Why birds do not fall while sleeping

When I was younger, I was fascinated by evolution, especially the intricacies of how things just work. This fascination also explains why many people believe in the intelligent design theory.

However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.

The fascination with “intelligent design” is cherry-picking. The is no shortage of “unintelligent design” in the natural world.

Take humans, for example. You can block your trachea and die through the simple act of eating. An intelligent (and omniscient) designer could have avoided that by better designing our overall our overall structure.

Or take the fact or ear bones are modified jaw bones. Or if you believe in intelligent design, ask why our intelligent designer thought it wise to link our jaw to our ears so that it’s hard to hear things when you’re chewing.

When you notice these flaws you are seeing it in very very short term. What we are today is what eventually worked for a million years. The design you see today is the way it is because it had to be robust enough (including those problems) to survive to this day.

The examples you quote do look like a problem today, but I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.

They must work just well enough. Nature doesn’t strive for an ideal, cause it has no ideas. It’s a semi-working minimum based on another semi-working minimum. A duplicated bone is just infinitely more likely than a completely new organ. And you don’t have to be free from cancer or arthritis or heart diseases if your population leaves just enough offspring in time.

Iow, it’s not only robust enough, but just robust enough and never pretended to be ideal or durable, except for few accidental cases like sharks, crocs and turtles. Who surely can suffer from long-term non-killing issues but cannot whine to their GP about it.

The examples you quote do look like a problem today, but I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.

Nah, it’s a vast space. There may be natural trade-offs, but there’s no force to solve an issue in the best way possible. It solves randomly and if that creates a non-fatal problem - bad luck, now we just have it. You’ll always have a set of non-fatal problems just under fatality, and also a set of fatal problems just under a reproduction disabling line.

So evolution is a big pile of hacks ? :)