I agree. Very shallow "sources" and no qualifications to be speaking on a medical topic. There is a role for pop science to disseminate knowledge but this is pure speculation.
There's nothing wrong with speculation on HN. It's intimately intertwined with curiosity, and curiosity—not correctness—is the guiding value of this site.
I know it sounds odd to demote correctness in that way. It doesn't mean we value incorrectness! What we value is the freedom to meander around topics in a curious way. Inevitably this means following a lot of paths that turn out to be wrong*, but that is how new things are learned, and it's a good way to spend time.
* I am not saying the OP is right or wrong - I have no idea about that, but it does look the kind of meandering speculation that has a good place here.
I can't judge if you are correct or not. It would be more convincing if you could name some of the problems. Since the article is "garbage", there should be lots of things wrong to choose from.
He's right, it's garbage and we should know enough (it's high-school level education) to reject it without an explanation. The fact that we don't is actually scary.
Evolution does not care about creating perfect bodies, that's not how it works. Aging and death are superpowers of an unique arrangement of matter, not bugs.
We know diabetes and other issues come from changes humans introduced in our diets, not faults in the evolutionary process.
The text draws from a weird mixture of religious influence (it's not explicit) that lowkey estabilished things should be perfectly designed (in science, mentioning "design" is an issue; fine but aged badly in science communication). It's just not the correct framing to be educational about how our bodies work, and sets up wrong expectations about what we know of nature.
I am in awe about how wonderfully engineered by evolution the body is. E.g., what we are able to do with it and how it heals itself when we have an injury. Sure, many people would not live long without external intervention, but many others would. I still want to see the robot that can survive 80 active years without maintenance.
Compared to most animals that spend their entire day foraging for food, it's not too bad. Adapting to eating dense and very nutritious animal flesh is a great time-saver, and as we didn't evolve long fangs, we had to learn to use tools instead, and the rest is history. (mixing cause and effect here for dramatic purposes)
I think learning to cook food was likely a greater benefit. It's like we externally expanded our means of digestion.
I watched a Ted talk where the speaker suggested our large brains with their high energy consumption would not have been possible were it not for cooking.
Bone marrow came first. We were scavengers for the longest time. We invented tools to break the bones hyenas would leave. Skulking little scavengers.. until spears were invented then hoo boy - shit went exponential.
When you watch those sci-fi shows and folks have nanobots implanted in them that heal wounds really fast or do other cool things I can't help but think in many ways we already have that technology we just need it to do more, faster as our brains and ability to create things have outpaced the rate of evolutionary change.
The human machine doesn't just survive without external intervention, it actually gets better at being a machine. Speed, endurance, power, coordination... all improve with usage.
Other animals do get heart cancer, which is fascinating. It's still very uncommon compared to other cancers, but not virtually absent as it is in people.
I greatly resent having to be a biological organism and subject to all the poor engineering and design decisions that entails.
The first word of that sentence implies its absurdity quite beautifully. She resents, therefor she is.
And then this:
Brains. After you reach adulthood, neurons don’t divide. If some of your neurons die—which happens every day—then they’re gone. If you get a brain injury, the other neurons will try to “learn around” the injury, but the neurons themselves are never replaced.
We need more neuroscience in schools! This summary is technically correct ofc, but to imply that the brain is missing some obviously-better option is absurd. We're meat that thinks, y'all; it's far from crap.
IIRC the slow loss of neurons is more than balanced by the additional fine-tuning - unless you get dementia, if course.
Loss of neurons isn't disastrous as long as it's not too many. Babies are born with several times more neurons than children have, and spend a few months letting all the useless ones die. Apparently it's better to start with a random tangle and prune it to shape (like cutting a box hedge) than to make a hedge grow in a box shape to begin with.
And IIRC brains can grow more neurons under some circumstances (certain drugs?) - they just normally don't.
"While questions remain regarding the precise extent, rate, and functional relevance of adult neurogenesis in the human brain, as well as important methodological considerations, multiple independent approaches now converge in support of its persistence throughout adulthood."
I get its just a framework to understand what is happening, but I always hate the phrasing of describing a 'decision' to a process like evolution. There are no decisions being made in the process, just a series of outcomes that lead in a direction
Evolution is literally just the observation that there are lots of things that self-replicate.
That's it. That's the entire thing. Plus some nuance about things that self-replicate faster than other things...
It occurs at all levels. Amyloid protein in Alzheimer's patients is self-replicating. So are cells. So are individual parts of cells. Sometimes things replicate by being parts of a larger thing that replicates, sometimes they don't. It's all one big chaotic tangled mess with no particular purpose or design. Human cells evolve, so do humans, so do human societies. So do rocks.
No, evolution is not an observation that there are things that replicate. Darwin's view, which has survived mostly intact, is that there is replication with variation and that more fit individuals replicate at a higher rate ("survival of the fittest" isn't a correct description; plenty of less fit individuals do replicate, but they contribute very little to the population genetics in the long run)
And amyloid protein doesn't self-replicate. An instance of the misfolded form causes other folded proteins of the same type to transition to the misfolded form. It's a form of catalysis, not self-replication.
I mean, that might be the fundamental driver of evolution, but we have observed a lot of other emergent properties that happen because of that process, and those observations form our understanding of what those self-replicating things lead to.
