It’s interesting how seldom meta-level innovation has happened in biological evolution. Is this because it is too hard to evolve a system whose basic underpinnings can be changed by evolution? Or perhaps, it is not such a big win after all, and most changes at this level just break things?
One of the biggest mysteries of evolution is how we “evolved to evolve”, how we went from the simplest replicators to our complex system with DNA, chromosomes, jumping genes, sexuality, and other mechanisms that seem to be fine tuned to create just enough variation such that natural selection can make progress. People who have worked on genetic algorithms have found that it doesn’t just happen, you have to put a lot of thought into creating a structure such that a selection mechanism leads to meaningful improvement. Somehow evolution did the job.
And even more amazing to me, this biochemical infrastructure, which has probably been unchanged for at least hundreds of millions of years, and which was selected for on the basis of creating very primitive organisms, nevertheless had within itself sufficient variability to lead to human intelligence. Yet our 20,000-odd genes are not all that different from those of yeast cells. It is almost unbelievable that we got so lucky as to be included within the envelope of what was possible, when such a goal could not possibly have been relevant at the time the biochemical system was fixed.
It’s interesting how seldom meta-level innovation has happened in biological evolution. Is this because it is too hard to evolve a system whose basic underpinnings can be changed by evolution? Or perhaps, it is not such a big win after all, and most changes at this level just break things?
One of the biggest mysteries of evolution is how we “evolved to evolve”, how we went from the simplest replicators to our complex system with DNA, chromosomes, jumping genes, sexuality, and other mechanisms that seem to be fine tuned to create just enough variation such that natural selection can make progress. People who have worked on genetic algorithms have found that it doesn’t just happen, you have to put a lot of thought into creating a structure such that a selection mechanism leads to meaningful improvement. Somehow evolution did the job.
And even more amazing to me, this biochemical infrastructure, which has probably been unchanged for at least hundreds of millions of years, and which was selected for on the basis of creating very primitive organisms, nevertheless had within itself sufficient variability to lead to human intelligence. Yet our 20,000-odd genes are not all that different from those of yeast cells. It is almost unbelievable that we got so lucky as to be included within the envelope of what was possible, when such a goal could not possibly have been relevant at the time the biochemical system was fixed.