4 Comments

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

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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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If a step relies on finding a permutation, then it might take factorial time instead of exponential time. Events 1 through N happen randomly, and when the exact order 1,2,...N occurs, the step is passed?

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Perhaps a hard step would require the system to develop the ability to consciously pursue completion of the hard step outside of and beyond "random variation at a constant rate". In this hypothetical, random variation would be categorically insufficient to overcome the difficulty of the step. The system would need to develop the ability to consciously orient itself towards achieving the hard step, the time dependence of achieving which could very well be nonlinear.

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