Comment by lanstin
20 hours ago
Not much in biology is simple. The time scales for this random walk and the ruthless energy budget of organisms makes for pretty crazy re-use of structures and chemicals even at relatively simple things.
The time scales and mechanisms of investor driven development don’t seem to share much with evolutionary processes. And digitally there’s not really a native equivalent to the global and dynamic state that the chemical melee inside and between cells provides.
Not much in biology is simple, but one of the ruthless rules is that an incremental change must be net non-negative in terms of fitness to stick around. In particular, this prevents evolution from keeping around adaptations "for future need", preventing chaining up many individually useless adaptations that become beneficial only when all of them come together. Key term here is "metabolic cost". This reduces the many ways evolution could've cobbled together our minds to a much, much smaller subset of sequences of steps that provided intermediate value along the way.