Cognitive Thrift 72 – Aida
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/06/08
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It’s like Aida: “Fortune favors the brave.”
Rick Rosner: It’s this one frickin’ gambler and it seems like a rare chain of events, but you’ve got hundreds of millions of years to work with and so rare events are what evolution is built out of anyway, and it is one more way for variation and innovation to sneak into evolution.
It’s kind of like a little ramp to let species jump to other species or to incorporate new behaviors, which eventually, if they persist long enough may be reflected in physical changes to the species.
Throughout evolutionary history, you probably have a bunch of losery animals that turn out t be heroes just like somebody in a John Hughes movie.
Jacobsen: Could there have been moderate to major steps throughout these low probability events in the species to drive cognitive systems to favor compactification of information?
Rosner: Yes, but let’s talk about – the deal is that old school evolutionary theory, just a few years past Darwin thought it was all gradualistic. Darwin was a gradualist, like water flowing through the canyons for tens of millions of years as opposed to the catastrophists who thought that huge single events happened that made these huge mountains shoot up.
New school evolutionary theory or semi-new evolutionary theory thanks to guys like Stephen Jay Gould includes Punctuated Equilibrium, which more accurately reflects the fossil record, which shows animals existing in a steady state for generation after generation until something disturbs them and then in a fairly short time you have new species.
Maybe, it is like one of those things like a bunch of those animals end up isolated because a path gets washed away, what is a peninsula is now an island.
They’re on warthog island afraid to make their own set of new warthog principles based on the genetics of the 18 warthogs who were isolated there from the pack of several hundred, or Darwin’s finches – whatever finch island gives you a new set of whatever.
People who are anti-evolution love to say show me the gradual things. Evolutionists say that nothing changes gradually. Dog changes gradually as all of history would let them change.
Things are the same…things stay the same for hundreds of thousands of years in a species, and then there’s some chance set of occurrences, genetic changes, changes in the niche, and all of the sudden you’ve got speciation over a period of probably a couple of thousand years, and even as quickly as a few hundred years, but fast and the anti-evolutionists are like “Oh no! Show us the missing link” and the evolutionists say, ‘What change comes happens relatively fast…” and so it’s easy to find steady-state examples of trilobites, and where they change into something else is a little more difficult, and this is jump one more ramp to make the jump from species to species, which is periodic stress induced fluidity of thought.
A low probability behavior, but one that is necessary because species face stress, and sometimes it pays off big time.
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