Evolution has lead to optimization and efficiency many times. It rarely trends to maximization or the largest possible efficiency, since those conflict with "good enough". Protein structure and function is a common example.
> It rarely trends to maximization or the largest possible efficiency, since those conflict with "good enough".
Sometimes things get trapped in a local minima. Particularly when a seemingly inconsequential detail at a much much earlier stage becomes a dependency of lots of downstream stuff, but then it turns out that this just so happens to conflict with a better option in the here and now.
More commonly, the "perfect" solution is extremely brittle while the (supposedly) "good enough" solution is incredibly robust to all sorts of environmentally inflicted bullshit. In other words, most of the time evolution is practical while the humans criticizing the outcome are ignorant idealists.
Not even good enough: "population reproduced faster then it died".
That's it: and it's separate from good enough because that can include things like "happened to live on the part of the island which didn't get obliterated by a volcanic eruption at the only point in history that volcano ever erupted".
dekhn|10 days ago
fc417fc802|10 days ago
Sometimes things get trapped in a local minima. Particularly when a seemingly inconsequential detail at a much much earlier stage becomes a dependency of lots of downstream stuff, but then it turns out that this just so happens to conflict with a better option in the here and now.
More commonly, the "perfect" solution is extremely brittle while the (supposedly) "good enough" solution is incredibly robust to all sorts of environmentally inflicted bullshit. In other words, most of the time evolution is practical while the humans criticizing the outcome are ignorant idealists.
XorNot|10 days ago
That's it: and it's separate from good enough because that can include things like "happened to live on the part of the island which didn't get obliterated by a volcanic eruption at the only point in history that volcano ever erupted".