Is Evolution Always a Good Thing? Exploring the Limitations of Natural Selection

[venton]

*** Yikes .. this got moved from General discussion to Biology. This isn't about Biology, before you jump down my throat! *****

Life evolves, businesses evolve, products evolve, web sites evolve, ideas evolve etc. etc.

This always seemed like a good thing to me - the right way to go.

But, although evolution of life on Earth has created many amazing things, it has one big flaw. It cannot undo what has already evolved. It can't try a different design for an eye, once a creature has evolved an eye all it can do is be subject to minor mutations which may or may not be beneficial. An animal cannot try a completely different approach once it has an eye.

Hence the question. I have always thought of my own business as having evolved, and always thought it was good, the parallel with evolution of life. Actually, I am a software developer, and some of my code has 'evolved' over many years. It has always worked, but has changed dramatically, but in small increments.

But it suddenly struck me, evolution is not a good thing really. Where does radical change come in? It doesn't. Radical change or redesign must be desirable in many instances. What do you think?

 

[Evo]

Life evolves, businesses evolve, products evolve, web sites evolve, ideas evolve etc. etc.

This always seemed like a good thing to me - the right way to go.

But, although evolution of life on Earth has created many amazing things, it has one big flaw. It cannot undo what has already evolved. It can't try a different design for an eye, once a creature has evolved an eye all it can do is be subject to minor mutations which may or may not be beneficial. An animal cannot try a completely different approach once it has an eye.

Hence the question. I have always thought of my own business as having evolved, and always thought it was good, the parallel with evolution of life. Actually, I am a software developer, and some of my code has 'evolved' over many years. It has always worked, but has changed dramatically, but in small increments.

But it suddenly struck me, evolution is not a good thing really. Where does radical change come in? It doesn't. Radical change or redesign must be desirable in many instances. What do you think?

Right, evolution is bad, we should have remained single celled organisms.

 

[NobodySpecial]

It cannot undo what has already evolved.

Got gills and a tail have you?

An animal cannot try a completely different approach once it has an eye.

Bats ?
It can if the new approach produces a survival advantage.

Actually, I am a software developer,

In that case please disregard my first question

But it suddenly struck me, evolution is not a good thing really. Where does radical change come in?

The big single - multicellular switch over was pretty radical, as was the backbone project, and the whole moving onto the land endeavor.

 

[madcat8000]

Well of course you can change the course of your buisnesses evolution, however you have to have the balls to do it the way mother nature does, by destroying 70-99% of your previous work...

 

[venton]

Remember that evolution is caused by a slight mutation which may or may not confer a life advantage. This builds up over a long long time. There is no way we could wake up with gills. You would have to go back a long way to find our common ancestor which had gills.
Perhaps gills would be good for us, and if we could wake up with them we could take to the seas. This is my point, evolution seems to be very clever but it is massively constrained. I thought evolution was a good basis for business, but now realize that may not be the case. 99%+ of species go extinct.

 

[venton]

I should point out that I posted this in 'general discussion' - it has been moved to Biology. Of course, this is NOT a biology question, it was more to do with business processes. Sorry to biologists, I'm not knocking evolution of life.

 

[russ_watters]

Part of the problem here is your characterizations of evolution in the biological and social sense are both wrong! So starting with a proper biological understanding would probably help.

 

[venton]

Part of the problem here is your characterizations of evolution in the biological and social sense are both wrong! So starting with a proper biological understanding would probably help.

Oh well, while I am here in Biology section I am up for a discussion on those lines. How is anything I said wrong in a Biological sense?

 

[Ygggdrasil]

The OP does have a good point that, for an individual species, evolution is a very efficient local search mechanism that can solve local maximization problems yet it cannot guarantee finding a global maximum.

However, this is true only when one examines the evolution of individual species. Evolution acts on populations of different species, species which may have developed independent solutions to the same problem. A good example here is flight. Insects and birds have developed independent means of flight (as evidenced by their very different wing structures). So, radical change is possible in an ecosystem. If species A has an inefficient means of performing a certain task, a different species that had independently evolved radically different and much more efficient means of performing that task will outcompete species A.

A good example of this process might be the evolution of the genetic code, the table that says which DNA base combinations code for which amino acids. Changing the genetic code requires a radical change to an organism's genome as it would require rewriting all of the gene sequences in the genome. However, there is very good evidence that the genetic code was optimized by evolution to minimize the effects of mutation. Likely, different species developed different genetic codes and competition between the species led to the selection of the species with the most efficient genetic code. While natural selection did not allow any individual species to improve its own genetic code, natural selection did improve the efficiency of protein coding of the entire ecosystem by culling the most efficient species from the others.

Applied to the business/social sphere, this is similar to Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction: radical innovation comes from new companies that displace the old, incumbent monopolies.

 

[venton]

Ygggdrasil - You have got my point exactly. I was perhaps feeling smug that I knew that my business (or computer code) had evolved over the years, so it should be very 'fit for purpose' - because hey - that's what life did. BUT it isn't necessariliy a good thing. A new 'species' of business can come along, with none of the constraints of my evolution and blow me away (that was your idea Ygggg - I like that). So, I was just asking opinions on whether I should look on my business evolution as maybe a bad thing, and at least take on board the fact that my business is NOT constrained like a species is - I am actually able to think in terms of radical changes.

 

[Evo]

Ygggdrasil - You have got my point exactly. I was perhaps feeling smug that I knew that my business (or computer code) had evolved over the years, so it should be very 'fit for purpose' - because hey - that's what life did. BUT it isn't necessariliy a good thing. A new 'species' of business can come along, with none of the constraints of my evolution and blow me away (that was your idea Ygggg - I like that). So, I was just asking opinions on whether I should look on my business evolution as maybe a bad thing, and at least take on board the fact that my business is NOT constrained like a species is - I am actually able to think in terms of radical changes.

Start a new thread on staying relevant and competitve in the business market and leave references to evolution out of it.

 

[venton]

Feel free to delete the whole post, it should never have been moved here.
I posted it in General Discussion - "Topics outside the realm of science and tech"
No harm done, I found it quite interesting.
Thanks.