I have mentioned 40y ago in the preamble of my doctoral thesis, that speeding up evolution is the best thing evolution can come up with. It is obvious that the rate of mutation matters. Too many mutations lead to chaos and death, while too few slow progress. Consequently we can see that the mutation rate is highly controlled and optimised in the diverse organisms. Often it is changed, depending on the environment (e.g, SOS repair, etc) , and/or genetic locus ( hyper-mutation of immunoglobin, etc.). But the main advance is given through recombination (which had been the subject of my thesis). The evolution of sex, brought homologous recombination so that evolution could spread its achievements throughout a population not only the direct offspring. But horizontal inheritance supercharges that. It brought to evolution what parallel procession brought to computation. Only evolution uses infinite many more processors (organism). During my career my various collaborators and I were able to shown that beneficial somatic mutations can re-enter the germline and spread. And that genomes as diverse as RNA and DNA viruses, or those of plants and animals can combine and form hybrid genes and enzymes that combine the evolutionary achievements independently formed in different kingdoms of live. And we have barely scratched the surface of the many tricks evolution has come up with to become more efficient. Consciousness may be just one of the many (partner choice, breeding, etc.) (I haven't bordered digging out the proper references for this impromptu post, but I am happy to provide them if there is interest)
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2024-11-11
If you follow this infographic, it took 3 billion years to develop multicellular life, but it only took another 400 million years to develop humans out of that.
Evolution is definitely speeding up, and quite a lot. Dinosaurs got extinct 65 million years ago, and nature had already re-filled that variety in species before humans killed most of them again.
And ever since humanity took hold, things have been speeding up wildly, anyways.
It’s one of the most compelling things for me about the Star Wars universe, the relative ease of space travel and the biological riot that implies.
Symbiosis of species that didn’t evolve on the same planet, for example, just imagine the wild innovations evolution would find.
The only mention of anything microbial is bacta and midichlorians in the Sequel That Shall Not Be Named, but as a micro nerd myself I have always wondered how they manage to not inadvertently create galactic super-plagues?
I love it. This entire topic breaks my brain. It evokes the same feeling I had working with high dimenson data structures, trying to incept it.
I completely agree with their conclusion, but their simulations seem a bit superfluous—I can hardly imagine them having a different outcome.
Is it no longer acceptable to pose simple thought experiments without acting them out in silico?
No it is not acceptable to just spout an idea without testing it someway, not if ‘Science’ is your game. A feeling about a particular outcome is not nearly enough to convince others that your intuition is valid. Show me the numbers.
If you are expressing an idea about systems with simple rules that produce complex outcomes and you don’t run the numbers, you haven’t even really done the work yet. It remains in the realm of armchair philosophy (aka probably wrong).
These type of simulations using Avida are a lot cheaper than wet lab experiments and the group that developed the platform has confirmed the outcome of insilico studies with decades-long wet lab experiments.
As a science funder, I would never fund a decade-long wet lab research program when a cheap desktop PC can validate your working model in silico, first.
I’m not disputing the value of simulations (although I think you’re overstating it a bit—by your criteria all of 20th-century science that didn’t include new lab results should be dismissed as “armchair philosophy”). But I think simulations should focus on testing those implications of a theory that aren’t predictable without a simulation—on getting answers you don’t already know. Like in this case, say: what happens when you introduce multiple traits and a polygenetic genotype-phenotype map? Such a simulation would confirm the same things this one does while also potentially advancing the theory in new ways.
All good points but my deeper point is not that complicated. It’s more realpolitik than anything. There are lots of ways to ‘science’ but many fewer ways to get your science funded.
If your work depends on a conceptual model or framework that can be simulated cheaply, no one will ever fund your real world experiments to validate that model/framework. Not until you run the sims.
There’s enough research on models that use simple rulesets that produce sometimes surprising behavior to show that our intuition about those systems is not reliable.
Any frazzled grant reviewer would rightly dismiss a request to commit to a grand wet lab program that hadn’t done this kind of model work.
So where I am coming from is that, yes, let’s say there is a 90% chance your intuition might be right about the behavior of a specific complex system. That’s still not good enough in our current funding environment. It’s just a practical necessity for most.