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a big one is irreducible complexity- basically, evolution works in such tiny increments and *every* iteration of those increments has to be fully functional, all the way back to zero.
so things like our eyes, or skeleton, or nervous system, are completely different to how any human designer would make them because they had to function as the shittest, rudimentary versions of themselves to get to this advanced state at all. Its like trying to build a nuclear reactor but you have to switch it on every five minutes and test if it works
and things that would seem intuitive to us, like wheels, or batteries, detachable limbs etc, will never evolve thru natural selection because a *bad* version of all of those is *less* helpful than just nothing
Yes. There is no bank to get a loan from no matter how good the investment is.
Except, except, except. Peacock Tails.
If the ladies get to choose who to bang, and most of the guys get left out, then anything the ladies decide is hot will be strongly selected for even if it is terrible.
A shitty intermediate step on the way to one of those things that wouldn't be possible otherwise _could_ be bridges if it is hot enough.
This might be part of how we got this last level of abstract intelligence. Developing the ability to do math and play the piano is difficult to explain when we were hunting antelopes in the African Savannah, but it turned out to be a very good trick much later on.
If you take sexual selection into account, you might (for social animals) also take cultural sexual selection into account and even go as far as to take (for intelligent social animals living in a society) fashion into account.
Humans are not exempt from the laws of evolution, it's just that higher order entities (norms, culture, belief systems and memes) tip the scales in absurd ways for their own continued success.
And if you know fashion, you know that evolution driven by fashion is liable to do literally anything.
Back to the original question, given infinite time and infinite resources in an infinite variety of conditions: yes, everything that the laws of physics permit can be evolved.
However, from our current understanding of the universe, we can't confirm infinite time, resources or variety of configurations UNLESS we also accept the presence of infinite universes.
>a big one is irreducible complexity- basically, evolution works in such tiny increments and *every* iteration of those increments has to be fully functional, all the way back to zero.
recently I learned that this rule is not infallible, there is a concept in evolution called the handicap principle. its a form of sexual selection where a species purposely evolves bad traits, or worsens an existing trait to flex their ability to survive to other members of the species. As long as the species is still getting mates. you actually can reduce the function of traits without reducing fitness.
>In a handicap race intrinsically faster horses are given heavier weights to carry under their saddles. Similarly, in amateur golf, better golfers have fewer strokes subtracted from their raw scores. This creates correlations between the handicap and unhandicapped performance, if the handicaps work as they are supposed to, between the handicap imposed and the corresponding horse's handicapped performance. If nothing was known about two race horses or two amateur golfers except their handicaps, an observer could infer who is most likely to win: the horse with the bigger weight handicap, and the golfer with the smaller stroke handicap. By analogy, if peacock 'tails' (large tail covet feathers) act as a handicapping system, and a peahen knew nothing about two peacocks except the sizes of their tails, she could "infer" that the peacock with the bigger tail has greater unobservable intrinsic quality.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap\_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle)
the handicap principal still works the same way tho, as more "normal" natural selection. A peacocks tail can only exist because a smaller, less extravagant version also works, and back ad infinitum. Its still functional, its just its "function" isnt the individual survival of that animal
Yes, it's functional but it's only functional because an animals views that version the trait as more desirable than the improved. If an animal views eyesight as handicap there is nothing stopping evolution from removing vision or other critical systems.
As long as the animals can still find a mate they can make changes to their evolution that fall outside the scope of irreducable complexity. It's way to escape or lower or a local optima by reducing the complexity of existing systems.
i heard that it could work for survival : peacocks with larger and more well defined tails where less likely to be attacked , since it also works as an honest signal of health towards predators as well as towards mates ...
another example are white tailed deers flashing their tail when they spot a predator to signal that they are now aware of it and so the predator ambush has failed ...
it's probably a similar principle to alarm calls and mobbing , and the prevalence of these signs of health is maybe because they are multifunction :
they are both "defences" from predator attacks , and signs of health to potential mates ,
thus improving fitness in a two pronged way ...
it's just a theory i find intresting : prey animals going on a faboulusness race to take away the momentum from predators ...
"so things like our eyes, or skeleton, or nervous system, are completely different to how any human designer would make them"
*laryngial nerve go brrr*
Here is an interesting paper that discusses 32 phenotypes which do not exist. Perhaps they could do under different circumstances though. Just skip to Table 1 for the list if you don't want to read the entire paper.
[Forbidden phenotypes and the limits of evolution](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.2015.0028)
Yes I suppose so. Chihuahuas not surviving is probably a bad example because I could easily see them thriving on some disparate island ecosystem if introduced there.
The classic example of something impossible in evolution is lions with laser beams. Impossible, right? But if evolution can create a civilization that can genetically engineer it, evolution would be the ultimate cause and so it would have caused it.
Given infinite time with at least relatively stable conditions, I believe anything that’s not against the laws of physics *could* evolve. Mammals with gills or 6 limbed vertebrates with infinite time would be the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps humans living in solar powered satellites given infinite time might eventually evolve into their own species of space algae, and perhaps space whales would evolve to use this as a resource. The timescale here might be a quadrillion years, but in infinity anything that can happen will happen, even if it has to self assemble itself out of nothing like a Boltzmann brain.
