>"All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)"

to think evolution is still not complete and we still get freaks like land is a true irony.

>>24529439
>Evolution
>Complete
You clearly don't understand evolution

>>24529405 (OP)
This feels like it's trying really hard to be profound, but doesn't really get there.

>>24529584
its giving tryhard

>>24529405 (OP)
Sounds about right

>>24529584
You're no authority on profundity

if evolution is a process of brutal optimization, then why is is that nature is so stunningly beautiful?
and why is it that when humans optimize, we get ugly gray shapes?

>>24529660
because ugly shapes are easier to make with machines
next

>>24529665
Seems like an overly mechanistic explanation, not an explanation by spiritual qualia; unless you mean to say that the only thing which describes the brutal efficiency of machines is itself ad nauseam. That makes sense.

>>24529538
you are clearly a nigger.

>>24529405 (OP)
>>24529538
>nta, don't care, follow your tribe to /sci/ or /his/ or lol even /pol/
The evolution is clear here that Land learned his vocabulary from S. King, attempts to 'feels' his way into youth that think of things as 'grimdark'. This is candycoating things and causes one minute discernment that it is surely immaturity for the immature - into the birdcage it goes, sorry.
>He probably has all the homo parts highlighted in King's books.

Maistre did it better:

"In the immense sphere of living things, the obvious rule is violence, a kind of inevitable frenzy which arms all things in mutua funera. Once you leave the world of insensible substances, you find the decree of violent death written on the very frontiers of life. Even in the vegetable kingdom, this law can be perceived: from the huge catalpa to the smallest of grasses, how many plants die and how many are killed!
But once you enter the animal kingdom, the law suddenly becomes frighteningly obvious. A power at once hidden and palpable appears constantly occupied in bringing to light the principle of life by violent means. In each great division of the animal world, it has chosen a certain number of animals charged with devouring the others; so there are insects of prey, reptiles of prey, birds of prey, fish of prey, and quadrupeds of prey. There is not an instant of time when some living creature is not devoured by another. Thus is worked out, from maggots up to man, the universal law of the violent destruction of living beings. The whole earth, continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, until the extinction of evil, until the death of death.

thankfully darwinsim is fake and gay

>>24529660
because we are not optimizing the same things

>>24530026
can you tell me the why? not being glib, I am looking forward to see some anti-darwinian stance that's not flat earth type shit.

>>24530048
NTA, but to me evolution feels not so much wrong as incomplete
organisms are fantastically complex with a million small mechanisms and I don't buy that they arrived at this by binary "reproduced/didn't reproduce" selection
bacteria, sure, but something like a cat just has too many moving parts
there has to be more to the selection process
and some research suggests that it is true, like when they discovered that rats can pass memories to their offspring

>>24530082
You mean Lamarckism?
It's true, but it merely precedes Darwinian natural selection, i.e. first you evolute something by doing it a lot, and then this feature may or may not be retained if you survive/die

>>24530082
>I don't buy
Who cares about your contrarian skepticism? Do you have any arguments at all? Some research also suggest evolution is true.

>>24530092
>Lamarckism
I hadn't heard of this term before, thanks
wikipedia says the existence of the effect is not widely accepted, though
which fits with my recollection of not being taught that in school

note that I'm not even saying lamarckism specifically must be true
just that there must be something like it, because mere selection by reproduction is too blunt to have produced such fine-tuned nature

>>24530135
Before natural selection can start selecting it has to have something different to select from.
Lamarckism is scientifically too abstract, but it's pretty much confirmed by the fact that different species had diverged a very long time ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_epigenetic_inheritance

My personal interest is in the question of whether these differences could manifest themselves just across few generations. I.e. if parents get higher education before conceiving, wouldn't offspring be better off evolutionary than if parents had conceived it before getting education and going through the whole intellectually intensive process of acquiring it?

Close to impossible to test it, it'd take generations.

