and you are missing my point that trying to help people understand a process that has no design element as if it was one that did actually does them (and the process) a disservice, possibly a great disservice.
I've told people off for using the pathetic fallacy too, in the past, I guess I just said "what do mushrooms want" for the sake of rhetoric. Well, because it would be funny. Fine then, I was trolling.
Thanks to your discussion though, I'm now wondering how to square the idea that evolution produces knowledge with the idea that it doesn't optimize even for reproductive fitness. I think you're technically incorrect there: it's that it doesn't optimize exclusively in the short term or by any one obvious strategy. The bottom line is that what survives survives, though, you can't argue with a tautology. Even if what survives is a sloth or a sleeper shark or a bristlecone or (imagine) a single infertile but incredibly tough organism, it still had to find a way (alright, stumble into a way). Maybe your objection is just that "optimize for" implies intent, but intentless-purism in language for biologists is as hard as pastless-purism in language for time travellers.
> how to square the idea that evolution produces knowledge with the idea that it doesn't optimize even for reproductive fitness
Its really fairly simply: natural selection requires two things: heritable genetics and a source of variation in the genetics between individuals. Mutation is the most basic source of variation, and that produces new information. But new information isn't necessarily knowledge. Assuming a scientific testing gloss, each new genetic code variation X can be considered as a hypothesis, that "variant X is fit", and then natural selection events that act on copies of X (for or against) serve as experiments testing the hypothesis. Through iterative experiments, we weed out the copies of the variants where the hypothesis of them being fit was proved by natural selection to be false, and what remains should be those copies of genetic variants which have (mostly) proven to be true. Learning and understanding which variants are fit (where the hypotheses are true) is knowledge, and in this way evolution produces knowledge while not having any optimization goal (in the intent sense, which I agree is a requirement for something to be meaningfully "optimizing" anything, because you can't aim in a direction without a sense for that direction).
> Assuming a scientific testing gloss, each new genetic code variation X can be considered as a hypothesis, that "variant X is fit", and then natural selection events that act on copies of X (for or against) serve as experiments testing the hypothesis
this is the problem i have with natural selection... it has no predictive power. You can never use natural selection theory to say if an organism is "fit" before it exhibits its fitness. what good is this?
This may be more a problem with how "fit" is defined and used than with natural selection theory itself. Fitness can be hard to define beyond the trivial "these organisms which survived the selection event must be the fit ones," and natural systems are usually so noisy with inputs that its hard to figure out what was actually important in retrospect, or likely to evolve in the future.
Only in situations with a powerful selection pressure (like an asteroid strike causing a nuclear winter, or antibiotic applied to a petri dish) can one have a hope of reliably predicting which variants will be selected for or against.
However, these situations are not irrelevant, especially if we can predict the likelihood of those situations developing. Real predictions of the theory of natural selection can be applied to managing antibiotic resistance in populations of bacteria. For example, we know that antibiotic resistance mechanisms that bacteria evolve will often have an energy metabolism cost to their maintenance. This means that, absent pressure to be resistant to antibiotics, we'd expect a population to gradually lose individuals with the genes for the resistance mechanism, because they would be incurring a metabolic penalty for possessing those genes. So natural selection theory accurately predicts that if you remove the selection pressure of the antibiotic, the bacteria will evolve to lose the resistance mechanism, and become susceptible to the antibiotic again over several generations of natural selection. Using this knowledge, some rural regions will discontinue use of a given class of antibiotics in agriculture to allow for resistant strains to decline, and then resume their use when they are again effective. By intelligently rotating use of antibiotics in this way, we can enjoy their benefits without incurring too much inefficiencies and worse tragedies from antibiotic resistance.
