- Cells work like this because DNA is under constant attack from mutations.
- Mutations most commonly arise during cell replication.
It's fascinating to realize that the "messiness" of DNA isn't a bug, but a feature—a side effect of evolution's raw material supply chain.
Mutations, repeats, transposons, and imperfect repairs all contribute to a noisy genomic landscape. But it's exactly this noise that enables biological diversity. No mutations, no variation. No variation, no selection. No selection, no evolution.
The genome is not a blueprint—it's a living, adapting scratchpad. Messiness is the canvas on which nature paints diversity.
Let me add to that. It requires a universe with specific laws that remain stable and encourage optimization. Then, a planet hospitible to life. Then, specific creatures with biological machinery more complex than anything humans have created. The machinery has plenty of reliability and adaptation baked in.
Godless evolution suggests randomness produced all of it overtime. Yet, that's never worked in anything we've built. Even our GA's required laws, an environment, a computer, software, and fine-tuning. Pre-existing or by intelligent design (human inventors). Without these, it produced no results.
So, I'll correct you by saying empirical data suggests evolution didnt produce this. We're seeing God's design skills in adaptive, resilient, complex, self-replicating systems. His work is truly beautiful to behold. Humans still can't produce something similar from scratch. Actually, they can't even be sure how the existing design works.
> Godless evolution suggests randomness produced all of it overtime.
Nope. Randomness _and_ a selection function. Natural selection, ie: surviving to create the next generation.
> Yet, that's never worked in anything we've built.
It works completely fine in things we've built. We don't have the processing power to simulate something on the scale of computational complexity happening a small tide pond though. But you can see 'evolution by natural selection' in a rule set as simple as Game of Life.
> Even our GA's required laws, an environment, a computer, software, and fine-tuning. Pre-existing or by intelligent design (human inventors). Without these, it produced no results.
The laws/environment/computer are the equivalent of having a universe with physical laws. If you want to claim that god created the universe and tuned the constants of the universe, well, maybe. Or maybe every possible universe exists and we're just not around in the ones that don't lead to conscious life, in the same way that Game of Life universe is too simple/constrained to evolve conscious life on the scales we can simulate.
It takes more than that for the chemical bonds to form, for the encoding to exist, for the bootstrapping environments to form, for the transitions to happen, and so on. Also, if a selection function exists, where did it come from and why does it work? Why does the math work? Why isn't math less useful or changing constantly?
"But you can see 'evolution by natural selection' in a rule set as simple as Game of Life."
That's false. You're repeating the same false premises as in the original claim I refuted. If godless and random could do it, then the questions below would all be No.
Does the game run in an environment made by intelligent designers? Does that environment need to be maintained?
Does it require rules made and maintained by intelligent designers?
Does it take an initial state in those rules to get to the specific outcomes you are looking for?
Does it produce simple, temporary patterns that are useless? Or complex machinery that's actually useful?
Or did all of the above happen randomly, keep happening, and produce increasingly complex and useful things?
"Or maybe every possible universe exists"
Science starts from observations to produce hypotheses. That is a faith-based belief popular in science fiction. It's also sort of a cop out because they're going to imagine something as infinite as God, but not mention God, to hope this would pop out randomly. If one does, they still have the "maintain it with stability over long periods" problem for that or those universes. They'll probably drag it deeper into infinity to say it will finally happen accidentally. Let's do science instead.
What we observe is a universe that is highly chaotic, almost every cubic inch is deadly, and the safest places are dead. We see nothing happening from it with Earth and humans being mind-boggling exceptions. Looking deeper at classical physics, we find reality itself also emerges in an orderly fashion from endless, quantum events that should be too random to support order. It also appears to work perfectly without failure for long periods of time.
We've also observed countless phenomenon that are truly random and chaotic, like July 4th fireworks, which never produce life or complex machines. Never self-replicating artifacts whose complexity increases over time. Never emergent intelligence from anything that didn't show evidence of design or have human input. We have billions of observations of chaotic events which themselves sometimes have a high magnitude of particles, chemicals, etc. Also, nothing lasts on its own due to physics with our intelligent designs requiring maintenance over time.
