I guess I will have to be the first here to join issue directly with the thesis statement of this interesting article:
"The lesson is that Mother Nature know best. Or alternately, TANSTAAFL: 'there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.' Trade-offs are endemic in evolutionary biology. Often, if you use a drug or surgery to optimize something, you will discover penalties elsewhere. . . .
"In 'The Wisdom of Nature: An Evolutionary Heuristic for Human Enhancement' 12 (Human Enhancement 2008), Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg put this principle as a question or challenge, 'evolutionary optimality challenge' (EOC):
"If the proposed intervention would result in an enhancement, why have we not already evolved to be that way?"
The answer to the evolutionary optimality challenge (EOC) comes from any properly taught Biology 101 course: evolution is not a teleological process, and it neither seeks nor is driven by "enhancement," but results in haphazard adaptations of ancestral systems through stochastic survival of genes.
I will make the counterclaim here that it is by no means clear (and it is certainly not conclusively shown by any of the examples in the interesting submitted article) that anything that can properly be called "optimizing" of human beings or of humanity as a whole necessarily results in a "penalty."
The staggering additions to human well being (and to the number of living Homo sapiens individuals) as a result of cultural innovations around the globe look to be mostly gain with remarkably little pain. I can eat foods that are grown in environments I have never visited, use this Internet device to communicate with all of you, fly to places far away without sprouting wings, and learn the thoughts of deep thinkers who are long dead. The progress of humankind in the last few thousand years has been a story of casting off natural constraints.
I may have to use the full Hacker News editing time period for comments to "optimize" this reply some more after I spend some time with my family, so please don't penalize me yet for the brevity of this reply. Before someone builds a chain of conclusions based on a supposed natural law, to reach other conclusions, it is first necessary logically to demonstrate the truth of the claimed natural law. "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
First edit: I see another comment mentions group selection. That is not a widely accepted idea (as contrasted with kin selection) in evolutionary theory. See three recent posts (there are more where those came from) from Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True website:
Oh, and since we are talking about human intelligence as a big part of the discussion here, I should mention the Wikipedia user bibliography "Intelligence Citations,"
a reference pathfinder that will always need more editing, as there is continually new research on this topic, but which already gathers many of the best monographs on the subject and some good review articles in one place.
Second edit: pjscott's thoughtful reply asks,
I don't think you've actually disagreed with the article. Did you read the 'Loopholes' section?
I've reread the article again, now that you've asked, and I think what I see here is a certain degree of rhetorical incoherence. I wouldn't compose an article this way if I wanted to make a tight argument, but perhaps the author desires to "essay," and try out ideas, and is still making up his own mind.
Anyway, based on the author's yeah-buts in some of the examples given after the "Loopholes" section of the article, and on the artitle's title, and on the first wave of comments received here on Hacker News, I have to take a stand and strenuously disagree with the idea that there is any "evolutionary optimality challenge (EOC)" to be met by human beings endeavoring to improve themselves, to improve human society, or to improve the world in general. There is plenty of scope for further optimization of individual human beings and of the human condition.
I definitely agree that the use of teleological terms to describe the process of evolution (as in this article) is inappropriate. However, I will note that biologists often do so anyway as a shortcut because our language doesn't really provide any good concise way to describe the actions (happenings?) of a process that is without intention (English certainly, probably most others as well). I would hope that most biologists understand the intellectual shortcut they are taking by using such terms, but I suspect that in many cases they may not.
I know that I have definitely described evolution in such terms when explaining it to non-scientists, but when participating in discussions with other scientists I try to stick to purely the intention-free ways of saying things.
Evolutionary psychology is bullsh*t because it pretends to know how an incalculable array of factors interacted to cause certain people to successfully reproduce over generations. The thing is, the complexity of reality is far far more awesome than that and making simplistic sounding plausible evolutionary arguments for certain behaviours is just hubris. Yes, evolution is happening but we're really overestimating ourselves if we think we know just how it's happening in the absence of archaeological fossil evidence.
How is this in any way a response to this comment thread? When did anyone say anything about evolutionary psychology? I only said that biologists sometimes get sloppy and say things about evolution they don't actually mean, and that this confuses other people who take them at their word.
Evolution works by exploiting regularities in all of those complex and intertwined factors.
