Template:M intro technology rumours of our demise: Difference between revisions

By now most accept the magic of [[evolution by natural selection]]. This really ''is'' magic: a comprehensive account of the origin of life — indeed, the sum of all organic “creation”, as it were — can be [[Reductionism|reduced]] to a mindless, repetitive process that we can state in a short plain English sentence.  

{{Quote|In a population of organisms with individual traits whose offspring inherit those traits only with random variations, those having traits most suited to the prevailing environment will best survive and reproduce over time.}}

The economy of ''design'' is this process is staggering. The economy of ''effort'' in its ''execution'' is not.

Evolution is ''tremendously'' ''wasteful''. Not just in how it does adapt, but in how much of the time it does not. The chain of adaptations from amino acids to Lennon and McCartney may have billions of links in it, but that is doddle compared with the number of adaptations over that time ''didn’t'' get anywhere — that arced off into one of design space’s gazillion dead ends and forlornly fizzled out. For every serendipitous mutation ''there are millions and millions of duds''.

Evolution isn’t directed — that is its very super-power — so it fumbles blindly around, fizzing and sparking, and its power is that vanishingly small proportion of mutations that ''accidentally do something useful''. Evolution is a random, [[stochastic]] process. It depends on aeons of time and burns unimaginable resources. Evolution solves problems by ''brute force''.