>>24530161
>Before natural selection can start selecting it has to have something different to select from.
traditionally it's been assumed that natural selection chooses from completely random genetic mutations
and I don't even have a problem if that is all there is to it
only that evolution seems way too fucking good and way too fucking fast if it iterates by throwing 50 dice once every 10-20 years
the larger and more long-lived the organism, the worse the results should be

>Transgenerational_epigenetic_inheritance
is such a terrible name
sterile and boring even by the standards of science

>if parents get higher education before conceiving, wouldn't offspring be better off evolutionary
I don't think we can inherit skills like playing the piano
I'm thinking more about ears that are slightly better at hearing, or blood that solidifies just a little bit better, or a microoptimisation in the digestive system
how do these propagate when they aren't that important to whether or not you managed to procreate? why aren't they lost in the noise?

>>24529405 (OP)
>All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages.
Technically this is false. The primary cause for the genesis of said qualities is random mutation, basically a "causeless" divine intervention. Natural selection is only a secondary cause relative to the emergence of novelty itself due to mutational randomness.

>>24530213
>traditionally
idk about TRVDITION, Darwin formulated his stuff a long time ago, we kinda past that.
>I don't think we can inherit skills like playing the piano
Not skills: mental output, and by extension, anything that our DNA retains with each successive generation.
Had a talk with a /lit/izen a few weeks back, check this out:

>>24529660
>why is it that when humans optimize, we get ugly gray shapes
Because that’s not true, you can get extremely organic looking designs running an optimization study on some “thing”, but the part to remember is that up until additive manufacturing, a lot of designs were impossible to make. To get around this, you modify the optimization study such that you only optimize within the design space of manufacturable designs, which is why you get boring “optimized” things.

>>24529405 (OP)
i really believe in evolution and really believe it happens faster than we give it credit for (10,000 year explosion by Cochran) and think it will keep going even faster with different substrate than DNA (ala the Revolutionary Phenotype by JF Gariepy)

>>24530219
>a "causeless" divine intervention

>>24530291

>>24530252
>you can get extremely organic looking designs running an optimization study
I don't mean some theoretical experiment in a lab
I mean the actual results of the great competition we call economy and industry and modern society
most of the items we produce are ugly
they are only pretty enough to not cause revulsion
aesthetics doesn't appear to be a property that arises naturally and tends to disappear the more "economically rational" the manufacturing process is

>>24530273
>Revolutionary Phenotype by JF Gariepy
what this book about, is it "computers are gonna take over bro" with some biology mumbo jumbo or is it bigger than that

>>24530323
>I don't mean some theoretical experiment in a lab
Just to be clear, I am talking about standard engineering design, not theoretical stuff/useful on papers. I work as an engineering consultant and pretty much any major company that makes a thing is a customer. Which makes it easy for me to answer:
>the items we produce are ugly they are only pretty enough to not cause revulsion
This is because of the consumer. The (at least American) consumer has proven time and time again that they prefer ugly, shitty, products that just barely get the job done over any type of quality. I’m sure you’ve heard of the proposal to ban “auto stop/start” in cars because the average American “finds it annoying”. A feature that can be disabled by a button, that saves gas, that does not increase wear anywhere close to change the ROI from the gas savings. Yet the consumer wants it banned, lol. Look at how people paint their own houses in the US, just varying shades of grey. That’s what the consumer wants so that’s what the big manufacturers will deliver.

>>24530347
>ban “auto stop/start” in cars because the average American “finds it annoying”. A feature that can be disabled by a button,
what car do you drive that lets you disable it permanently once and for all?
because the ones I drove always reset the settings after killing the engine
which is the typical modern pathology of taking away choice and forcing the user to adapt to the tool rather than the other way around
in which case fuck yes, I want it gone
also I'm not American nor have I heard about this proposal until now

>>24530347
it's not just consumer choice
factories themselves are also ugly as sin
as are more or less all industrial buildings, vehicles and machines
and industry is supposedly all about optimization, same as nature
so why are tree leaves so much more pleasant than solar panels?