In instances where we see obvious regularities, and we see that they've been exploited, then we should at least bump that probability that it's a valid explanation for the behavior. Are we sure? Of course not. But we've got some information, and often a pretty significant amount.
That's not to say there isn't a lot of bad evolutionary psychology out there, especially in the popsci section at the bookstore. But the idea that we shouldn't even consider evolution when we're trying to explain behavior is too far in the other direction.
Actually, the wikipedia article on teleology has a pretty nice discussion of the issues of teleology and misleadingly-teleological statements in biology.
while attributing the saying (without citation of a source) to Haldane, gets to the issue I was getting at in my top-level comment. Evolution happens because chance survival of genes favors the genes that survive to replicate again. But anything about an individual organism's body functions is not a goal of evolution, certainly not in the sense of "If the proposed intervention would result in an enhancement, why have we not already evolved to be that way?" Evolution is not driven by "enhancements," which all of the biologically trained readers of this thread fully understand.
I think you're willfully misunderstanding the point: teleological thinking, what Evolution 'wants' or what is an 'enhancement', is indispensable as a crutch for thinking about these issues. It is not completely or literally true, any more than 'tables' exist; what Evolution 'wants' is a statistical tendency in a highly dimensional space etc etc like a table is a high-level fuzzy interpretation of the extremely complex dimensional space of mass-energy etc etc.
Even a highly general abstract mathematical formulation like used in discussions of evolutionary fitness like calculating time to fixation of alleles would be far too much work to apply everywhere in this essay, would make it unreadable by practically everyone, and not actually add anything meaningful.
That evolution doesn't produce enhancement is the flaw that undermines the whole of the article, you are correct.
This is well illustrated in longevity science by the large and growing number of comparatively simple genetic manipulations that extend healthy life in mice, flies, and worms - by all measures an enhancement for the individual. e.g.
A great many of these alterations are well within the reach of mutational processes, and would be selected for if they provided advantage. But they clearly do not - many come with obvious costs, and the rest with costs we haven't figured out yet, perhaps as simple as leading to lack of front-loading of energy expenditures. Evolution only selects for longevity in comparatively rare instances, such as:
a) We humans, long lived amongst mammals of our size, and possibly due to our intelligence allowing things like the Grandmother Hypothesis:
c) Naked mole-rats, in which longevity looks like some mix of a side-effect of resistances needed to survive their natural environment, plus a touch of the longevity stratification that comes with being eusocial.
Evolution is not a teleological process, because there is no room in the definition of evolution for the end-purpose of the process. If there were, then we would define what the end-goal (or purpose) of evolution was.
If you want to take the same mechanics as evolution (stochastic mutation and survivable gene propagation) and assign a purpose or end-goal to the sum of all instances of evolutionary function, then you have to name that purpose, and back it up to make it a teleological process.
Of course then, I would argue you are not talking about evolution; but rather stochastic mutation, survivable gene propagation, both "together" aiming for some final purpose.
Based on the evidence we have, we can say with confidence that if evolution has a teleological purpose, then it is so bizarre and alien that to even describe it in terms meant for humans is to mischaracterize it.
Well, no. We can say that it very likely isn't a teleological process, because, one, we have no evidence it is; two, we have a lot of evidence that seems to say it isn't; and, three, if it were, it would have massive implications in other fields that we haven't seen any evidence for, either.
Humans are allowed to think statistically and proceed on the basis of best (not absolute, but best) evidence; indeed, in the real world, we must do so.
I mean everything that's considered evidence of evolution could also be considered evidence of teleology: the entire process of the universe creating new forms of novelty, from matter to biology to ultimately possibly some sort of technological singularity.
"we have a lot of evidence that seems to say it isn't"
What is there that exists that is fundamentally incompatible with teleology existing or makes it highly unlikely?
"if it were, it would have massive implications in other fields that we haven't seen any evidence for, either."
What makes you think that you would see evidence for it if it existed? (Or rather, what makes you think that most or all evidence in favor of teleology couldn't be explained by some other non-teleological process?)
> everything that's considered evidence of evolution could also be considered evidence of teleology
No. Teleology has a goal in mind and evolution has been seen to run down dead ends many, many times. All of the extinct species are dead ends.
