Technology

Millions of years of evolution training our instincts encoded in dna

Kinda OT regarding simulating something if you have the DNA, but evolution itself learned how to learn, it's not just random chance: If you take the natural error rate during DNA transcription it's quite high, error correction processes then take it down to practically nothing, and after that randomness is again introduced, in a controlled manner, to still allow mutations -- our genome could in principle spit out clones with no mutations whatsoever but it doesn't because being adaptive is beneficial for the species. That is, evolution is not a random walk through the possibilities, "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks", but an algorithm deliberately employing randomness to introduce variety when it has reason to believe that it's beneficial.

And ironically evolutionary scientists don't like to hear that, physiologists have a hard time getting through to them. "We don't care whether that mechanism is theoretically unnecessary to explain that stuff evolves and adapts, it's what's happening in the actual body, here, have a microscope". And while the genome using deliberate strategies to create mutations may indeed be strictly speaking unnecessary, from a computational POV it's way more efficient: Makes no sense to fuck with mitochondrial DNA if your bird has trouble drinking nectar, better mess around with the beak.