Evolution by natural selection

The greatest scientific achievement — or not science at all?

Let’s see if this works.

In essence evolutionary theory is that organisms evolve through a mindless, iterative process — an algorithm. Each iteration has three components:

• Variation: Random but minor variations in organisms, which happen through recombination (mixing of parental genes) or mutation (errors in copying genes).
• Selection: Selection of those variations that are best suited to to the prevailing environment — this will happen naturally; those variants that are less suited will, ipso facto, fare worse and eventually die out.
• Heredity: The features conferring fitness tend to be retained and passed on in successive versions of each reproducing organism. This happens through parental combination.

The process is effectively “trial-and-error” or “generate-and-test”: The problem is how best to survive and replicate in the given environment; the “best” solutions for the process continuously generate new trials, test them, discard failures, and keep the successes.

Observations on the evolutionary process

• It is algorithmic: it is suitable — ideal — for use by a Turing machine.
• It is profoundly stupid: It requires no insight, intelligence, imagination or creative power. Also ideal for use by a Turing machine. Therefore:
  • No educated guesses based on acquired assumptions about the environment, the prevailing physical laws of the universe etc.
  • No retrospective correction of successful variations which, on subsequent adaptations, turn out to be constraints or design flaws.
• It is profoundly wasteful: It requires trial and error, but because it is stupid, it is entirely unsupported by intelligent insight. It has no ability to hypothesise that variation x will be more successful than variation y, and therefore opt for variation x;
• It is profoundly contingent: each replicator’s fitness depends on a dynamic environment that may or may not be changing. The environment comprises, and is therefore affected by:
  • the organism itself
  • all other organisms in the biosphere (which themselves are evolving),
  • prevailing macro-environmental conditions:
    • Those created by organisms in the biosphere (their use of resources, their competition with each other, their impact on climate),
    • Prevailing normal fluctuations of the environmental conditions (weather, seasonal change, viruses)
    • Extraordinary events (earthquakes, volcanoes, meteorites etc)
• It is profoundly inefficient: the iterative (and un-insightful) nature of evolutionary design means that layering work-arounds over earlier design flaws, meaning no economy of design. An earlier design flaw that is critical will lead to extinction. A non-critical design-flaw may be
• It is survivor bias writ large

which are taken to be unvarying constants true for all times and all places. Trial and error without theory dependence succeeds only by serendipity and thus depends on largely inexhaustible resources 

See also

• Legal evolution

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