Hummingbirds and Evolution.

[swestrup]

_sps_ sent me a pointer to this article on how hummingbirds fly. While interesting in its own right, the part that made it worth alerting me to, was the last paragraph:

"The one big caveat is that an engineer can start from scratch - biological evolution doesn't ever start anew. It's encumbered with the trappings of one's ancestry." -- Dr. Douglas Warrick, of Oregon State University.

It is surprising how few folks, even in the Biological sciences seem to understand how basic a principal that is to understanding and analyzing life on this world, or on another. Its actually very refreshing to find someone who has that clue.

Comments

[auriam.livejournal.com]

Yeah, like the vertebrate eye which has to deal with the annoyance of having its retinal blood vessels out in front of its vision... I recall reading that the giant squid can see much better than we since it doesn't have this issue...

Though one might say that when eventually evolution "comes up with" creatures intelligent enough to understand the process and its mechanism, it can leap ahead by conscious reprogramming... if, that is, the ones who still believe that some Big Scary Being will get angry if they take their fates into their own hands aren't able to stop them...

[sps.livejournal.com]

Actually, this has happened repeatedly. RNA learned catalysis, and then autocatalysis. It then learned to be coded by DNA. DNA learned switching and metaswitching. Skipping over a *lot* of good stuff we get to planning and communication, parenting and memetic programming - out species' latest major contributions are archiving (well, there have been retroviruses for a while), telecommunications (whoops, retroviruses do that, too) and indexing (the Internet and Googling being only the latest instances of these, of course) (and dammit if the mammalian immune system doesn't work by hashing and cacheing, e.g.).

It depends a bit on what you mean by 'understand' just as it depends on what you man by 'learn', but metaprogramming is what *all* the evolutionary leaps have been about. Each time the timescale shrinks and the system complexity jumps, but the process is all the same.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

So... what's next? ;)
[I have my theories, but I'd like to hear yours first... and given that most scientists are very hesitant to make sweeping predictions without being quite sure of their plausibility - look at how upset some got with Penrose and his "quantum consciousness" ideas - I'd better not get too excited about them until I have a realistic idea of my ideas' possibility of truth.]

[sps.livejournal.com]

Hm, I'm not sure I dare answer, since I am one of those who believe that Penrose is talking out of the wrong orifice. He utterly failed to persuade me that there was anything to explain - so profoundly so that he persuaded me that he was unqualified to consider the entire field - and the question of the plausibility of the explanation was thus never even raised.

[swestrup]

I think he was asking what you expected the next level of metaprogramming to consist of, not whether Penrose had a clue.

[sps.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know it. But since I can't provide an answer that builds on Penrose... and it seems to be assumed that I ought... what can I say?

Not that I have an answer anyway. I just have no estimate of how far the human brain is from obsolescence, and that makes all the difference.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

Hmm. That article NYT ran a few months ago, asking scientists if there were any beliefs they held which they could not prove, comes to mind. One of them said he believed that the idea of life and consciousness being "special" was merely an offshoot of the same old evolved self-preservation instincts we've always had.

[sps.livejournal.com]

Well, utilitarianism obviously has a free parameter of infinite dimension, which is the relatedness-to-self metric. I don't think that even requires proof. Then again, I believe it to be clearly provable in principle (though not yet formally proven) that consciousness (or rather, the perception of self-consciousness, and the availability of a generalisation to others) is an epiphenomenon of self-observation in compulsively environment-modelling systems. So ... I find it a bit weak-minded to put that in the 'unprovable beliefs' category.

Myself I believe that there is not not a God. I believe that's provably unprovable!

[auriam.livejournal.com]

Depends on how one defines a "god"... some are easily disproven, and thus have fallen by the wayside over time. Like the old joke about the Communist teacher who tells his students to ask God for a ruble and then ask the teacher, or the priest who tosses the money from the collection in the air and says "God can keep whatever he can catch".

People - well, MOST people - no longer believe in a God which acts in physical, immediately human-understandable, obviously intentional and supernatural ways (ie, extremely improbable, against-the-laws-of-physics "miraculous" actions). Some of them think that there might have been that kind of a god once, but that now it's "hiding" or trying to "test their faith".

Myself, I think the more metaphysical "First Cause" type of a god may be possible - not necessarily provable, though - but that it's a waste of time to sit around waiting for it to tell us what to do - and foolish to believe others who claim to be able to speak to that hypothetical god, much less obey them on that basis...

[auriam.livejournal.com]

Also... I don't really hold an opinion either way on Penrose's "science of mind" or "Quantum Consciousness" theories, as I haven't read through the full explanations or justifications of them yet. However, I'm starting to inwardly wince whenever I hear an idea that contains the word "quantum" where one wouldn't expect to find it, as in "quantum bees" or "quantum dowsing"; it seems to be thrown in as a flavor enhancer, much like "atomic" once was.

I just meant that the world is full of impressive-sounding theories lately; and that maybe I should get my own understanding of the current consensus on Reality before attempting to modify it, lest I open my mouth and remove all doubt prematurely ;)

[sps.livejournal.com]

swestrup and I were at one point thinking of going to the Psychic Expo and selling Quantum Luck Rotators....

[auriam.livejournal.com]

Hey, go for it... I think it should be fine for any counteropinion (or counter-fact) group to be present at any event they disagree with, as long as they don't prevent the event from taking place... more speech, not less, is the way to truth.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

And I bet you'd make some money, too... after all, I don't see any tigers around here; the rock must be working!

And btw, wondered if you'd ever seen Penn and Teller's skeptic/debunking show, "Bullshit"... Penn's kind of like an atheistic Rush Limbaugh, for better or worse, and it's rather entertaining.