Our first hypothesis is that our reality should be total chaos. Our second hypothesis is something with unimaginable power is forcing a specific order to consistently come out of chaos. Second hypothesis is that the universe doesn't support life without being forced to. Third hypothesis is an intelligent being went uphill against the deadly universe to create us and our planet. Fourth hypothesis is that being is sustaining us despite a whole universe of threats to our lives. Fifth is that the creator is perfect. God is the Occam's Razor explanation of all of this.
There's also revelatory knowledge. God revealed Himself to us via His Word which came with prophecies, miracles, and testable predictions about lifestyles. Jesus, who died for humanity's sins, had a perfect life on top of the same, other attributes. Neither nobody nor nothing else had these traits to support their claimed revelations. So, outside empirical knowledge, revelatory knowledge reinforces the God theory into a highly-proven, saving belief. The life transformations that follow add anecdotal evidence to it.
Really? Creationists on HN? There are mountains of peer reviewed research articles you can read to see that evolution is real and evidence based. To claim otherwise is idiocy.
Most top scientists were deists or Christians at one point. Newton's Principia Mathematica was even written to glorify God. Clearly, neither atheists nor evolutionists found the number of people making that claim to be good enough to ignore another claim.
Scientists tell us all ideas, whether a proposal or dissent, are evaluated strictly on evidential merit. Yet, evolution as origin of life had little evidence, many flaws, was forced on people anyway, and dissenting papers aren't allowed.
If it is dogmatic, and dissent isnt allowed, it is not science at all. Just a godless religion or political domination done with scientific wording in their papers. A consensus by people who force everyone to think one way isnt a scientific consensus. A theory whose rebuttals aren't even allowed in scientific journals isnt a scientific theory.
Until alternatives are allowed, and a real debate happens, I reject macro-evolution as either the truth or even a scientific consensus. I'll throw in some example counters, most being strong, which I wasn't taught in high school or college.
I want to clarify first: I'm not trying to defend "evolutionary theory" itself —
what I'm pointing out is:
> Mutation, chaos, and randomness may actually be the fertile ground where biological diversity emerges.
At the same time, I fully agree with your key point:
> "The adaptive, complex, self-replicating systems we see
> don’t persist just because of pure randomness."
In my view, this doesn’t necessarily mean a “God” designed it in a human-like way.
But it does point to a deeper structural order and cosmic regularity.
Maybe we can call it a kind of “design of laws,” rather than a personal designer.
After all, nature seems to operate within a set of elegant, consistent rules:
- F = ma (Newton's 2nd Law): A foundational rule in classical mechanics.
- E = mc² (Einstein): Energy and mass are interchangeable.
- V = IR (Ohm’s Law): Governs how voltage, current, and resistance relate.
- a² + b² = c² (Pythagorean Theorem): Geometry’s timeless backbone.
- Entropy always increases (2nd Law of Thermodynamics): Order tends toward disorder unless something resists it.
So maybe we can say:
- In religious terms, this is “God’s design.”
- In philosophical terms, it’s the “underlying order of the universe.”
- In scientific terms, it’s the “laws of nature, structural stability, and the boundary conditions of evolution.”
Why are those rules there? Why don't they break? Why are they small, elegant, and beautiful? Why are many connected to each other in harmony?
This doesn't fit what random, survival-oriented processes produce. It doesn't fit what random, chaotic systems produce. It looks more like an intelligent being designed and maintained the universe. That should amaze you.
They also hardwired us with a specific morality. Children are born looking for God, wanting to be loved, and with a sense of justice (fairness). That the creation has these morals implies the creator either has them or knows of them. If people have done evil, they should be quite afraid of what that implies.
Divine revelation came later with miracles as proof. God's Word told us we have to seek God, love others, do good, and do justice. That fits with our natural design. That specific God fits the profile of one who would design that elegant universe with only human life in it. That should reinforce the need to repent and follow Christ, or burn alive. In His Word, he also said He created us very personally before He began driving those laws you're talking about.
Right now, most LLMs with web search grounding are still in Stage 1: they can retrieve content, but their ability to assess quality, trustworthiness, and semantic ranking is still very limited.
The LLMs can access the web, but they can't yet understand it in a structured, evaluative way.
