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this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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Just as a reminder, it's also good to ask "is there any big disadvantage?". Sometimes, a thing evolves traits that don't help but don't cause enough harm to stop being passed on.
It's interesting how many people don't realize this. We were having a casual discussion one day and one of the smartest people I know, who has been educated in a lot of science, didn't realize that neutral or even outright negative traits can occur and persist in evolution. Evolution doesn't create a perfect being. It's just creates those that can survive long enough to reproduce better than those that can't do it as well.
“There's no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight
Another good one:
“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight
Or doesn't even beat the alternative, just doesn't get beaten by the alternative too badly. Lots of traits that just 'don't get washed out' or are even a distinct disadvantage but occur alongside an advantage.
"Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire."
...evolved down the wrong path, almost as if its devolution
Yes, it makes sense