Regardless, it doesn't have agency and isn't clever. Personally I belive in a Designer, but since middle school I've been bewildered by the way evolution is almost always presented, outside of rigorous scientific literature, as if there is agency, intelligence and intent behind it.
I don't have a problem with that, but materialists don't have that luxury and use language in bad faith when do it.
You might enjoy Dennett’s “The Intentional Stance” for some enlightening exploration of this metaphor, e.g. “The thermostat tries to keep the temperature between 67 and 69” not only makes sense but is a useful way to think of it even when we don’t believe the thermostat has agency.
As humans we do things for teleological reasons. Meaning we can say we did X in order to accomplish Y.
Ascribing teleological explanations to evolution is technically wrong, since it doesn’t look ahead.
However, it does something very similar. Our brains process competing options, from plausible to nonsensical, before selecting an action, partly in sequence (ideation), but also in parallel (competition processing).
Evolution tries many options in parallel and sequence too. Just by actually doing them and then selecting which of those choices to keep repeating (better survival), and those to forget (extinction of genes, clusters of genes, or whole species).
So over longer time periods, it acts very teleologically. A kind of reverse teleologic by hindsight.
The same is true for the “brilliance” of this teleology. Evolution tries so many things, that it can solve very difficult problems in very novel ways.
Is that “intelligence”? Our casual usage of intelligence isn’t defined precisely enough to say one way or another.
One person would say evolution is blind, and in the short run it is. But another person might point out that evolution is anything but blind. It is an epic version of Edison’s lab, where millions or billions of false solutions are continually tried and ruled out, to find each new fitness enhancement.
It relentlessly experiments and follows the “data”.
On longer timescales, evolution is effectively teleological, highly creative and very intelligent.
And all three aspects compound over time, just like human learning and research, because evolution doesn’t just find new features, but new abstractions and modularity. Such as flexible reusable gene systems for encoding body parts, epigenetic reuse of features in different kinds of cells for different purposes or triggered and “run” by different conditions, nervous systems, etc.
Thus evolution “learned” to speed itself up over time, letting it more rapidly optimize larger more complex solutions. I.e. orders of magnitude faster creation of new novel animals, than it originally took to optimize the first cellular life, colonies of cells, etc.
Watching evolutions first billion years would not have suggested that the plethora of different intelligent animals, from octopus, parrot to human, would have been remotely possible in the time it took. Evolution’s compounding meta learning created brains, our “true” teleology, and its expansion into technological and economic expressions of the pursuit of survival. All meta extensions of evolution, found by evolution.
There are single proteins that need to "evolve" somehow, but they need to arrive at a very particular shape, and extremely near misses offer no feedback information and are just as good as dead.
But the combinations of amino acid sequences they would have to search through in order to find the correct shape is so large that it is greater by several orders of magnitude than the sum total number of all the organisms that have ever lived on Earth since the beginning of time (which is about 10^40, I think).
So your claim that "evolution just tries so many billions of options, man" just doesn't hold water.
There was a time, back during the 1960s, I'm told, when mathematicians in the academy would openly mock evolutionary biologists for their lack of understanding of statistics. But then political correctness took over or something.
> But the combinations of amino acid sequences they would have to search through in order to find the correct shape is so large
Evolution isn't looking for that sequence.
It is looking for any change in sequence with a positive payoff, and in the meantime constantly diversifying sequences with similar outcomes, creating more opportunities for serendipity.
Every large animal is born with mutations. So we are also quite robust to spreading the search, running multiple experiments at a time, taking small risks with genes not quite as good, which will get weeded out quickly when combined with other weaker genes, but in the meantime cast a wider net for meshing with another gene that complements it.
So yes, in any given species with a nontrivial population, millions or billions of genetic variations are being explored at any point in time. We are nothing like carbon copies of each other, differing by just a couple checkmarks.
This is a radical speed up. Just as sexual recombinatory reproduction is. Evolution today operates with vastly more efficient genetic environment, structures and systems than what early life did.
Tractable statistics do no justice to how biology works and all the paths it searches. I am not knocking formal statistics at all, just noting that past one or two step events, the layered statistics of chemistry, genes, gene clusters, epigenetics, populatoin dynamics of complex creatures in their complex environments, etc. are not going to be tractably modelled.