> What is there that exists that is fundamentally incompatible with teleology existing or makes it highly unlikely?
All of the extinct species. The fact the human eye has a blind spot whereas the squid eye does not. The fact cancer is possible. If I had a biology textbook closer to hand, I could go on at length.
> What makes you think that you would see evidence for it if it existed?
If we can't see something, or measure it in any other way, or otherwise provide evidence for its existence, then why should we ever behave as if it existed?
> evidence in favor of teleology
I've yet to see any actual evidence in favor of teleology in evolution. Non-teleological explanations are simpler and they also explain all of the weird crap we see. In addition, our non-teleological theories have allowed us to predict quite a bit about how biology works in the real world. That mix of simplicity and increased predictive power makes the non-teleological theories a lot better than the previous teleological ones.
> All of the extinct species. The fact the human eye has a blind spot whereas the squid eye does not. The fact cancer is possible. If I had a biology textbook closer to hand, I could go on at length.
Those examples don't prove much, they just demonstrate that any goal there could be is not aligned with the fate of those species. You seem to be arguing against the assumption that teleology would imply some sort of perfection (for some somewhat arbitrary definition of perfection)
The truth is that there is an epistemological problem here. For all we know, the universe was created by Mr. X who _wants_ us to think there is no teleology. Deception could be the very goal. There is absolutely no way for us to verify this, so there is also no reason to state categorically that there is no teleology.
You could make an analogy with a (pseudo) random number generator. How do you distinguish between a real and a pseodo RNG? You can't, really. There are some statistical tests. But if someone is determined to fool you, they can just feed you X amount of GBs of data from a true random source, and only then start to feed you an infinite amount of zeroes.
I'm of course not defending the idea of teleology, just saying that epistemologically speaking, we have no basis for ruling it out nor accepting it.
The preference for the simplest explanation is just a heuristic, there is no compelling philosophical argument why it should hold. Philosophers of science are still debating whether it is a valid heuristic; meanwhile, scientists don't invoke it all that much, I believe. They care about whether an explanation is right, not simple.
Actually this topic has moved beyond philosophy. There is a beautiful and simple mathematical argument and formulation of Occams Razor in terms of the universal prior of Solomonoff induction.
In a practical setting complex theories or models with lots of explanatory variables tend to overfit the data. In machine learning, regularization or picking a proper prior and things like Minimum Description length in forming networks are instances of penalizing complexity for better predictive power. In decision trees, pruning is another example. In genetic programming picking the smaller and or faster of two similarly performing programs substantially reduces its tendency to overfit.
>
The preference for the simplest explanation is just a heuristic. ... They care about whether an explanation is right, not simple.
I disagree entirely. Given two explanations that are "right" in that they explain the observations, and one is very simple, and the other involves vast mysterious unknowns, I would say that there is a strong philosophical argument in favour of the simple explanation.
Especially when complex suppositions like a "goal" of evolution have the characteristics that people are drawn to them for emotional reasons, they raise more questions than they answer.
With "right" I meant the explanation which is actually correct. The preference for simple explanations is only a bias for lack of a better criterion to choose; but typically there are lots of more substantive reasons why one explanation is better than the other (e.g., by looking at how it ties in with other theories).
The idea of simplicity is quite arbitrary. In machine learning there is an analogue in Minimum Description Length learning. It turns out that there the kind of representation is crucial; a hypothesis can be minimal under one representation, but not the other; ergo, what is "simple" is not a straightforward question, and therefore the heuristic is somewhat arbitrary. A "goal" to evolution may sound complex to you, but from an information theoretic perspective, the opposite, namely actual, complete randomness, is the most complex thing possible ...
The whole point of this is: we don't really know, the best we can say is "I won't assume things I don't have evidence for." Lastly, your "raise more questions than they answer" is the hallmark of philosophical problems ...
> With "right" I meant the explanation which is actually correct.
Outside of math (and by extension, mathematical models and virtual computer systems), there is no such thing as "correct". We have physical models we tend to rely on because they give good predictions.
But there's no "correct" explanation for physical phenomena. Newton's mechanics were "correct" until Schroedinger and Heisenberg showed they weren't. And I'm sure within a hundred years, we'll have an even better model than modern quantum mechanics.
