There are lots of simple things that organisms could do to make them wildly more successful. The success of human society is a good demonstration of how very low complexity systems and behaviours can drive your competition extinct, magnify available resources, and more, the vast majority of which could be easily coded into the genome in principle.
However, evolution does not make judgements about the end result. The question is whether there is a path of high success leading to your desired result. Laryngeal nerves are a good demonstration that even basic impediments won’t be worked around if you can’t get there step by step with appropriate evolutionary pressure. Ultimately there seems to be no impetus for a half-baked neuron tentacle, and a lot of cost and risk, so that will probably never be the path to such organisms.
There are many examples of fairly direct inter-organism communication, like RNA transfer between organisms, and to the extent that cells think in chemicals, the fact they share their chemical environment readily is a form of this kind of communication. I’m not aware of anything similarly direct at larger scales, between neurons.
The success of human society is a good demonstration of how very low complexity systems and behaviours can drive your competition extinct, magnify available resources, and more
On what basis are you calling human societies “very low complexity systems”? The individual units are humans, whose brains are immensely complex; and then the interactions between humans are often complicated enough that nobody has a good understanding of the system as a whole.
Ultimately there seems to be no impetus for a half-baked neuron tentacle, and a lot of cost and risk, so that will probably never be the path to such organisms.
This seems somewhat intuitive, but note that this statement is a universal negative: it’s saying there is no plausible path to this outcome. In general I think we should be pretty cautious about such statements, since a lot of evolutionary innovations would have seemed deeply implausible before they happened. For example, the elephant’s trunk is a massive neuron-rich tentacle which is heavily used for communication.
There are lots of simple things that organisms could do to make them wildly more successful.
I guess this is the crux of our disagreement—could you provide some examples?
Most of the complexity in human society is unnecessary to merely outperform the competition. The exploits that prehistoric humans found were readily available; it’s just that evolution could only find them by inventing a better optimizer, rather than getting there directly.
Crafting spears and other weapons is a simple example. The process to make them could be instinctual, and very little intellect is needed. Similar comments apply to clothing and cooking. If they were evolved behaviours, we might even expect parts of these weapons or tools to grow from the animal itself—you might imagine a dedicated role for one of the members of a group, who grows blades or pieces of armour that others can use as needed.
One could imagine plants that grow symbiotically with some mobile species that farms them and keeps them healthy in ways the plant itself is not able to do (eg. weeding), and in return provides nutrition and shelter, which could include enclosed walling over a sizable area.
One could imagine prey, like rabbits, becoming venomous. When resistance starts to form, they could primarily switch to a different venom for a thousand generations before switching back. In fact, you could imagine such venomous rabbits aggressively trying to drive predators extinct before they had the chance to gain a resistance; a short term cost for long-term prosperity.
The overall point is that evolution does not have the insight to get around optimization barriers. Consider brood parasites, where birds lay eggs in other species’ nests. It is hypothesized that a major reason this behaviour is successful is because of retaliatory behaviour when a parasite is ejected. Clearly these victim species would be better off if they just wiped the parasites off the face of the earth, as long as they survived the one-time increased retaliation, but evolutionary pressure resulted in them evolving complicity.
There are lots of simple things that organisms could do to make them wildly more successful. The success of human society is a good demonstration of how very low complexity systems and behaviours can drive your competition extinct, magnify available resources, and more, the vast majority of which could be easily coded into the genome in principle.
However, evolution does not make judgements about the end result. The question is whether there is a path of high success leading to your desired result. Laryngeal nerves are a good demonstration that even basic impediments won’t be worked around if you can’t get there step by step with appropriate evolutionary pressure. Ultimately there seems to be no impetus for a half-baked neuron tentacle, and a lot of cost and risk, so that will probably never be the path to such organisms.
There are many examples of fairly direct inter-organism communication, like RNA transfer between organisms, and to the extent that cells think in chemicals, the fact they share their chemical environment readily is a form of this kind of communication. I’m not aware of anything similarly direct at larger scales, between neurons.
On what basis are you calling human societies “very low complexity systems”? The individual units are humans, whose brains are immensely complex; and then the interactions between humans are often complicated enough that nobody has a good understanding of the system as a whole.
This seems somewhat intuitive, but note that this statement is a universal negative: it’s saying there is no plausible path to this outcome. In general I think we should be pretty cautious about such statements, since a lot of evolutionary innovations would have seemed deeply implausible before they happened. For example, the elephant’s trunk is a massive neuron-rich tentacle which is heavily used for communication.
I guess this is the crux of our disagreement—could you provide some examples?
Most of the complexity in human society is unnecessary to merely outperform the competition. The exploits that prehistoric humans found were readily available; it’s just that evolution could only find them by inventing a better optimizer, rather than getting there directly.
Crafting spears and other weapons is a simple example. The process to make them could be instinctual, and very little intellect is needed. Similar comments apply to clothing and cooking. If they were evolved behaviours, we might even expect parts of these weapons or tools to grow from the animal itself—you might imagine a dedicated role for one of the members of a group, who grows blades or pieces of armour that others can use as needed.
One could imagine plants that grow symbiotically with some mobile species that farms them and keeps them healthy in ways the plant itself is not able to do (eg. weeding), and in return provides nutrition and shelter, which could include enclosed walling over a sizable area.
One could imagine prey, like rabbits, becoming venomous. When resistance starts to form, they could primarily switch to a different venom for a thousand generations before switching back. In fact, you could imagine such venomous rabbits aggressively trying to drive predators extinct before they had the chance to gain a resistance; a short term cost for long-term prosperity.
The overall point is that evolution does not have the insight to get around optimization barriers. Consider brood parasites, where birds lay eggs in other species’ nests. It is hypothesized that a major reason this behaviour is successful is because of retaliatory behaviour when a parasite is ejected. Clearly these victim species would be better off if they just wiped the parasites off the face of the earth, as long as they survived the one-time increased retaliation, but evolutionary pressure resulted in them evolving complicity.