Re: Uniformitarianism

Bill Hamilton (hamilton@predator.cs.gmr.com)
Thu, 12 Feb 1998 13:45:51 -0500

At 5:59 AM -0600 2/12/98, Glenn Morton wrote:
>Have you run the programs you can get off my web page? If you would take
>the trouble you would see that mutation in the genome of the screen critters
>can occur with little change in morphology for a while then one mutation
>occurs which alters it dramatically. This is the nature of an interative,
>reproductive system. Punctuated equilibrium is in the mathematics of
>nonlinear dynamics.

I haven't run Glenn's programs -- yet -- but I have studied nonlinear
dynamics for a number of years. More recently I have used genetic
algorithms to solve some design problems that occur in my work. The
reproduction of genomes in a population can be modeled as a nonlinear
dynamical process. Nonlinear dynamical systems tend to occupy well-defined
regions of their phase spaces with voids between them, with each region's
shape and size a function of the initial conditions and other parameters.
The lack of transitions isn't even mildly surprising to a nonlinear
dynamicist. (Glenn: will your Basic code run under Windows NT? I
considered trying to convert it to Visual Basic, but that didn't seem worth
the effort)

Bill Hamilton
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William E. Hamilton, Jr, Ph.D. | Staff Research Engineer
Chassis and Vehicle Systems | General Motors R&D Center | Warren, MI
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