Sure, those are the ingredients for evolution to occur. Replication and variation affecting selection.
But it's also pretty reductive to say it's the entire thing. You'd be hard pressed to describe the history of life on earth using only those three concepts. You could do it, but it would be a bit like describing the workings of a human cell exclusively using quantum field theory.
There are many emergent concepts, the understanding of which brings a lot more explanatory power. Things like selective pressure and evolvability. Our understanding of evolutionary biology and evolution in general indeed continues to evolve nearly 2 centuries after On the Origin of Species.
One of the most interesting things to me is that the process of evolution itself evolves. Variation, replication and selection evolve over time. Evolution seems to accelerate. Evolution can even create entirely new substrates for itself on top of the old ones. If you look at all the traits that distinguish humans from our closest relatives, the brain sizes, the slow maturation of offspring, our vocal chords, complex language, etc, there's a single thread running through all of it, namely an entirely new evolutionary substrate: culture. Once culture appeared, evolution accelerated massively. And cultural evolution itself seems to accelerate. It took several hundreds of thousands of years to get to the agricultural revolution, but then it only took several thousand years to reach the industrial revolution/enlightenment. From there it took centuries to invent the computer, about half a century for the internet and now society is changes dramatically within a single decade, some might even argue a single year. In certain specific cases, we can even do evolution in the span of hours or minutes (seconds?) now, with genetic algorithms and the like.
And yes, biological evolution, cultural evolution and genetic algorithms all operate via variation, selection and replication, but it should be pretty clear by now how important all the little details and emergent phenomena are for understanding the differences between them.
42 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 2.7 ms ] threadI know it sounds odd to demote correctness in that way. It doesn't mean we value incorrectness! What we value is the freedom to meander around topics in a curious way. Inevitably this means following a lot of paths that turn out to be wrong*, but that is how new things are learned, and it's a good way to spend time.
and what we're optimizing for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
* I am not saying the OP is right or wrong - I have no idea about that, but it does look the kind of meandering speculation that has a good place here.
Evolution does not care about creating perfect bodies, that's not how it works. Aging and death are superpowers of an unique arrangement of matter, not bugs.
We know diabetes and other issues come from changes humans introduced in our diets, not faults in the evolutionary process.
The text draws from a weird mixture of religious influence (it's not explicit) that lowkey estabilished things should be perfectly designed (in science, mentioning "design" is an issue; fine but aged badly in science communication). It's just not the correct framing to be educational about how our bodies work, and sets up wrong expectations about what we know of nature.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I watched a Ted talk where the speaker suggested our large brains with their high energy consumption would not have been possible were it not for cooking.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/no-heart-cancer-th...
And then this:
We need more neuroscience in schools! This summary is technically correct ofc, but to imply that the brain is missing some obviously-better option is absurd. We're meat that thinks, y'all; it's far from crap.Loss of neurons isn't disastrous as long as it's not too many. Babies are born with several times more neurons than children have, and spend a few months letting all the useless ones die. Apparently it's better to start with a random tangle and prune it to shape (like cutting a box hedge) than to make a hedge grow in a box shape to begin with.
And IIRC brains can grow more neurons under some circumstances (certain drugs?) - they just normally don't.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S193459092...
We can expect evolution to do the right thing for the genes. Not for us.
That's it. That's the entire thing. Plus some nuance about things that self-replicate faster than other things...
It occurs at all levels. Amyloid protein in Alzheimer's patients is self-replicating. So are cells. So are individual parts of cells. Sometimes things replicate by being parts of a larger thing that replicates, sometimes they don't. It's all one big chaotic tangled mess with no particular purpose or design. Human cells evolve, so do humans, so do human societies. So do rocks.
And amyloid protein doesn't self-replicate. An instance of the misfolded form causes other folded proteins of the same type to transition to the misfolded form. It's a form of catalysis, not self-replication.
But it's also pretty reductive to say it's the entire thing. You'd be hard pressed to describe the history of life on earth using only those three concepts. You could do it, but it would be a bit like describing the workings of a human cell exclusively using quantum field theory.
There are many emergent concepts, the understanding of which brings a lot more explanatory power. Things like selective pressure and evolvability. Our understanding of evolutionary biology and evolution in general indeed continues to evolve nearly 2 centuries after On the Origin of Species.
One of the most interesting things to me is that the process of evolution itself evolves. Variation, replication and selection evolve over time. Evolution seems to accelerate. Evolution can even create entirely new substrates for itself on top of the old ones. If you look at all the traits that distinguish humans from our closest relatives, the brain sizes, the slow maturation of offspring, our vocal chords, complex language, etc, there's a single thread running through all of it, namely an entirely new evolutionary substrate: culture. Once culture appeared, evolution accelerated massively. And cultural evolution itself seems to accelerate. It took several hundreds of thousands of years to get to the agricultural revolution, but then it only took several thousand years to reach the industrial revolution/enlightenment. From there it took centuries to invent the computer, about half a century for the internet and now society is changes dramatically within a single decade, some might even argue a single year. In certain specific cases, we can even do evolution in the span of hours or minutes (seconds?) now, with genetic algorithms and the like.
And yes, biological evolution, cultural evolution and genetic algorithms all operate via variation, selection and replication, but it should be pretty clear by now how important all the little details and emergent phenomena are for understanding the differences between them.