>>24530373
I drive an Integra and it’s disabled based on sport mode or my custom drive mode. It also works well with a 6MT; the moment I have my foot on the clutch it’s already restarting and once I have my gear selected it’s idling smoothly. Now note, even you want this feature banned, and I claim this is why everything is shitty and garbage. The reason why the feature is forced on after a reset is purely for emissions/gas mileage regulation compliance. Because the average consumer is an idiot and can never identify the root cause of an issue, they resort to stupid shit like asking the government to ban a feature when it was a government regulation that caused the feature to be shitty in the first place.

>>24530393
Can an ugly factory make a beautiful thing?

>>24530393
That's is just confirmation bias.
Nature is nice as a theme park, dogs are nice when domesticated, horror movies are fun when you aren't in them.

>>24530415
>I drive an Integra and it’s disabled based on sport mode or my custom drive mode. It also works well with a 6MT; the moment I have my foot on the clutch it’s already restarting and once I have my gear selected it’s idling smoothly.
so it just so happens that what they force you to do aligns with your preferences, and even then you needed to fiddle with the settings
basically "they didn't come for me" situation
and you have the gall to look down on others
have some self-awarenees, anon
>Now note, even you want this feature banned, and I claim this is why everything is shitty and garbage
the feature can stay if some people like it
what I want is the ability to choose
I am fucking tired of not feeling like the owner of the technology I use
>The reason why the feature is forced on after a reset is purely for emissions/gas mileage regulation compliance. Because the average consumer is an idiot and can never identify the root cause of an issue, they resort to stupid shit like asking the government to ban a feature when it was a government regulation that caused the feature to be shitty in the first place.
you call others idiots, but this statement makes no sense
what difference does it make who instituted the rule?
the people want the rule gone
it's not idiocy to ask the government to walk back their decision

to top it all off, having a "setting" that deliberately resets itself is just fucking insulting
they give you the illusion of choice, but ultimately want to bend you to their preference
of course people don't like it, being treated like cattle
smart ones anyway

>>24530442
I'm not talking about fun, I'm talking about beauty
yes, not everything in nature is elegant
but so many things are
a tiger is still majestic even if its prey doesn't appreciate it

>>24531164
>so it just so happens that what they force you to do aligns with your preferences, and even then you needed to fiddle with the settings
If pushing an easily accessible button is fiddling with the settings (but turning on the car, selecting a gear, setting the climate, flipping on headlights aren’t), fine.
>it's not idiocy to ask the government to walk back their decision
But that’s not the discussion being had, the general discussion is simply banning a feature and not why the feature functions like it does. The people that legislate for or against these regulations are voted for by the same retarded consumers that complain about them. My point is, “this” has more to do with the average person and their sensibilities.
>of course people don't like it, being treated like cattle
Independent of what civilization or era you look at, there’s always a chattel class that makes up the majority of population.
The more general point I am trying to hint at is as follows: throughout history, the arts, beautiful “man-made” things were commissioned by the rich for the rich. The rich have/had some level of taste apparently, because once things started to be designed for the “masses”, every “thing” degenerated into some low quality junk, because they are made for the sensibilities of the tasteless.
I guess to be even more general and to explain why I’m mildly salty talking about this (and if my assumptions are wrong, I apologize), I claim that the vast majority of people that complain about the quality of “things” are 100% ignorant of how things work on a technical level. From the basic principles of thermodynamics to the basic design process, people know literally nothing. They want safer cars, but hate paying more for gas because the cars are heavier. They want more fuel efficient cars, but hate the technologies needed to reach fuel efficiency. They say they want stripped down simple cars, yet they spend an average of $50,000 on a new vehicle. Guess what, companies make things they think people will buy, and the consumer voted with their money and unanimously said they prefer cheaper, uglier things. Look at the consumer goods that the rich consume and you’ll see more beauty in the design of things. If you want beauty in your everyday buildings and things, you have to pay for it. If you lament this then you are lamenting capitalism commodifying beauty.