Blaise Agüera y Arcas: prediction

Transcript context

…the steady state. You said in your talk that merging is more important than mutation. Tell me more. So the usual thing, what we learned in school was that Darwinian evolution consists of mutation and selection or what Jacques Monod, the Nobel winner, called chance and necessity. So, you know, in other words, mutations maybe from cosmic rays or whatever to our DNA sort of throw spaghetti at the wall and and whatever sticks is what is what remains, whatever doesn't kill us and and and whatever hopefully makes us stronger. That was my assumption as well, you know, starting out with these BFF experiments and and so I I had a mutation rate, you know, where a byte could change at random with probability 1 in 10,000 or something, you know, with with every interaction. And then I began playing with the mutation rate and found that this emergence of these complex programs occurred even when the mutation rate was turned down to 0, which is really a surprising finding. It tells you that this emergence of purpose comes about, you know, even without any any random changes in in the code. It's it's not explainable in in purely Darwinian terms, but, you know, the other things that are not explainable in purely Darwinian terms are the emergence of life in the first place. This greatly puzzled Darwin, you know, he he thought this problem of abiogenesis or the emergence of life was just, you know, impossible to to reckon with, you know, you might as well talk about the origin of matter is how he put it in 1 of his letters. And the other thing I can't explain is the increases in complexity that occur. You know, why is life now more complex than bacterial life, you know, a million you know, billion years after it began on earth? You know, why are do we have human societies now and if we go back, you know, a hundred million years we had only, you know, things with much simpler brains. We had octopuses, had pretty complex brains, but anyway, but, you know, the the tendency has been toward toward greater complexity. There there are some people who have argued against that, you know, famously, Stephen Jay Gould, you know, has said things like, you know, everything on earth is is this is the same amount of all. We've all been evolving for, you know, 3000000000 years. It's all equally evolved. I think I think Gould was wrong, when he said this. The reason being symbiogenesis. When when you have a eukaryote formed by a a mitochondrion being sort of, you know, finding itself inside an archaea and then, you know, becoming a eukaryote, that resulting composite organism is more complex than either of the 2 parts that made it up. In the same way that a spear is more complex than a stick and a stone point. You know, you you put 2 things together, you now have a you have something more complex than the parts. And and if if this if this idea that symbiosis or symbiogenesis is is an essential part of evolution is correct, then you absolutely get more sophisticated things coming about later in evolution because they're being put together from pre existing parts. Yeah. I wanted to touch on the the because I said that the same thing on the show many times that inspired by Kenneth Stanley actually, that we see this monotonic increase in complexity and and and evolution.…

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