Archive of posts with tag 'Evolution'

November 4, 2024 • #

Nature's Barbell Strategy →

Evolution has generated two opposed modes for organisms to find fitness:

r-selection is about speed: rapid reproduction, fast growth, many offspring

K-selection is about carrying capacity: slow development, robust fitness, few offspring

What can we learn to harness both approaches in work and life?

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May 24, 2024 • #

“Stages of Evolution of Plant Species” , from the Whole Earth Catalog , Spring 1970.

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May 7, 2024 • #

Tools, the Technium, and the Importance of Agency →

On Kevin Kelly’s “Technium” and why human innovation is different than the biological variety.

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Circle of Life →

May 6, 2024 • #

Kevin Kelly:

Because of the circle, no organism is privileged with being above another. A circle has not top. We humans are somewhere in the lineup, but where depends on how you turn the chart. This circle of life also better captures the idea that all living organisms today are equally evolved. By definition, any organism alive today (shown on the outer rim) can boast an unbroken chain of ancestors who have survived the same number of years, 4.5 billions years. The snail, fern, clam and mite have all undergone an equally long path to now. They are all the results of 4.5 billion years of evolution. The fern’s 4.5 billion-year answer to how to survive is to steal energy from the sun; the snail to steal it from the fern; the mite to steal it from the snail, and the deep vent clam, to steal it from the heat of the earth.

Though our intelligence, cellular complexity, or phenotypic traits are far from equal, all organisms alive today are equally evolved. Each species has been down a 4.5 billion-year path that led it to the niche it fills today.

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April 7, 2024 • #

Map of humanmetabolic pathways.

(via @burny_tech)

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March 29, 2024 • #

Possibility space →

Gordon Brander:

There is something powerful about this notion of possibility spaces, both from a theory standpoint, and as a way of seeing. It causes you to approach challenges in a different way. You don’t need to be creative. The creative breakthrough already exists out there in the space of possibility. It’s just waiting to be discovered.

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Evolution Has No Goal

February 27, 2024 • #

There’s a common misconception that evolution is “seeking” fitness — that there’s some inherent motivation in the process pushing toward a particular objective.

But evolution is an undirected process of mutation, testing, and accidental discovery of fitness. Within the genes of an organism, there is no memory acquiring feedback from these experimental genetic guesses. Genetic drift, mutation, and natural selection are evolution’s conjecture and criticism. But the criticism feedback loop doesn’t close in a single generation.

Evolution’s feedback loop is survival. If a gene survives, it will replicate. If it doesn’t, that mutation is “found” not to have worked (though the genes themselves never receive the message directly)¹. A gene’s only goal (if one can call it that) is to copy itself. The environment provides the pressure to select one mutation over another. But the environment has no goal either. It merely is, and genes have evolved to continually mutate, then poke and prod at the environment to perpetuate their replication.

Though from the Big Bang to now it appears evolution is seeking ever-higher forms of intelligence, this too is deceiving. There are no steps on a ladder, no “global maximum” on offer. Further complexity often confers an advantage, but not always. This fact fools us into believing evolution is in search of higher-order complexity on purpose.

We’re fooled into believing there’s an objective because humans have a tendency to seek patterns. Because we ourselves can conceptualize abstract goals and proceed incrementally on a planned path, we imbue evolution with a similar characteristic.

Evolution is a soup of primitive ingredients being continually mixed, matched, and tested against the chaotic environment around it. When thought of as its own form of knowledge creation distinct from the way human-created knowledge works, it’s a helpful mental model for thinking about all forms of complex adaptive systems.

The theory that genes receive feedback within a single generation is called “Lamarckism”, a fascinating subject in itself. A story of humans projecting our own means of knowledge creation on evolution’s purely undirected, emergent process. ↩

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February 22, 2024 • #

Illustrations by naturalistErnst Haeckel.

From his collection Kunstformen der Natur.

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The Two Enlightenments

February 20, 2024 • #

We learn about “The Enlightenment” as a singular entity, a historical age associated with rationality, scientific inquiry, humanism, and liberty. The Enlightenment and scientific revolution were defining moments that spawned an unprecedented period of progress and human flourishing. But in his book The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch adds useful texture for better understanding the motivations of the Enlightenment’s contributors.

