Larry > Recent Status Updates

Homology > analogy

Imagine Braintenberg vehicles, unable to compute XOR. One is an AND gate that lifts the wheels of a thing off the ground, the other an OR gate that gets them moving. When nothings ON nothing happens. When the OR gate opens the thing moves. But when both gates open the wheels move but they also get lifted off the ground so the thing doesn’t move. So the whole thing computes XOR!

Pretty awesome so far

Greater visual sensitivity requires bigger receptors, which means less receptor density, which means less acuity: hence a trade off between acuity and sensitivity

Although Ed Hagen has a nice thread (2022) on why recent evolution is no threat to EP https://x.com/ed_hagen/status/1537566... (because recent evolution builds on necessarily prior complex and therefore universal adaptations—> Griffith’s point here re-applies, I think)

Against the monomorphic mind: within-population genetic differences, possible recent genetic evolution (Cochran et al’s 10,000 years explosion).

The consequence is that phenotypic variation must arise from the flipping on or off of “disjunctive” developmental programs, which requires evolution to have anticipated the relevant environmental variation. But no: Malaysian barn owls hunt individually in the UK and together in Malaysia, and “there is no reason to suppose that this is the expression of a disjunctive program selected in ancestral birds…”

Problems with EP: the monomorphic mind rests on the assumption that the transmission of complex traits like psychological modules requires a unique genetic architecture—because many genes are involved—, but this would make the transmission of ANY complex trait miraculous.