Measurable sometimes for sure, but not symbolically characterizable or calculatable.
> It is looking for any change in sequence with a positive payoff
The entire reason I used the example of the combination lock was so that hopefully you would understand situations in which "any change in sequence with a positive payoff" is a nonsense concept. You either get the correct combination or don't get any positive payoff whatsoever.
When you are trying "millions or billions" of genetic variations are being explored at any point in time, as you point out, you are off by so many orders of magnitude in terms of the search space that you need to explore that the problem is intractable.
You may as well tell me that you can guess a random password that I come up with because you have a way to test millions or billions of combinations at a time. That's great, but I can come up with a random password that it would take you from now until the end of the universe to guess even if you guess quadrillions of possibilities at a time because I can create a password that would require you to test 10^84 possibilities.
IIRC, evolution is an optimizer but not intelligent. Some of our expectations of intelligence are actually more lax than people think and include optimizers.
Until we find out that evolutionary steps/genetics are the firings of the neurons of some planet scale brain that thinks using evolution. We do have quite a bit of junk DNA ;)
That's funny. :) I just typed it out in one splat with a few quick edits. But I spend a lot of time trying to get clear and distilled perspectives of everything interesting.
It's hard to explain an animistic force of nature to another human without using words that imply agency. It feels like our language and our ways of thinking are hard-wired to see everything through that lens because we have agency. It's like a fish trying to imagine what it's like to be outside of water.
Bruce Lee's injunction "be like water" probably means don't overcomplicate with agency and opposed consciousnesses, just evolve the lagrangian (towards victory).
Dude, that's just the language. "Water wants to flow downhill". It's a model, man. Everyone learns this pretty quickly. I don't get how this position is so popular on HN/Reddit. The language is giving you tools to model the world.
"The water doesn't want anything. It's just the laws of gravity."
Intelligence comes from being able to efficiently compress highly predictive models. Any computational mechanism that is unable to do this is a low-grade intelligence. If you need the whole thing spelled out carefully for you, you're NGMI.
Humans anthropomorphise everything, I’m pretty sure it is how we run general intelligence software on small pack hunting tribal creature hardware: we model evolution as a clever sentient trickster and speculate about how does things.
I've observed this as well. People who believe in evolution can't seem to stop themselves from using "intelligent design" language to anthropomorphize evolution.
I agree with the sentiment. I also heard of some books that say stupid things like humans have not yet reached the maximum of human evolution.
Of course we have not reached the end of our evolution. That will exist only when we are all extinct.
As for the direction... that is something else. Maybe we will evolve into higher intelligence, but as the Dick's story "The Golden man" or "Idiocracy" show, is the intelligence really the driving force of today?
I don't agree. Women, in general, don't find men attractive because of intelligence. It's other factors more like, whether their life is in order, they are fit, or the classic, if they are symmetrical.
So, we are visually, materiallistically oriented. Not all, of course, but evolution works on population size, not exceptions. Exceptions only come into an overbearing effect on cataclysmic events.
It's not that kind of intelligence that matters. Don't think in terms of being good at chess, poetry, or multiplying numbers in your head. Think wheel, writing, domestication, agriculture, petrochemical engineering, nuclear weapons, computers, genetic engineering.
Our intelligence is what allows us to acquire and improve new adaptations without having to change our own genetics. We're able to change living environments and adapt to them multiple times in a single life span, and we went from basic language to walking on the Moon much faster than evolution is able to make meaningful changes through natural selection. It takes however many million years for a species to grow fur to adapt to cold climate; it took a spear for us to adapt by stealing other animals' fur, and couple hundred years to figure out how to make synthetic ones at scale. In that time, we adapted to almost every environment on the planet.
Intelligence very much is the driving force behind humanity.
EDIT: and we're also beating natural selection from the other end - modern medicine allows many people to live and reproduce, who without it would've died from genetic diseases. We're very good at denying the "fitness" criteria nature uses.