He divides the movement into two broad forms: the “British” and the “Continental”.

Both branches agree on the core principles of rationality, progress, and freedom. Where they disagree is on how to achieve these goals. They pursue the same ends, but disagree on the means. The British model builds on the concept of fallibilism: progress happens through conjecture, empirical evidence, and falsification. The Continental relies on pure reason, and our theoretical ability to find final, objective truth. Thinkers like Kant, Rousseau, and Voltaire best fit in the Continental camp. The likes of John Locke, Edmund Burke, Karl Popper, and Adam Smith in the British.

Here’s a summary of qualities that differentiate these two approaches to pursuing human progress:

Continental Enlightenment	British Enlightenment
Utopianism	Fallibilism
Society can be perfected	Society can only be indefinitely improved
Problems are soluble, NOT inevitable	Problems are soluble, AND inevitable
Perfect the state through design	Improve the state through gradual evolution
Top-down	Bottom-up
Comprehensive reform of institutions	Messy, improvement of imperfect forms

Deutsch himself favors the British form. As with issues of contemporary politics and philosophy, it’s important to understand not only the goals a particular philosophy seeks, but how it proposes we go about doing so.

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February 6, 2024 • #

Why Evolution Has No Goal →

Evolution is a roiling mess of substance and interaction. Order emerges from the stew. Fitness allowing one collection of chemicals to outlast another.

A true complex system is confounding and inscrutable, bucking attempts to make it legible, controllable. “Greatness cannot be planned”.

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February 5, 2024 • #

A gene pool is carved and whittled through generations of ancestral natural selection to fit [a particular] environment. In theory a knowledgeable zoologist, presented with the complete transcript of a genome [the set of all the genes of an organism], should be able to reconstruct the environmental circumstances that did the carving. In this sense the DNA is a coded description of ancestral environments.

—In The Living Wild , Art Wolfe (2000)

(from David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity)

The organism is a key to decoding its environment.

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January 27, 2024 • #

Environmental challenge + gradual adaptation + eons of time = magic.

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January 26, 2024 • #

The baron caterpillar. Nature finds a way.

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Why Evolution Has No Goal →

October 26, 2023 • #

Jason Fried recently wrote that we should teach iteration as a subject, or technique at least, in schools.

Another subject wildly undertaught is evolution. Not just the “creation vs. evolution” Big Picture story of how humans got here that we’ve spent centuries arguing over. I mean the underlying mechanisms of random variation, error correction, and fitness-to-environment testing that creates emergent order:

Out of the random variation, which is the result of mutations/copying-errors (which can be the result of exposure to radiation, metals or chemical substances), only a small percentage actually increases the fitness of an individual. Those mutations tend to prevail and become widespread, whereas mutations that lead to a disadvantage will likely be weeded out of the genepool. Even though the variation is originally random, a non-random subset of it – the fitness-benefitting components – ends up conserved through natural selection. This mechanism results in organisms adapting to better survive and reproduce in their environment.

So many other fields can benefit from a deeper understanding of these mechanisms — economics, sociology, architecture, language. In fact there’s a similarity here to teaching iteration. Teaching that accumulation and trial-and-error are present in every real system you’ll encounter in the future.

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Exapting Technologies

September 9, 2021 • #

New forms of technology tend not to materialize from thin air. The nature of innovation takes existing known technologies and remixes, extends, and co-opts them to create novelty.

Gordon Brander refers to it in this piece as “exapting infrastructure.” As in the case of the internet, it wasn’t nonexistent one day then suddenly connecting all of our computers the next. It wasn’t purposely designed from the beginning as a way for us to connect our millions of computers, phones, and smart TVs. In fact, many types of computers and the things we do with them evolved as a consequence of the expansion of the internet, enabled by interconnection to do new things we didn’t predict.

Former railroad corridors are regularly reused as cycling trails

“Exaptation” is a term of art in evolutionary biology, the phenomenon of an organism using a biological feature for a function other than it was adapted for through natural selection. Dinosaurs evolved feathers for insulation and display, which were eventually exapted for flight. Sea creatures developed air bladders for buoyancy regulation, later exapted into lungs for respiration on land.

