If your job is to attract an agent that is playing a careful balance between exploration and exploitation, while on tight computational budget, then you want to attract them with some initial hooks (e.g. bright colors) and appease their computational risk assessment module with high compressibility (e.g. symmetries and self-similar patterns).
You are probably thinking backward. I am not an expert in evolutionary biology but the beauty of flowers is something which has helped them survive. Flowers themselves didn't decide to be beautiful or they don't even know that they are beautiful. Remember that evolution is blind. It is just that their beauty was in the eyes of beholders and those beholders helped them survive.
Unless the post you are replying to has been heavily edited, I am at a loss to see how you could find in it either an assumption or implication that flowers themselves decided to be beautiful or that they know they are beautiful.
One could challenge whether it is appropriate to say flowers are beautiful to insects, though clearly that is intended to be read as attractive, which, empirically, they are (nor do you seem to dispute the proposition that they evolved to be that way), and there's no prima facie reason for their scent and appearance to invoke pleasure in most humans.
My similarly limited understanding tells me that there are a few aspects to this:
- We've evolved to find our natural habitat (which is very variable) pleasing, as that's an evolutionary advantage compared to constantly feeling uneasy.
- We are attracted to places that are different to the ones we live in, so we keep exploring and spreading.
- There's also a learned component - even if we understand that a landscape isn't habitable for us (like the desert), we're conditioned to finding it beautiful, as this is the cultural consensus.
I feel there is something of a false dichotomy between being pleased and being uneasy, as I suspect that indifference would be equally effective. We, like many other animals, have mechanisms to become indifferent to those aspects of our environment which are commonplace and neither useful nor harmful to us. While some curiosity towards novelty is arguably beneficial, a lack of caution is demonstrably dangerous.
If our aesthetic response to flowers was a direct consequence of evolutionary pressure, we would expect to find the flowers of plants having edible tubers or fruit to be especially attractive, and those of poisonous plants to be repulsive.
We don't know if tight budgeted exploration/exploitation agents find flowers beautiful. As humans we've been so much in bioeconomical surplus that we've invested in exploration of meta-patterns, that allowed us exploitation despite the variability of the environment (temporal, multi-instance, multi-agent compressibility), and maybe beauty is a proxy for this function, and as such mostly only a human experience? Or maybe beauty is merely something that inspires replication and preservation, and being on the receiving end of this is a good adaptation from any living being's perspective?
If compressibility was the only normativity, smoothest objects would be the most beautiful, a sine wave would be the most interesting symphony, but they are in fac the most banal, most unbeautiful things. Smooth object are highly compressible but also highly exhaustible, unlike organic objects.
Any painter of a natural subject knows that organic structures are far from that kind of symmetry, and actually a painting loses verisimilitude if you are too symmetrical and formulaic.
Symmetry and self-similar patterns are everywhere in living things and that seems to stem from the way structure emerges from DNA. So IMHO it would be surprising if flowers were not following this ubiquitous pattern...
I think you're right about that. It's a fundamental aspect of how biological systems tend to be structured.
Perhaps symmetry is even an indication that a particular structure is "cheap" in some sense. A less symmetric structure might require more information to store in the DNA, and therefore require longer evolution. If a symmetrical structure does the job as well as a more complicated structure, it's likely the simpler structure will prevail.
In my experience people tend to find also non-biological symmetrical / self-similar structures striking. Something about this kind of simplicity triggers our sensory systems. It's probably more bug than feature. But it might be relevant that symmetry of biological systems often indicate health. Unhealthy biological systems are less structured, less symmetrical, and identifying sickness is evolutionary advantageous.
"Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes"
Author writes like he has a picture of himself on his bedside table and an old flickr account abandoned after realising he spent all this dedication and effort on deciphering some kind of ephemeral beauty in the world other people saw, but that was somehow always just out of reach for him.
All these evolutionary arguments (e.g. “head of penis is shaped as such to clean out semen of competitors”) all sound conveniently convincing, but I’m curious if there’s any data validating them?
It’s easy to shoehorn any number of plausible theories, but how do we know one evolutionary theory is the correct one?
Clearly the arguments that sound less convincing have failed to survive and reproduce. The existence of evolutionary arguments is therefore proof of the correctness of the theory! ;)
Except penises come in quite a variety of shapes across species.
Distinguishing actual driving traits from those that just happened to ride along (i.e. men's nipples and other various vestiges, bright red colour of foxes where neither the foxes themselves, nor their predators or prey can see colour), is very hard.
> but how do we know one evolutionary theory is the correct one
IMHO, the one that works is the one most likely to result in increased gene propagation even if the percentage is minuscule in the absence of orthogonal genes.
The argument is not that X evolved to do Y, but rather X resulted in increased gene propagation as it happened to do Y.
In the example above, the head of the penis is shaped as such because that shape enables semen displacement. In the same vein, males tend to lose an erection, and therefore the [flaccid] penis loses the displacement property, after excretion because that results in not displacing one's own semen.
And if I'm being truthful, I struggle with evolution a bit. It's a bit like life. I understand how life could have eventually evolved to where we're at. But how did life _start_?
Any specific mechanism is explained as having evolved, but if so, how did it _start_?
For example, there's an HN thread explaining why bees die after they sting and why it's acceptable from a colony perspective. What put bee's on _that_ specific evolutionary track? How did it _start_?
I think a lot of people are like myself, there's a level of blind faith put into evolution. We obviously have witnessed it happening so we know it does happen, but there are so many things we can't explain for sure that forces us to have blind faith it happened via _purely_ evolutionary forces. like ... what if we find out some super advanced alien civilization seeded earth with life and managed it in some way, helping shape things. It would kind of explain a lot.
