Re: Direction in evolution, from Re: Are there things that don't evolve?

Indeed, I cannot stress this enough, constraints in evolution can give
evolution 'direction'. Ruse has been pointing this out in his books and
this is important to remember. Additionally, selection itself can select
for mechanisms of variation which may be 'non-random'. The concept of
evolvability means that evolution itself can evolve. If particular
mutations/variations are more likely to be succesful, evolution can
become 'biased'.

Understanding this helps resolve many of the objections to evolution
such as why evolution has been so succesful. Evolvability is an exciting
concept which has picked up much momentum in the last decade.

Pim

David Campbell wrote:

>
> Also, the organization within organisms is determined by "Whatever
> works in the environment.", aka natural selection. This is a strongly
> non-random factor affecting evolution, but the environment may be
> largely determined by random factors and ordinary actions of natural
> law. For example, imagine a computer program that randomly generated
> mazes and another that used random processes to solve the mazes. The
> results of the second program are tightly constrained by the first,
> but the overall system relies on mathematical randomness.
> Something else that can make randomness look non-random is the
> interaction of random variation with a constraint.
Received on Tue Apr 4 11:52:56 2006