While I agree with your general slant, it's not correct to say that evolution can't act quickly. Evolution can act, and does act, slightly faster than a single generation. Populations change rapidly, and the success, failure, life and death of individuals and their guiding behaviors, change with it. The introduction of online dating, for example, has already caused evolutionary changes in our species. Only time can tell if these changes are going to last. Just because we haven't yet generally grown thumbs adapted for interacting with iPhones doesn't mean that the more subtle changes haven't happened.
While I agree in the sense that what you say improves human race survival vs whatever-else comes.
But evolutionary pressure also occurs within the species and for the human race $$$ has largely influenced demonstration of procreational traits.
Intelligence doesn't matter if you are smart but don't have any opportunities.
The other social cues, fashion, appearance, physical fitness, health, being "funny". Are all a lot easier if you have $$$.
So many conversations around modern population fertility rates have a $ component in them.
Maybe being intelligent matters more than simple strength and coordination used to. But what kind of intelligence?
Maybe being a sociopath such that you can bully your way to CEO - or to a high enough level you meet some "darwinian fitness" threshold.
But in and of itself, being able to engineer the feat of walking on the moon didn't make all the nasa employees inherently more desirable to partners to procreate. Those employees maybe had attributes that matched with desirable procreation partners and maybe that feat brought $$$ too - but the engineering smarts alone isn't it.
Diminishing returns. People vastly prefer a partner who can communicate using language over those who don’t, that’s a huge preference for intelligence just not an unlimited one.
Similarly most people want some level of success be that artistic, financial, athletic, etc and success is highly correlated with above average intelligence. 101+ IQ’s might not seem that impressive but over a long time scale that’s an endless treadmill.
Women prefer men that suit their goals. Their opinions and experiences shape their goals. They are not a hive mind.
Women on the more narcissistic end of the personality spectrum may prefer ugly men, poor men, dumb men, low self esteem men, etc. so they can control him. Narcissistic men do the same when picking women.
This isn't even exceptional behavior. It might even be the norm depending on where you live. People who aren't as narcissistic may prefer to be single for much of their life.
Evolution doesn't care how today's politics perceives these personality traits. If they lead to reproduction they will continue. On this topic, it's not even evolution but culture and simple family traditions!
Also ironically, by the time we became able to conceive of and communicate about such ideas, natural evolution has long stopped being the driving force behind how humans and human groups look and grow and evolve.
Evolution is still very much a driving force in humanity. Every time a couple struggles to get pregnant, every time birth control fails and results in an unplanned pregnancy, every time someone decides to be child-free, every time someone dies young, etc., etc., humanity evolves toward one genotype over another.
If anything, I would argue that human evolution has accelerated in the last few decades (at least in wealthy nations where people have a lot of control over their reproduction and enormous choice in who they marry, if they marry at all).
> The TV series poses a four body problem early on (three suns and a single planet).
That's the same as the book except the book explains eventually that there were originally 7? 9? planets. The others had been ripped apart or consumed by the 3 stars, and the last one would be eventually.
The weak link of a sound system is typically the speakers/headphones. Speaking for myself the weak link for computing was monitors until about a decade ago, about the time everything was getting smaller.
I should switch to just a phone because the lack of multitasking (not in the cpu sense but the ordinary sense), the small screen, and the onscreen keyboard with no easy way to edit would make me use a computer about 95% less.
You can have my dual 27 inch 4k monitors, and my real keyboard with tons of customized shortcuts, my virtual desktops, and my EMACS 29 with lots of modes when you pry them from my cold dead hands.
https://blot.im/ is the one that finally made it possible for me to use one without configuration of both a web server and a site generator (neither of which I can do) and keep my files "local" in a synced Dropbox folder.
Never hear of meebok in comment above yours. Even a name like that has a .org and .com [1] neither of which, as far as I can tell, have anything to do with the e-reader.
Anyone feel like explaining it to me like I'm 5? High School physics was over 40 years ago, and while I like reading "layman's" science this one only made me think about the discussion of diminsions in 3 Body Problem, which also confused me. Frankly I've never figured out why people write of dimensions as if Time isn't one (e.g. isn't the 2D material discussed actually 3D?) Is it just understood that Time is a given one doesn't have to name?