If you have say two networks that are based on different choices of perspective in coding a MDL with wildly differing lengths and better performance of the larger one, I would be highly suspicious as to whether the the poor performer is properly built from a sensible simplifying metric.
In terms of a general intuition of how the choice of similarly expressive representations affect complexity, one can look to Kolmogorov Complexity. For any two languages used to compute the KC of some string, there is only an additive translative constant for each possible input. The asymptotics of how each language grows its representation with respect to input size by far will dominate such translative overheads. This is sufficient for philosophical purposes. Although in the practical case these choices matter and MDL was created specifically to treat these practicalities.
Five happy Moon's sang the Macarena. Truth is beauty. There is nothing grammatically wrong with those sentences, there is no way to philosophically disprove them, and they have nothing to do with the physical world around us.
PS: I am not saying philosophy is useless, just it's a search for something other than meaning... perhaps truth. ;)
Disregarding the fact that there actually _was_ something grammatically wrong with that sentence, I think that is a misconception of philosophy. It's not supposed to prove or disprove much (except in certain areas dedicated to logic perhaps). I don't see philosophical arguments as meaningless, and to claim so is to make a very philosophical claim ... What is meaning anyway? I don't think anybody really knows the answer to that. But perhaps you meant to say that these arguments won't lead to any concrete results, and there I'd have to agree with you.
We do have a basis for rejecting the hypothesis that there is an intelligence "behind the scenes" that is imitating a non-teleological process. It totally untestable and does not make useful predictions about the world, so you can't do anything with it scientifically. All you can do is say "hey, it could be true" and that's the end of the conversation. Science is not about saying which hypotheses could possibly be true, it is about determining which hypotheses are likely to be true given the evidence and which are unlikely, and where possible quantifying that likeliness (via statistics). A hypothesis that can neither be supported nor refuted by any empirical evidence has no place in science. This isn't to say that we rule such a hypothesis out as impossible, but just that science has nothing useful to say on such a hypothesis.
To go to your analogy of determining whether something is a source of random numbers, of course if you only make your decision based on the first 10 million numbers you cannot distinguish between a true RNG and a source that provides 10 million random numbers and then all zeros. Bringing that analogy back to the hypothetical intelligence guiding the universe, if you only look at the first 13 billion years or so (current best estimate of the age of the universe), you can't tell the difference between a truly non-teleological universe and a universe guided by an intelligence that intentionally makes the universe act like a non-teleological one for the first 13 billion years and then starts doing something totally different (e.g. causes a scientifically unexplainable apocalypse in 2012). But what's the point of saying this? You're effectively saying that absolutely anything could happen at any time, because there aren't really any fundamental laws, just the will of a hidden intelligence that can do whatever it wants to whenever it wants to.
In summary, read this comic and replace "string theory" with "hidden intelligence guiding the universe": http://xkcd.com/171/
That's a bit of a straw man. I could expect some kind of evidence for you being a king, whereas a goal behind the universe or evolution is a metaphysical matter. But yeah, we rule it out provisionally.
"No. Teleology has a goal in mind and evolution has been seen to run down dead ends many, many times. All of the extinct species are dead ends."
The best way I've heard it described is like dropping a marble into a bowl. The marble will go up and down and wobble around but will eventually settle at the bottom of the bowl. In other words, it would basically be encoded into the universe as a preference that over time would win out.
"All of the extinct species. The fact the human eye has a blind spot whereas the squid eye does not."
Just because not all matter in the universe is condensed into a single point doesn't mean that gravity doesn't exist. Sometimes things get further apart, sometimes things get closer together, but gravity still exists.
"That mix of simplicity and increased predictive power makes the non-teleological theories a lot better than the previous teleological ones."
I'm not arguing that teleology is a better scientific theory than evolution; it's not. But just because it's a crappy scientific theory (well, actually it's not even a theory) doesn't mean that it's less likely that there are some sort of teleological forces baked into the universe, e.g. a preference for the creation and preservation of novelty.
It sounds like you're using analogies to "prove" your point, rather than using evidence to prove and analogies to illustrate. This is a very common theme in my experience with arguments in favor of an external force guiding evolution (and other unprovable subjects). If we're not careful, thinking by analogy can lead us to believing incorrectly that irrelevant attributes of the analogy actually apply to the universe.
