linguistics__

Considering our eyes are wired inside-out (the nerve cables are on the same side light comes in, so they have to go through a hole in our eye, the blind-spot), I'd say that natural selection gets stuck in local optimums all the time. Cephalopods like octopuses have very similar eyes to us, but they evolved completely separately and their nerves are wired in "the right way".

So in our case the starting conditions just lined up the way it did and no single step (or series of steps) easily flipped our wiring, so we just rolled with it (and we get by quite well).

Forth + APL: Uiua

> Yeah I think Unity just doesn't have the technical skillset anymore

It's not a technical skillset issue, it's a case of lacking resources, leadership changing priorities and changing requirements mid-development, causing a lot of work to be redone.

We still have highly skilled developers working in this area, if we can just actually be allowed to do (and keep) we work we have.

Where you see the 'Q', it's a text-field, you can just enter a different letter and it'll switch.

I mean I'll be calling (pronouncing) it Tablespoon, that's a great name:)

To answer that there are two main factors: 1) For this kind of single instance gene transfer to have an evolutionary effect, it will need to happens to germ-line cell (so an egg or sperm cell in a multi-cellular organism, or in a single-celled organism). Otherwise the mutation won't be inheritable and it won't be evolution, just mutation.

2) The organism(s) affected by this gene transfer would need to be under some evolutionary pressure that would benefit from extra genetic variance. Genetic variance in itself is not a driver of evolution, evolutionary pressure is, which does need the variance to actually do anything. Pressure is the sculptor and variance is the clay, without one of those there won't be a statue.

Also, normally most random mutations are either negative or neutral (there's a lot more ways an organism can be dead than alive), so I would suspect this might also be true of gene transfers. Though gene transfers from environmental DNA isn't as random as direct genetic mutation, so perhaps there's something interesting happening there. But I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the risk of cancer or viral infections would be higher.

Or if you're working with a list of lists, the wonderful: ↓⍉↑ will do

The life/dinner principle doesn't work in absolutes, it just states that you would expect asymmetric evolutionary pressures from asymmetric stakes in interactions.

It's also worth taking the "Life/dinner principle"[0] into account. If the termites fail to detect the beetle, then they might loose a tiny bit of food or whatever. While if the beetle fails to deceive the termites it might get killed or starve. Hence the adaptive pressure is probably higher for the beetle than for the termites.

0: The name comes from the example: the rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for its life, while the fox is running for its dinner.

That's 1 million kroner per day, just fyi

Well, the question is in reality either unanswerable (we don't know - and may never know - how many and when the first proto-language(s) emerged) or meaningless (all live natural languages go back as far as we can reconstruct or attest to).

Just as a little correction: Dutch is not an "evolved German dialect". German and Dutch are both West Germanic languages, but so is Scots, Frisian and English. So it would be like saying that German is an evolved English dialect then (though to be fair, Dutch and German are grouped closer to each-other in that family tree usually and have provided a lot of substrate for each-other due to close contact).

Swiss German is not regarded as a its own language by any nation, though from a purely linguistic perspective it could very well be classified as its own language. What is deemed a language vs. a dialect usually comes down to politics. The saying usually goes something like: "A language is just a dialect with an army".