There's quite a few layers to this onion, I'll try to go from simplest to what is described in the article:
Coordinate definition: Current travels along x, magnetic field applied along z, and voltage is measured across y:
Hall Effect: A transverse voltage (y) that appears along a conductor carrying current (along x) in the presence of a transverse (z) magnetic field. Basically, the magnetic field pushes the traveling charge to one side or the other (+/- y) as it moves, causing a charge separation along y, and hence generating an external "Hall" voltage. (BTW, this is a handy way to detect a magnetic field of a small permanent magnet, hence all the "Hall effect sensors" you can buy to measure if e.g. your door is closed, without need for a physical electrical contact...)
Quantum Hall Effect: The observed voltage has quantized "Steps" because electrons must form orbits that follow the rules of quantum mechanics (so the quantum phase of the carriers must be an integer along the orbit) It's usually only observed at very low temperatures (so the carriers aren't getting their phases bashed around) and in "2D" materials (i.e., carriers restricted to the say X-Y plane, as in a MOSFET just under the oxide gate.) That way all the orbits have to lie in the same plane.
Fractional Quantum Hall Effect: Wait, the orbits can sometimes be some other integer fraction (like 4/7, 2/3 etc.)? How can that be? Well, basically the carriers interact with the outside edges of the material (the orbits "bounce against" the edges, making it "topological" i.e. dependent on the physical shape of the sample.)
Anomalous (Quantum or not, Fractional or not) Hall Effect: Rather than supplying the external magnetic field, the sample itself (via some spin-orbit mechanism, i.e. the little orbits of the electrons around the atoms) effectively supply the magnetic field.
It isn't obvious that this material should exhibit fractional, anomalous quantum Hall effect behavior, so theorists are super excited to work on something new. And who knows? Lots of times things that seem boring and unimportant turn out to be useful...
Time is not a dimension in the same sense as the spatial dimensions. It's a coordinate for events, of course, but you can't for example cross from one side of a line on a 2D plane to the other without ever intersecting the line by moving in the time dimension like you can if you have a 3rd space dimension (e.g. by flying over the line).
Even in relativity, the fourth time-related dimension is not of the same nature as the other two (the distance between two points counts the time dimension differently than the space ones).
Well, absolute zero temperatures (or close to it) are the usual way to create quantum computation. Absolute zero temperatures however are totally impractical economically also size of the machine (see MRI machines) and other reasons i cannot recall right now.
In absolute zero temperatures, the electrons behave in a discreet way, like digits, they behave less unpredictably. Temperature is one way to control their movement, but i think magnetism is another one.
What these two discoveries mean (MoTe2 and the graphene one), is that there is another way to control their movement, less unpredictable movement once again, in normal temperatures and without magnetism. They call that "fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect (FQAHE)".
That's my take on it. Still not GPT-4 level but getting there.
EDIT: Also 2d material means a material one atom thick. Graphene is exactly that, that's the definition of graphene: graphite one atom thick. The two materials they describe, are not 2D exactly, but they are thin enough that they consider them 2D. They essentially mean sheets of atoms, instead of them being just an atom thick, a little bit more, like 5 or 10 atoms thick.
I think when nanodevice engineers talk about 2D problems, they are talking about devices in which the interesting physics happen in 2D.
The actual devices actually exist in the 3 spatial dimensions of course, and evolve in the time dimension. They just have physics that involve very flat sheets of things, or all of the interesting stuff happens on the surface of something.
The big deal stuff about time and space both being dimensions is more of a relativity thing I think. IIRC in quantum physics time is really annoying and everybody hates it.
I couldn't believe I had yo scroll almost to the bottom to find what I thought would probably be the 1st or 2nd comment. I was just about to give up and write it myself.
Between pihole, extensions and userscripts I never see ads. Ads wouldn't bother me in the least and I wouldn't block them if they were static like in a newspaper. It's the tracking I won't tolerate.
If you spend any approachable amount of time on the internet I'm confident that you're seeing ads all the time. You may not always recognize them when they're not animated banners asking you to punch a monkey, but astroturfing, sockpupets, shills, influencers, and ads disguised as content are everywhere.
