Likewise, the wonder of evolution itself is not how well it works, but that a brainless, accidentally occurring optimization process can work at all...
That's not the amazing part to me. If you work a little with recurrent optimization processes, you get used to the idea of mechanisms grinding away and optimizing. The part I find amazing is the unpredictability of what the process creates. How so little, can produce so much, and so much you would never have guessed.
I haven't looked much into Stephen Wolfram, but the way the simplest cellular automata can produce complex patterns is amazing. Who isn't amazed by the Mandelbrot set? So simple a process producing so complex a result.
The almost religious aspect of my amazement with the universe is how so little has produced so much. Imagine watching the universe from the Big Bang. A big explosion. I suppose outside of it all, that would be a surprise. But once it goes boom, it's just an expanding hot mess slowly cooling as it expanded. That expanding hot mess would get boring pretty quickly. But when it expands enough, and things cool enough, now some of the tiny bits of hot mess start to interact, and produce new things you haven't seen before. Who woulda thunk it? On a macro scale, gravity starts to do the same thing on a vastly greater scale, and the universe turns clumpy. That's interesting too.
But can you imagine the first time a star fires up? What the hell was that? And now, new tiny things get produced in the center of stars too. Who saw that coming? And then, a star explodes it's guts across the universe and goes out. Wow. That was quite a show. And that produced some new stuff too. But we've seen new stuff before. But how about the first black hole? Did you see that one coming?
After a while, once that new stuff starts clumping together, you start getting chemistry. Look at all the ways this stuff combines. I think we're entering the baroque period, where all sorts of interesting fine details and interactions come out of all the ways to combine this new stuff.
With crystals and lattice structures, you're getting some self replication already. DNA certainly would be interesting. Cells. All of biology. Culture. Technology.
All along the way, there are inflection points, where things happen that you just don't see coming. That's the part that amazes me, mainly because it leads to the anticipation of what's next. Santa Claus is coming to town.
I have nothing to add, but I just wanted to thank you for writing that. I would describe the feelings you evoked in me as "almost religious" except that I had never felt anything like that when I was religious -- I worshipped a small god, who operated at a much more provincial scale than the whole universe.
This is bigger, and more impressive, and makes my former religion feel remarkably tiny and cramped.
You're welcome. And thank you for some positive feedback, because I felt a little self conscious in writing it. I'm not one for the numinous, the transcendent, etc. I tend to snicker at such things. "Wow gee whiz". But thinking about evolution recently, and seeing the pattern, it really did look amazing to me.
It just goes to show that your don't have to suspend the laws of nature to be amazed, you just have to pay attention to them.
As Hitchens says, the actual universe is much more amazing than a burning bush.
If you like this kind of thing, and particularly if you're a recovering Christian, I've got another for you. Christians think that a Son had to die for you to live. Almost right.
A Sun had to die for you to live.
That's a lot more amazing to me, much more grand and beautiful than a human sacrifice in the desert. That's the kind of thing that makes me feel grateful to be alive.
Today's post, The Wonder of Evolution was originally published on 02 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
The wonder of the first replicator was not how amazingly well it replicated, but that a first replicator could arise, at all, by pure accident, in the primordial seas of Earth. That first replicator would undoubtedly be devoured in an instant by a sophisticated modern bacterium. Likewise, the wonder of evolution itself is not how well it works, but that a brainless, accidentally occurring optimization process can work at all. If you praise evolution for being such a wonderfully intelligent Creator, you're entirely missing the wonderful thing about it.
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was An Alien God, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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