alt Hacker NewsTwo things:
0) Humans (and even our recent ancestors) eating you are a very recent thing to be concerned about, numbers-wise. By the time our numbers were enough to provide evolutionary pressure, we started farming what we wanted, which kinda breaks the process. Also. most poisons don't effect everything equally, so what might prevent a horse from eating you might taste delicious to us (like the nightshade family) or even be sought after for other reasons, like capsaicin.
1) You're succumbing to the usual evolution fallacy. Evolution doesn't want anything more than 1 and 1 want to be 2. It's just a process, and sometimes (hell maybe even often) it doesn't work in a linear fashion. Lots of "X steps back, Y steps forward", and oftentimes each of those steps can take anything from decades to centuries or more to make, and by the time it happens what was pressuring that change is gone.
So many people, even when they obviously know better, like to think of evolution as intelligent. It's obviously not. But every time someone says stuff like this, it reinforces the fallacy and then we get people saying things like "if evolution is real, why come $insane_argument_against_evolution?"
Replies
> By the time our numbers were enough to provide evolutionary pressure, we started farming what we wanted, which kinda breaks the process
a lot of assumption in this sentence. proof needed
> So many people, even when they obviously know better, like to think of evolution as intelligent. It's obviously not. But every time someone says stuff like this, it reinforces the fallacy and then we get people saying things like "if evolution is real, why come $insane_argument_against_evolution?"
Tbh those kinds of people are beyond convincing. And I think most of them are trolling or have fallen under the spell of other trolls. There's clearly a network effect. We don't really have a flat earther movement here in Europe and evolution deniers are insignificant.
I don't think people saying these things actually think evolution is intelligent. They just use the phrase "want" to indicate the survival pressure that lead to the change propagating.
But the people that don't believe in evolution are so indoctrinated it doesn't matter what words we use.
Ps I do find it fascinating that a non intelligent process like evolution managed to create intelligence. Even though the state of the world often makes me doubt intelligence exists :)
Survival of the fittest is also a wrong way to think about evolution that leads many people to make assumptions that are backward.
Selection doesn’t pick winners, it picks losers. But bad luck also picks losers, and good luck pick winners, so things with small negative or positive effects can be swamped, and anything neutral has no pressure to be phased out at all. So if being born with blue hair turns out not to have any effect on your survival, because for instance none of your predators can see blue any better than they can see what every color your mate is, then there will continue to be blue babies at some rate. And if you or your mate have other genes that do boost your survivability, then there will be a lot of blue babies. But not on the merits of being blue. However the animals involved may just decide to involve blueness in their mate selection criteria. Because correlation.
Then many generations later, if your habitat changes, or your range expands, maybe blue fur protects more or less well against UV light, or moss growing in your fur, or some new predator. Now the selection works more like people think it works. But it’s been sitting there as genetic noise for perhaps centuries or eons, waiting for a complementary gene or environmental change to create a forcing function.
If I understood correctly the argument in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins suggests that thinking about a genome as having a goal which it adapts itself to work towards, is absolutely a useful conceptual model.
He makes it very clear that the genome does not actually have intentionality, but also that this is the right way to imagine how organisms might evolve, as though they did have both goals and a plan.
0) What do humans have to do with it? We're not the only animals that eat mushrooms.
I would expect this way of thinking about evolution would be common but unfortunately it isn't. I feel the way we say "X animal evolved to do Y" sets the ton as if it was a active, thought out decision. Instead, it was just 1000s of mutation happened and maybe a certain kind was able to survive while other wasn't. It is more of a mathematical concept than conscious one.
> $insane_argument_against_evolution
That looks like Perl variable syntax. Arguably the most mushroom like programming language.
Also way too biased to humans, the fact that they poison us could just be a biochemistry coincidence, the author is operating from a very human-centric POV (like you say in (0))
> like to think of evolution as intelligent
Evolution is more intelligent than people assume.
The selection is driven by each species choices, and the more intelligent the species, the more intelligence played a role in it.
While your objection is technically correct it can still be useful (ie simple, straightforward, etc) to phrase things in terms of a goal. Since a goal (pursued by an intelligent being) and optimization pressure (a property of a blind process) are approximately the same thing in the end. In other words, Anthropomorphization can be useful despite not being true in a literal sense.
Certainly this can be misleading to the layman. The term "observer" in quantum mechanics suffers similarly.