out what you chose to omit. What "certain crowds" would that be, people who don't tolerate bullshit? It's not about "certain crowds" who know Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein are full of shit, it's about Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein being full of shit, and you knowingly repeating and recommending their shit. FIFY: >Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein are full of shit, but I enjoyed the most recent Bret Weinstein interview on Joe Rogan [0] where Bret talks about his pet theory on natural selection / evolution (maybe 2/3 way through the interview), which is bullshit. Then don't just repeat their bullshit without question. You could have even gone as far to explain WHY they're full of shit, and who they really are, and what other malicious bullshit they spew, instead of just propagating their bullshit without warning, as if "certain crowds" are trying to suppress that vital information. When you uncritically recommend and parrot bullshit, and try to preempt comments from "certain crowds" who you know rightfully disagree, it sure comes off looking like you believe it, which is not a good look. The strongest plausible interpretation is that you enjoy listing to deceptive idiots make fools of themselves and spread misinformation, and I'll give you that. "Junk DNA as variables that reduce search space" is a very old idea, but it's routinely introduced in popular media as if it fixes a flaw in evolution — usually the "pure random walk" strawman. That framing is a huge tell, because evolutionary biology abandoned that view generations ago. Weinstein and Rogan’s signature move is to take settled science, remove its context and literature, and rebrand it as contrarian revelation, implying experts missed something obvious or are hiding it. That move reliably revives strawmen, Intelligent-Design-adjacent language, and manufactured doubt, while producing zero new knowledge. Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein are notorious not because they're unpopular, but because they're dishonest and corrosive.
username135 9mo ago
Why does it need some kind of boundary? What if it was operating on a limitless trajectory?
jyounker 9mo ago
The constraint is a life-forms' existing form. A given genetic sequence can only move (in general) a small distance from the existing sequence. Since you're already starting with a successful sequence, the odds are that a small variant on that sequence is also going to be only marginally more or less successful than the original sequence.