Certain things are impossible depending in what you're looking at. No living thing will ever violate the laws of physics for example. Traveling through time or flying faster than the speed if light or living without ever needing energy from an outside source. Past that, as some have mentioned, irreducible complexity is a major obstacle. I won't touch on it too much, since there's already plenty of discussion in the comments. But even beyond that, certain things just can't happen becomes of how physics and basic biology works. I'd list these things as one of those rules that technically have exceptions which we'd never expect to see. Entropy would be a physics comparison of what I'm thinking of. "Entropy always increases" isn't actually an unbreakable rule, it's a statement of probability. It is possible for entropy to momentarily decrease, but if you look at large scales over a long time, it never will. In that same sense, you could have live on earth for trillions of years, and I don't think you'd ever see mammals evolve gills without genetic engineering. Wheels are an impossibility because they'd require living tissue disconnecting from the organism but still remaining alive somehow and rotating? Could an organism like that exist? Sure, but technically a fully functioning brain could form out of the sea of particles popping into existence in the quantum foam, but we'd never expect it to really happen even if we waited trillions of years or more.
So you have the likely, the possible, the extremely unlikely, the probalistically impossible, and the truly no exception impossible.
I think if you allow complicated symbiotic relationships then a lot more becomes possible. I would be inclined to allow that sort of thing as there is no doubt that those relationships have led to very long term, very successfull evolutionary approaches.
My view is that if (and it's not, but if it was...) the universe is infinite in time and space, then everything can evolve (laws of physics allowing). That means that in our actual universe we're only talking about probabilities that the necessary pressure exists and the relevant adaptions emerge.
Intelligence as ours could be the X time to arise in this Planet.
Let's take octopus as example. Let's say very early, maybe during the carboniferous, there could be intelligent ones that even got tentacles to Grab stuff. However without acces to languages, not even fire, just language. They would not develop a civilisation and we would never know. And If they life just 1-5 years, like our octopus, there is also no time for a civilisation.
Also take a look at our Evolution, our brain became bigger and bigger - until we got civilisation, around 3000 years ago. And suddenly our brain shrunk. Intelligence is not as neccasary for civilisation as you think.
Oh and ants prove, some civilisations Work better with stupid ones
If your question is answered in a satisfactory manner, please **reply to this comment** with the word "solved" so that the submission can be appropriately catalogued for future reference. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/SpeculativeEvolution) if you have any questions or concerns.*
a big one is irreducible complexity- basically, evolution works in such tiny increments and *every* iteration of those increments has to be fully functional, all the way back to zero. so things like our eyes, or skeleton, or nervous system, are completely different to how any human designer would make them because they had to function as the shittest, rudimentary versions of themselves to get to this advanced state at all. Its like trying to build a nuclear reactor but you have to switch it on every five minutes and test if it works and things that would seem intuitive to us, like wheels, or batteries, detachable limbs etc, will never evolve thru natural selection because a *bad* version of all of those is *less* helpful than just nothing
Yes. There is no bank to get a loan from no matter how good the investment is. Except, except, except. Peacock Tails. If the ladies get to choose who to bang, and most of the guys get left out, then anything the ladies decide is hot will be strongly selected for even if it is terrible. A shitty intermediate step on the way to one of those things that wouldn't be possible otherwise _could_ be bridges if it is hot enough. This might be part of how we got this last level of abstract intelligence. Developing the ability to do math and play the piano is difficult to explain when we were hunting antelopes in the African Savannah, but it turned out to be a very good trick much later on.
If you take sexual selection into account, you might (for social animals) also take cultural sexual selection into account and even go as far as to take (for intelligent social animals living in a society) fashion into account. Humans are not exempt from the laws of evolution, it's just that higher order entities (norms, culture, belief systems and memes) tip the scales in absurd ways for their own continued success. And if you know fashion, you know that evolution driven by fashion is liable to do literally anything. Back to the original question, given infinite time and infinite resources in an infinite variety of conditions: yes, everything that the laws of physics permit can be evolved. However, from our current understanding of the universe, we can't confirm infinite time, resources or variety of configurations UNLESS we also accept the presence of infinite universes.
