Comment by topaz0
3 months ago
The most pervasive misunderstanding about evolution is that it leads to "perfection". Sure it is a kind of optimization procedure, but a) it's optimizing on a loss function that is measured on the population scale, not the scale of a particular organ, so don't expect your pet figure of merit to be optimized even in an average sense, and certainly not in an individual; and b) there is not a unique optimum, the optima are not stationary, and local optima generally are not all that sharp, so do not expect the population to be all that close to the optimum either.
I wonder what energy-saving optimisations the human body has which lead to worse outcomes in our energy-rich environment.
I don't just mean fat storage algorithms leading to metabolic syndrome and T2D, but for example whether we could afford to have better immune and musculoskeletal systems, more cancer-fighting cells, better regeneration etc if we were tuned to an energy budget of 3000kcal instead of 2000kcal.