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RobinHanson's avatar

No, that's just a very hard try-try step. The chance stays the same until you succeed.

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G Gordon Worley III's avatar

I'm not sure this kind of step really exists, because there's not exactly a "menu" of things from which evolution chooses. Instead it looks more like conditions within which variation arises, but these conditions don't include things like a choice between, say, different types of stomachs, but instead conditions on what changes to the stomach are possible. This might from the outside end up looking like choosing from a menu of options: for example the same 2 or 3 digestive adaptations to herbivory has evolved in separate genelines, but only because the existing digestive system made those options the ones it could move to. So I find the idea of a menu step strange because menu selection not the mechanism of action at play.

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