this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
1759 points (89.9% liked)
Memes
45619 readers
1031 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not necessarily true - evolution (and simulating evolution) is great at finding local maxima/minima, but not as great at moving out of those in the case where the local min/max is not the global min/max. So, for example, birds might not be the optimal way to do flight efficiency, but between birds and optimal flight efficiency if there's a region of worse flight efficiency of any real size (more than you could vault in a couple generations of lucky mutations) then evolution will never find it because the intermediate steps to get there will be selected against too heavily to jump the gap.
I don't think I entirely disagree with you. I was generalizing the real phenomenon that we are unable to engineer competing mechanisms to those found in the wild.
That said, "region of worse efficiency" tends to happen all the time. The accurate argument would be a "region of untenable inefficiency". A legless bird that evolved the ability to fly its entire life from hatching to death is an unlikely evolution. Not coincidentally, finding ways to keep something up in the air longer-term than birds do is something our engineering is capable of.