From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Jun 18 2002 - 03:26:38 MDT
On Tue, Jun 18, 2002 at 12:08:27AM -0400, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>
> If this is so, then why does evolution, a process of essentially constant
> underlying "smartness", appear to have accelerated over time, rather than
> slowing down as more complex organisms are created? The above theory would
> appear to make predictions which are the diametric opposite of the observed
> evidence from anthropology and evolutionary biology.
Does evolution really accelerate? The evidence I have seen seems
somewhat inconclusive, and I have one paper lying around suggesting that
species longevity is increasing roughly logarithmically - which would
mean both that the improvement in survivability is increasing more
slowly, and that more and more old species remain.
If you look at it from the perspective of billions of years of single
celled organisms, hundreds of millions of years of soft-bodied
creatures, the Canbrian explosion followed by a scant few hundred
million years of skeletal creatures going onto land, followed by the
appearance of sophisticated nervous systems and then the appearance of
humans a few million years ago, it sounds very much like a singularity
chant. But on the molecular level the rate of evolution might have been
nearly constant - the first billion years were really the heroic era
when replication, metabolism and environmental protection were
perfected. Since then there has just been a lot of homeobox twiddling.
My personal view is that evolution does indeed accelerate, but in the
form of adding new and faster layers on top of the old ones. Metabolic
evolution is terribly slow. Body plan evolution is faster. Then nervous
systems and adaptivity added an even faster layer, which enabled an
super-fast layer of behavioral and cultural change. But if this carries
over to intelligence development, it might turn out that the road to
superintelligence is not by looking at super-hardware or super-software,
but by looking at super-memetics or super-culture.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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