What’s missing is a layer of engineered relevance modeling, capable of filtering not just based on keywords or citations, but on deeper truth alignment and human utility.
And yes, as you mentioned, we may even see the rise of LLM-targeted SEO—content optimized not for human readers, but to game LLM attention and summarization heuristics. That's a whole new arms race.
The next leap won’t be about just accessing more data, but about curating and interpreting it meaningfully.
>Right now, most LLMs with web search grounding are still in Stage 1: they can retrieve content, but their ability to assess quality, trustworthiness, and semantic ranking is still very limited.
Why do you think it is limited? Imagine you show a link with details to an LLM and ask it if it is trustworthy or high quality w.r.t the query, why can't it answer it?
Don't think the limit is in what LLMs can evaluate - given the right context, they’re good at assessing quality. The problem is what actually gets retrieved and surfaced in the first place. If the upstream search doesn’t rank high-quality or relevant material well, LLM never sees it. It's not a judgment problem, more of a selection problem.
Not sure I understand -- LLM's are pretty good at assessing quality of search results. If an LLM can bulk assess a bunch of results it can get a pretty far, probably more efficient than a human hand checking all the results.
A lot of discussions treat system prompts as config files, but I think that metaphor underestimates how fundamental they are to the behavior of LLMs.
In my view, large language models (LLMs) are essentially probabilistic reasoning engines.
They don’t operate with fixed behavior flows or explicit logic trees—instead, they sample from a vast space of possibilities.
This is much like the concept of superposition in quantum mechanics: before any observation (input), a particle exists in a coexistence of multiple potential states.
Similarly, an LLM—prior to input—exists in a state of overlapping semantic potentials.
And the system prompt functions like the collapse condition in quantum measurement:
It determines the direction in which the model’s probability space collapses.
It defines the boundaries, style, tone, and context of the model’s behavior.
It’s not a config file in the classical sense—it’s the field that shapes the output universe.
So, we might say: a system prompt isn’t configuration—it’s a semantic quantum field.
It sets the field conditions for each “quantum observation,” into which a specific human question is dropped, allowing the LLM to perform a single-step collapse.
This, in essence, is what the attention mechanism truly governs.
Each LLM inference is like a collapse from semantic superposition into a specific “token-level particle” reality.
Rather than being a config file, the system prompt acts as a once-for-all semantic field—
a temporary but fully constructed condition space in which the LLM collapses into output.
However, I don’t believe that “more prompt = better behavior.”
Excessively long or structurally messy prompts may instead distort the collapse direction, introduce instability, or cause context drift.
Because LLMs are stateless, every inference is a new collapse from scratch.
Therefore, a system prompt must be:
Carefully structured as a coherent semantic field.
Dense with relevant, non-redundant priors.
Able to fully frame the task in one shot.
It’s not about writing more—it’s about designing better.
If prompts are doing all the work, does that mean the model itself is just a general-purpose field, and all “intelligence” is in the setup?
That's an excellent analogy. Also, if the fundamental nature of LLMs and their training data is unstructured, why do we try to impose structure? It seems humans prefer to operate with that kind of system, not in an authoritarian way, but because our brains function better with it. This makes me wonder if our need for 'if-else' logic to define intelligence is why we haven't yet achieved a true breakthrough in understanding Artificial General Intelligence, and perhaps never will due to our own limitations.
That’s a powerful point. In my view, we shouldn’t try to constrain intelligence with more logic—we should communicate with it using richer natural language, even philosophical language.
LLMs don’t live in the realm of logic—they emerge from the space of language itself.
Maybe the next step is not teaching them more rules, but listening to how they already speak through us
exactly on point, It seems paradoxical to strive for a form of intelligence that surpasses our own while simultaneously trying to mold it in our image, our own understanding and our rules,
It's fascinating to realize that the "messiness" of DNA isn't a bug, but a feature—a side effect of evolution's raw material supply chain.
Mutations, repeats, transposons, and imperfect repairs all contribute to a noisy genomic landscape. But it's exactly this noise that enables biological diversity. No mutations, no variation. No variation, no selection. No selection, no evolution.
The genome is not a blueprint—it's a living, adapting scratchpad. Messiness is the canvas on which nature paints diversity.