In the same way, technologies beget new technologies, even seemingly-unrelated ones. In the case of the internet, early modems literally broadcast information as audio signals over phone lines intended for voice. Computers talked to each other this way for a couple decades before we went digital native. We didn’t build a web of copper and voice communication devices to make computers communicate, but it could be made to work for that purpose. Repurposing the existing already-useful network allowed the internet to gain a foothold without much new capital infrastructure:

The internet didn’t have to deploy expensive new hardware, or lay down new cables to get off the ground. It was conformable to existing infrastructure. It worked with the way the world was already, exapting whatever was available, like dinosaurs exapting feathers for flight.

Just like biological adaptations, technologies also evolve slowly. When we’re developing new technologies, protocols, and standards, we’d benefit from less greenfield thinking and should explore what can be exapted to get new tech off the ground. Enormous energy is spent trying to brute force new standards ground-up when we often would be better off bootstrapping on existing infrastructure.

Biology has a lot to teach us about the evolution of technology, if we look in the right places.

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Weekend Reading: Raising Less, the Adjacent Possible, and Fire and Motion

August 15, 2020 • #

🧰 There Are More Uses For A Screwdriver Than You Can Calculate

Biologist Stuart Kauffman on biological functions and the “adjacent possible”:

The unexpected uses of features of organisms, or technologies, are precisely what happens in the evolution of the biosphere and econosphere, and the analog happens in cultural evolution with the uses of mores, cultural forms, regulations, traditions, in novel ways. In general, these possibles are novel functionalities, in an unbounded space of functionalities, and so are not mathematizable and derivable from a finite set of axioms.

🏃🏻‍♂️ Fire and Motion

A Joel Spolsky classic from 2002. Take advantage of the time you have when you’re independent, small, and lean. Don’t get hung up on grand strategic chess-piece moving, sitting still while you plan your Big Moves. A reminder to just keep pushing forward every day:

Fire and Motion, for small companies like mine, means two things. You have to have time on your side, and you have to move forward every day. Sooner or later you will win. All I managed to do yesterday is improve the color scheme in FogBugz just a little bit. That’s OK. It’s getting better all the time. Every day our software is better and better and we have more and more customers and that’s all that matters. Until we’re a company the size of Oracle, we don’t have to think about grand strategies. We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor.

💵 Raise Less Money

There was a Twitter discussion going on this week around this piece, wherein Aaron Harris makes the case for seed stage companies to raise just enough money to find product-market fit, and not be tempted to greatly extend runway for experimentation:

I realized that the conversation about raising always anchors back to the idea of adding “months of runway.” That always seemed appropriate to me because it was a measure of the amount of time a company had to stay alive. Staying alive seemed good since it increased the time a company had to find product market fit and to grow.

But I now realize that this is the wrong framing because simply staying alive is an inadequate goal for a company. Founders start companies to find product market fit and grow. Venture capital is designed to speed growth, not to extend runway.

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Blood is Thicker Than Water →

December 26, 2019 • #

This article is excerpted from Steve Stewart-Williams’s latest book, The Ape that Understood the Universe. On the purposes of altruism and kin selection:

The details of Hamilton’s theory are complex, but the basic idea is fairly simple. The starting point is the observation that organisms share a larger fraction of their genes with relatives than they do with unrelated individuals. This has an important implication, namely that any gene that contributes to the development of a tendency to help one’s relatives has a better than average chance of being located as well in the recipients of that help. As a result, by helping one’s relatives to survive and reproduce, one can indirectly help to spread the genes that gave rise to that very tendency.

I’m currently reading Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy, which is full of evolutionary concepts and factoids like this, even though it’s ostensibly about marketing, bias, and decision making. Stewart-Williams’s book sounds right up there; will add it to the list.

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Antifragility and Tinkering in Biology (and in Business) Flexibility Provides an Efficient Epigenetic Way to Manage Risk →

November 27, 2019 • #

I found this piece cited in Taleb’s Antifragile, a unique case of an author citing a paper that was itself inspired by a galley of that book. The concept of “antifragility” (systems that gain or improve from disorder, volatility, and chaos) is fascinating. All organic or organic-like systems (economies, social orders) fall into this category, and here we see the concepts applied in biology:

Living systems are antifragile in that they can do much more than simply respond to the “pressure” of the environment by random mutations followed by selection; they have an in-built property that allows them to find solutions in the face of adversity. Antifragility is one such property. It unfolds not only in individual organisms, which age much slower than what could be expected from a fragile entity, but also in the way they generate a progeny. All these processes have in common the ability to create some novel information: antifragility cannot be separated from management of information.