Definitely agreed about the lack of evidence for teleology among evolution, but I don't think false starts, extinct species, etc... are counter evidence to teleology really. They'd just be evidence of an imperfect process attempting to reach that goal.
Having a destination in mind doesn't mean you know exactly how to get there, right?
It seems like admitting a 'blind teleology' would relegate the argument to complete meaninglessness; a teleology that behaves as if it were random is not worth talking about.
>We can say that it very likely isn't a teleological process, because, one, we have no evidence it is; two, we have a lot of evidence that seems to say it isn't;
A) Even an organism "at rest" is actively moving against the direction of Entropy. Evolution and life in general is factually teleological. You just seem to have a very specific idea of what teleological means.
B) Evolution moves towards diversity. Even as a purely stochastic process this is a motion towards vertical complexity as well as evolutionary dead ends.
"The lesson is that Mother Nature know best. Or alternately, TANSTAAFL: 'there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.' Trade-offs are endemic in evolutionary biology. Often, if you use a drug or surgery to optimize something, you will discover penalties elsewhere. . . .
"In 'The Wisdom of Nature: An Evolutionary Heuristic for Human Enhancement' 12 (Human Enhancement 2008), Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg put this principle as a question or challenge, 'evolutionary optimality challenge' (EOC):
"If the proposed intervention would result in an enhancement, why have we not already evolved to be that way?"
The answer to the evolutionary optimality challenge (EOC) comes from any properly taught Biology 101 course: evolution is not a teleological process, and it neither seeks nor is driven by "enhancement," but results in haphazard adaptations of ancestral systems through stochastic survival of genes.
I will make the counterclaim here that it is by no means clear (and it is certainly not conclusively shown by any of the examples in the interesting submitted article) that anything that can properly be called "optimizing" of human beings or of humanity as a whole necessarily results in a "penalty."
The staggering additions to human well being (and to the number of living Homo sapiens individuals) as a result of cultural innovations around the globe look to be mostly gain with remarkably little pain. I can eat foods that are grown in environments I have never visited, use this Internet device to communicate with all of you, fly to places far away without sprouting wings, and learn the thoughts of deep thinkers who are long dead. The progress of humankind in the last few thousand years has been a story of casting off natural constraints.
I may have to use the full Hacker News editing time period for comments to "optimize" this reply some more after I spend some time with my family, so please don't penalize me yet for the brevity of this reply. Before someone builds a chain of conclusions based on a supposed natural law, to reach other conclusions, it is first necessary logically to demonstrate the truth of the claimed natural law. "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarkes_three_laws
Thanks for bringing up this topic of discussion.
First edit: I see another comment mentions group selection. That is not a widely accepted idea (as contrasted with kin selection) in evolutionary theory. See three recent posts (there are more where those came from) from Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True website:
24 June 2102 "The Demise of Group Selection"
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/06/24/the-demis...
26 June 2012 "Did human social behavior evolve via group selection? E. O. Wilson defends that view in the NYT"
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/did-human...
28 June 2012 "I (and others) comment on Steve Pinker’s discussion of group selection"
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/i-and-oth...
Oh, and since we are talking about human intelligence as a big part of the discussion here, I should mention the Wikipedia user bibliography "Intelligence Citations,"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...
a reference pathfinder that will always need more editing, as there is continually new research on this topic, but which already gathers many of the best monographs on the subject and some good review articles in one place.
Second edit: pjscott's thoughtful reply asks,
I don't think you've actually disagreed with the article. Did you read the 'Loopholes' section?
I've reread the article again, now that you've asked, and I think what I see here is a certain degree of rhetorical incoherence. I wouldn't compose an article this way if I wanted to make a tight argument, but perhaps the author desires to "essay," and try out ideas, and is still making up his own mind.
Anyway, based on the author's yeah-buts in some of the examples given after the "Loopholes" section of the article, and on the artitle's title, and on the first wave of comments received here on Hacker News, I have to take a stand and strenuously disagree with the idea that there is any "evolutionary optimality challenge (EOC)" to be met by human beings endeavoring to improve themselves, to improve human society, or to improve the world in general. There is plenty of scope for further optimization of individual human beings and of the human condition.