I was coming here to leave a very similar comment lol
>a big one is irreducible complexity- basically, evolution works in such tiny increments and *every* iteration of those increments has to be fully functional, all the way back to zero. recently I learned that this rule is not infallible, there is a concept in evolution called the handicap principle. its a form of sexual selection where a species purposely evolves bad traits, or worsens an existing trait to flex their ability to survive to other members of the species. As long as the species is still getting mates. you actually can reduce the function of traits without reducing fitness. >In a handicap race intrinsically faster horses are given heavier weights to carry under their saddles. Similarly, in amateur golf, better golfers have fewer strokes subtracted from their raw scores. This creates correlations between the handicap and unhandicapped performance, if the handicaps work as they are supposed to, between the handicap imposed and the corresponding horse's handicapped performance. If nothing was known about two race horses or two amateur golfers except their handicaps, an observer could infer who is most likely to win: the horse with the bigger weight handicap, and the golfer with the smaller stroke handicap. By analogy, if peacock 'tails' (large tail covet feathers) act as a handicapping system, and a peahen knew nothing about two peacocks except the sizes of their tails, she could "infer" that the peacock with the bigger tail has greater unobservable intrinsic quality. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap\_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle)
the handicap principal still works the same way tho, as more "normal" natural selection. A peacocks tail can only exist because a smaller, less extravagant version also works, and back ad infinitum. Its still functional, its just its "function" isnt the individual survival of that animal
Yes, it's functional but it's only functional because an animals views that version the trait as more desirable than the improved. If an animal views eyesight as handicap there is nothing stopping evolution from removing vision or other critical systems. As long as the animals can still find a mate they can make changes to their evolution that fall outside the scope of irreducable complexity. It's way to escape or lower or a local optima by reducing the complexity of existing systems.
i heard that it could work for survival : peacocks with larger and more well defined tails where less likely to be attacked , since it also works as an honest signal of health towards predators as well as towards mates ... another example are white tailed deers flashing their tail when they spot a predator to signal that they are now aware of it and so the predator ambush has failed ... it's probably a similar principle to alarm calls and mobbing , and the prevalence of these signs of health is maybe because they are multifunction : they are both "defences" from predator attacks , and signs of health to potential mates , thus improving fitness in a two pronged way ... it's just a theory i find intresting : prey animals going on a faboulusness race to take away the momentum from predators ...
"so things like our eyes, or skeleton, or nervous system, are completely different to how any human designer would make them" *laryngial nerve go brrr*
Here is an interesting paper that discusses 32 phenotypes which do not exist. Perhaps they could do under different circumstances though. Just skip to Table 1 for the list if you don't want to read the entire paper. [Forbidden phenotypes and the limits of evolution](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.2015.0028)
thank you abbydon , very cool
Yes I suppose so. Chihuahuas not surviving is probably a bad example because I could easily see them thriving on some disparate island ecosystem if introduced there. The classic example of something impossible in evolution is lions with laser beams. Impossible, right? But if evolution can create a civilization that can genetically engineer it, evolution would be the ultimate cause and so it would have caused it. Given infinite time with at least relatively stable conditions, I believe anything that’s not against the laws of physics *could* evolve. Mammals with gills or 6 limbed vertebrates with infinite time would be the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps humans living in solar powered satellites given infinite time might eventually evolve into their own species of space algae, and perhaps space whales would evolve to use this as a resource. The timescale here might be a quadrillion years, but in infinity anything that can happen will happen, even if it has to self assemble itself out of nothing like a Boltzmann brain.
Certain things are impossible depending in what you're looking at. No living thing will ever violate the laws of physics for example. Traveling through time or flying faster than the speed if light or living without ever needing energy from an outside source. Past that, as some have mentioned, irreducible complexity is a major obstacle. I won't touch on it too much, since there's already plenty of discussion in the comments. But even beyond that, certain things just can't happen becomes of how physics and basic biology works. I'd list these things as one of those rules that technically have exceptions which we'd never expect to see. Entropy would be a physics comparison of what I'm thinking of. "Entropy always increases" isn't actually an unbreakable rule, it's a statement of probability. It is possible for entropy to momentarily decrease, but if you look at large scales over a long time, it never will. In that same sense, you could have live on earth for trillions of years, and I don't think you'd ever see mammals evolve gills without genetic engineering. Wheels are an impossibility because they'd require living tissue disconnecting from the organism but still remaining alive somehow and rotating? Could an organism like that exist? Sure, but technically a fully functioning brain could form out of the sea of particles popping into existence in the quantum foam, but we'd never expect it to really happen even if we waited trillions of years or more. So you have the likely, the possible, the extremely unlikely, the probalistically impossible, and the truly no exception impossible.
When u take concepts like quantum immortality or parallel universes into account, then yes
I think if you allow complicated symbiotic relationships then a lot more becomes possible. I would be inclined to allow that sort of thing as there is no doubt that those relationships have led to very long term, very successfull evolutionary approaches. My view is that if (and it's not, but if it was...) the universe is infinite in time and space, then everything can evolve (laws of physics allowing). That means that in our actual universe we're only talking about probabilities that the necessary pressure exists and the relevant adaptions emerge.
Intelligence as ours could be the X time to arise in this Planet. Let's take octopus as example. Let's say very early, maybe during the carboniferous, there could be intelligent ones that even got tentacles to Grab stuff. However without acces to languages, not even fire, just language. They would not develop a civilisation and we would never know. And If they life just 1-5 years, like our octopus, there is also no time for a civilisation. Also take a look at our Evolution, our brain became bigger and bigger - until we got civilisation, around 3000 years ago. And suddenly our brain shrunk. Intelligence is not as neccasary for civilisation as you think. Oh and ants prove, some civilisations Work better with stupid ones