Comment by Retric
2 days ago
It’s not the sperms fault it ends the night on a body instead of someplace useful. Random luck is therefore a filer dropping from millions to thousands without telling you anything about the sperm.
It’s useless for all that multicellular goodness that separates humans from fish. But making viable single cells is a prerequisite for everything that comes after. DNA that can’t make cell walls etc can’t make a person as such there’s a host of genetic anomalies that don’t result in a fetus let alone a live birth.
Wait, but random luck is precisely the thing that breaks this whole "fittest" model since there isn't a selection for fitness! (that was my other major issue I didn't mention with this whole approach)
Add luck doesn't explain millions either, it would sound the same if thousands dropped to hundreds
Random bad luck is always part of any survival of the fittest situation. A meteor killing few thousand trees isn’t something a given tree at the center of the impact crater can do much about.
Also, it’s “fittest” as category not most fit as a ranking. Perhaps a better conceptual model is people who finish a marathon are a fitter group than those who start a marathon even if someone who failed was potentially in better shape than the winner. Many species have thousands of offspring because the odds any one of them reproduces is very low, a valid strategy not some sign of incompetence.
> Add luck doesn't explain millions either, it would sound the same if thousands dropped to hundreds
The actual cause is the full evolutionary history going back to the first life form and the environment each generation lived in, but we can still examine individual elements of what’s going on.
“Luck” is a multiplier on the number of sperm needed. The ability of an individual sperm to optimize its odds of success is a sign of cellular function. There’s zero contradiction between those statements. ~1:10,000 * ~1:100
So the fittest tree dying due to a meteor is *not* survival of the fittest. It's survival of the luckiest. This has nothing about being "fit"/better adapted to the environment.
> Many species have thousands of offspring because the odds any one of them reproduces is very low, a valid strategy not some sign of incompetence.
But having millions instead of thousands that would decrease the chances of survival (for example, by the offspring exhausting food resources and starving) would be a sign of incompetence.
Anyway, this is a different, simpler, argument, it explains "many with low chances", but doesn't explain 50 millions wether thousands would work just fine.
> There’s zero contradiction between those statements
My issue is there is zero connection. You can't justify millions this way.
> The actual cause is the full evolutionary history
That's not a cause, but a description of what happened. There's a lot of irrelevant info in that history. Also a lots of random things with no benefit
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