And so I continue to have blind faith that even if we don't have a concrete explanation for many of the things we see it happened via evolution, but I also understand the skepticism some people have for evolution being the sole explanation.
> I understand how life could have eventually evolved to where we're at. But how did life _start_?
Evolution doesn't explain how life started (or attempt to explain), just how it changes over time. How it started is obviously a really interesting question, but not one you can use evolution to understand. Evolution explains a specific thing, not everything.
> there's a level of blind faith put into evolution
I'd call it common sense, more than blind faith. You see a person dead on the floor with a bullet wound, and a handgun laying next to the body. Concluding that the victim was shot to death is common sense, not blind faith. In that sense, evolution is more like playing detective, all the evidence is pointing to it.
> 1. The assent of the mind to the truth of a proposition or statement for which there is not complete evidence; belief in general.
> 2. Specifically Firm belief based upon confidence in the authority and veracity of another, rather than upon one's own knowledge, reason, or judgment; earnest and trustful confidence: as, to have faith in the testimony of a witness; to have faith in a friend.
...
> 5. Intuitive belief.
We have a hypothesis that the penis _evolved_ due to it's ability to scoop out semen. A part of that hypothesis is that this is why longer penises evolved, to place semen in places that cannot be scooped out by other men.
But another explanation for larger penises is that women find them more attractive and pleasurable and therefore it increased your chance of mating.
Another would be that larger penises are statistically more likely to get a woman pregnant in general, with or without a bulbous head.
But here's one for you. The original hypothesis about the penis head came from an experiment in which they found that a single thrust could potentially pull out 90% of a competitors semen. We won't discuss the logistics (they didn't use real people), we'll have _blind faith_ that the experimenters ensured it was realistic.
Men ejaculate in spurts over a time period that is larger than what it takes to thrust a single time. This would imply the penis head also removes it's own sperm quite often.
---
The point here is that
1. We don't know, and
2. We can't know without actually documenting the process.
This sub-thread was brought about by someone saying "how do we know this is true", and the answer is, we can't know, therefore we take it on blind faith.
If you're offended by the phrase blind faith, use whatever phrase you like. But while you're doing that, please watch that youtube video. It will help you better understand why it's more useful to discuss the underlying idea than to discuss if we should be using word X or word Y.
> by someone saying "how do we know this is true", and the answer is, we can't know, therefore we take it on blind faith.
If you're talking about evolution in general, then it makes a large number of predictions about the way things are, that have borne out.
If you're talking about penises scooping out semen, the answer is we can't know, therefore we take it on faith—the answer is we don't know, and so it's one of several hypotheses—none of which are mutually exclusive. Nobody is (or should be, at least) taking it on faith, because nobody should be asserting it as definitely true.
I would be interested to see how you think this short video supports the claim you are making here, as it does not mention evolution, common sense or faith, and is ostensibly about how little knowledge one gains just by learning the name of a thing.
You don't understand how pointing out the names of things isn't the important property of a thing would be relevant in a discussion with someone who is arguing it should be called X instead of Y?
No, the claims made in the video you linked to do not show that, as you put it, "in this case, 'common sense' and 'blind faith' mean the same thing." Nor does your reply to mcphage.
correct, the video is pointing out the name you call something isn't important.
I choose to call it blind faith and the other poster prefers to call it common sense. If a 3rd person wanted to call it guacamole I'd be onboard.
The other poster insists on arguing about the name rather than discussing the interesting part, which is underlying idea. They want to do this based upon the whole "science vs religion" thing that was boring even back in the 90's when it was raging.
I have no interest in it and so I've stepped out of that conversation. Let someone else take up a stupid, useless, argument.
> The video is pointing out the name you call something isn't important.
Firstly, this is a misreading of the video. The absurdity of this position can be seen from extending your example through replacing every noun in your comments by "guacamole".
Secondly, "blind" is an adjective, and one that you use at every opportunity (except where you are looking up definitions - by the way, isn't looking up definitions an odd preoccupation for someone who doesn't see anything of importance in what you call something?) It is well-known that you cannot outright prove anything about the natural world by induction, but to lump everything that is not proven into the category of specifically blind faith ignores the epistemic value of evidence and just leads to what you call a stupid, useless, argument.
> what if we find out some super advanced alien civilization seeded earth with life and managed it in some way, helping shape things. It would kind of explain a lot
A simple explanation would be that the aliens are much simpler than we are in makeup because it happened purely by evolution, and that part of our complexity came through planning.
There's just too many possibilities to so confidently claim it's kicking the can down the road.
Simplicity would be more likely to imply creation than complexity.
Simplicity implies understanding and intent.
No one would design the absolute spaghetti code mess that underlies our existence.
Look at the computers we build. Neat little rows and friendly little abstractions.
Life isn't. It's billions of years of good enough hacks layered one atop the other, and sometimes transitioned sideways from other forks of the code base.
Near half our DNA is just viral cruft that got mixed up and passed along for untold generations.
>Eight percent of our DNA consists of remnants of ancient viruses, and another 40 percent is made up of repetitive strings of genetic letters that is also thought to have a viral origin
Suppose living matter came to earth on an asteroid. That still doesn't explain how living things emerge from non-living matter.
> the aliens are much simpler than we are in makeup because it happened purely by evolution, and that part of our complexity came through planning.
That looks like argument from complexity. And it seems that complexity through planning would require an even more complex creator, not a simpler one.
> There's just too many possibilities
I don't think it makes a difference either way. If we can figure out one way of making life from non-living matter, we've cracked the code, we don't need to know how exactly it happened.
https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360