October 21 2017, 11:35

Reading Homo Deus about evolution, I’ve developed a hypothesis. What if ancient organisms had the ability to make elementary decisions about variability, and it wasn’t an absolutely random process? Obviously, I’m not talking about logical thinking in the first amphibians, but rather about a massive decision-making matrix regarding variability, inherent to them since birth, with parameters defined by various experiences. Ultimately, if the issue with pulmonary respiration is already resolved and walking on fins across the beach is inconvenient, the next generation “knows” it would be wise to change in this regard, and something slowly begins to evolve, so that hundreds of millions of years later on the same beach, it wonders why humans aren’t birds. If this is so, for millions of years of evolution, such a considerable part of the neural network in the brain must be filled with such rules, and, when needed, this mechanism neatly initiates variability in the right direction, not at random (well, as far as this neural network knows what ‘right’ is)

In the classical theory with random changes, I dislike that the probabilities of these changes are too small. Certainly, there are hundreds of thousands and millions of years for such random experiments, but it only works effectively in enormous populations with rapid reproduction. For example, when the entire world ocean teems with a single species rapidly reproducing, generations change quickly and the more adapted survive better than the less adapted. But what about species presented in significantly smaller numbers, and with a fairly long life. Well, I don’t know, take, for instance, an elephant. Does it mean that the elephant will evolve over the next million years (if we imagine life/elephants will exist that long – unlikely) just because it’s beneficial in a circus to walk on two legs? I think, with elephants, it might not work out.

And 100000 generations ago, we were still monkeys, for example, and about 10000 generations ago, humans were definitely not monkeys anymore.

If experience can be inherited, then what I write in the first paragraph might indeed exist. The only thing left to prove is that this decision matrix can be transmitted horizontally from species to species, and then everything would be quite beautiful.