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Protein Reinforcement and DNA Consequentialism — LessWrong

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It takes hundreds of generations for a simple beneficial mutation to promote itself to universality in a gene pool. Thousands of generations, or even millions, to create complex interdependent machinery. That's some slow learning there. Let's say you're building a squirrel, and you want the squirrel to know locations for finding nuts. Individual nut trees don't last for the thousands of years required for natural selection. You're going to have to learn using proteins. You're going to have to build a brain. Protein computers and sensors can learn by looking, much faster than DNA can learn by mutation and selection. And yet (until very recently) the protein learning machines only learned in narrow, specific domains. Squirrel brains learn to find nut trees, but not to build gliders - as flying squirrel DNA is slowly learning to do. The protein computers learned faster than DNA, but much less generally. How the heck does a double-stranded molecule that fits inside a cell nucleus,

x Protein Reinforcement and DNA Consequentialism — LessWrong Biology Evolution Evolutionary Psychology Personal Blog 65 Protein Reinforcement and DNA Consequentialism by Eliezer Yudkowsky 13th Nov 2007 4 min read 20 65 Followup to : Evolutionary Psychology It takes hundreds of generations for a simple beneficial mutation to promote itself to universality in a gene pool. Thousands of generations, or even millions, to create complex interdependent machinery. That's some slow learning there. Let's say you're building a squirrel, and you want the squirrel to know locations for finding nuts. Indivi

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