Description du poste
Dear reader, this post will be completed in some hours; I'm posting it now because I'm participating in justwrite.club and I don't want to forfeit $1k. I'll remove this note when it's done. That said, the sections that are below are real; what I'm still doing is adding the "coming soon" sections.
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Or: The payload lens on Darwin
Tl;dr: What is the most natural teleological shorthand to use, when thinking about evolution?
The “gene-centered view” of e.g. Dawkins says: genes are “trying” to increase the number of exact copies of themselves. And organisms are “vehicles” genes use to survive.
The “payload lens” (which I’ll be pitching) says: adaptive payloads (such as eyesight or fair meiosis) are “trying” to become deeper, stabler attractor basins that can team up with other adaptive payloads. And genes are “vehicles” these payloads use to survive.
Epistemic status: I haven’t done much of a lit search, so I’m claiming neither that any of this is original nor that it is vetted/established; I’m laying it out partly because I want to be able to build on it in some later essays about what we humans are (and what some possible AIs might be) other than optimizers. (However, I don’t mostly get to that here; and I hope this stuff may also be interesting in its own right.)
Angles on DarwinDarwinian evolution (as operationalized by Lewontin in his 1970 paper The Units of Selection, which helped organize the field) is the theory that intricate adaptations (such as those in Earth’s living organisms) tend to arise when a process satisfies three principles:
• Variation (organisms vary)• Differential reproduction (different variations have different reproductive odds)• Heredity (new organisms resemble their parents more than they resemble random population members, including in reproductive success).Lewontin stresses that these principles can apply at any of several levels, e.g. genes, cells, gametes, organisms, or populations.
My business in this essay will be to contrast two s