Re: A question on Dawkins

Bill Hamilton (hamilton@predator.cs.gmr.com)
Mon, 5 Jun 1995 13:31:07 -0500

The problem with teleology is not whether or not it's present, but how one
would establish rigorously that it is present.
>
>If the players are environmental factors, I still don't get it. How should the
>environment know that a few more clubs are "better"? Unless the player with
>the most clubs "survives" the present hand, how is his position on the next
>deal a "cumulation"? Isn't the LARGE assumption here that the player with a
>few more clubs will get to hold them deal after deal?

It's not an assumption. I introduced it as a ground rule to make what
started out to be a Bridge deal analogy more like what actually occurs in
evolutionary development. Of course what you end up with is not Bridge,
but the problem was with the analogy of repeated Bridge deals in which no
information was preserved from one deal to the next. Evolution is not like
a Bridge game with fair deals each round from a shuffled deck. Instead,
those players who have survival advantages get to pass their "hands"
(a.k.a. their genomes) on to the next generation, which starts with the
previous generation's survival advantages. Furthermore, sexual reproduction
combines genes in various ways, which provides another source of
potentially useful variation.
>
>And THEN, where is the fossil evidence of all these "deals"? We should at
>least be able to find thousands of "hands" that have progressively more
>"clubs," shouldn't we?

Glenn?

>
>I never liked Bridge anyway.
>
Neither did I.

Bill Hamilton | Vehicle Systems Research
GM R&D Center | Warren, MI 48090-9055
810 986 1474 (voice) | 810 986 3003 (FAX)