In the paper the authors explore flexible protein development and how the “tinkering” process gives organisms a way to improve in robustness over time:

Choosing among a variety of antifragile processes, we discuss the existence of (literally) flexible proteins and the processes in which they participate. We show how this could help delay the senescence process, providing an example of how tinkering and antifragility work together during ageing.

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Weekend Reading: Darwinian Gastronomy, Humboldt, and Taxes

November 16, 2019 • #

🌶 Darwinian Gastronomy

Turns out cultures from warmer climates evolved a taste for spicy foods to combat the presence of more diverse bacteria:

Alas, nothing in nature turns out to be that simple. Researchers now suggest that a taste for spices served a vital evolutionary purpose: keeping our ancestors alive. Spices, it turns out, can kill poisonous bacteria and fungi that may contaminate our food. In other words, developing a taste for these spices could be good for our health. And since food spoils more quickly in hotter weather, it’s only natural that warmer climates have more bacteria-killing spices.

🌲 The Pioneering Maps of Alexander von Humboldt

The German scientist Alexander von Humboldt is one of the most important figures in conservation and geography. He was one of the first scientists to use maps as a critical tool for communicating his discoveries and ideas:

Another of Humboldt’s groundbreaking illustrations came out of his five-year voyage to Central and South America with the French botanist Aimé Bonpland. In 1802, Humboldt and Bonpland ascended Chimborazo, a volcano just below the equator that was believed at the time to be the highest mountain in the world (at 20,564 feet, it’s more than 8,000 feet shorter than Mount Everest). The pair documented the mountain’s plant life, from the tropical rainforest at its base to the lichen clinging to rocks above the treeline. The image below, which Humboldt called Tableau Physique in the French version of his original publication, organizes these observations in an intuitively visual way, showing Chimborazo in cross-section, with text indicating which species lived at different elevations on the mountain.

💰 Connecting Some Dots on Taxes

There was a roil over a Bill Gates interview from the recent DealBook conference, specifically around his comments on the upcoming election and his uncertainties around the Democratic candidates’ tax policies and consequences they might have. As is usual for Twitter, the rage machine was in full effect around Gates’s comments about “how much he’d have left” if Elizabeth Warren had her way.

The notion commonly tossed around with regard to billionaires is that there’s no way that level of wealth accumulation could happen through non-nefarious (or illegal) means. Kevin Williamson does a good job in this piece picking apart the logic here (or lack thereof) around “wealth transfer” — a disingenuous way to describe a phenomenon where there was no coercion involved.

The idea that there is some big national slop bucket marked “income” and that Gates et al. are grabbing up more than their fair share is breathtakingly primitive. A relatively small number of high-growth firms has accounted for a very large share of economic growth in the United States in the past several decades. That represents wealth creation, not a wealth transfer.

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Biology and Culture →

November 23, 2018 • #

In going through the backlog of Sam Harris’s Waking Up podcast, I put on this not-too-recent episode with Bret Weinstein, evolutionary biologist, free thinker, and polymath that I’ve heard in a number of other interviews before. This one in particular was fascinating since it went fairly deep on his area of expertise in biology, evolution, adaptation, and genetics.

Weinstein talks about human advancement through the lens of what is and isn’t a biological adaptation. I love the idea that the reason humans have progressed to such an advanced state is the shift in adaptation from the physiological realm (where change is slow over thousands of generations) to the cultural one (where enormous change in behavior can happen within a single generation). The metaphor is the movement from hardware to software:

“Human beings are, by far, the most nurture-based creature that has ever existed on planet earth. We have been pushed in the last phase in our evolution very far in the direction of nurture, and away from the direction of nature, and that is not an accident. That occurred because it provided a distinct evolutionary advantage. If you think of a human being as a physiological creature, that’s the robot. It’s got a brain, and that’s the computer. And then it’s got a mind and that’s the software. Human beings are effective at doing what we do because so much of what we are has been offloaded to the software layer.

“Things have been shifted over into a software layer that can be written and rewritten as circumstances change.”

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