At 10:54 AM 10/02/2000, you wrote:
>Hi Wes,
>
>If you'd like to do an article on this topic for
>Origins & Design, jump right in. (Contact me
>off-list about length, et cetera.)
>
>I've got to cut out of this discussion because of
>upcoming lecture commitments. A few comments,
>however.
>
>When I spoke at the University of Colorado a couple
>of weeks ago, a bright undergraduate came up after
>the talk and said, "Dr. Nelson, you've just GOT to
>go on the net and play Conway's 'Game of Life' --
>that will answer all the questions you have about
>natural selection!" I listened as this young man
>described the remarkable, organismal-appearing
>patterns that arise from what he called "a few
>simple rules."
>
>Interesting, I replied. But then there's Conway.
>Right?
>
>The undergraduate was silent for a moment, and looked
>down at his feet. So I went on:
>
>All evolutionary algorithms that we know have at least
>one author, or intelligent designer. In the case of
>the Game of Life, for instance, that would be Conway.
>In many (all?) cases, the authors work hard writing
>code, and debugging that code, to ensure that their
>programs run and actually produce results.
Chris
This is only relevant if the algorithms themselves are intelligent. They
are usually merely a means of implementing a simulation of *unintelligent*
processes in a computer. *Everything* in a computer has to be done
algorithmically, because the computer is not designed to act like organic
molecules (etc.) in Nature.
The objection is thus just a red herring. Is a pile of rocks thrown
together by Einstein an *intelligent* pile of rocks just because it was
made by Einstein? I don't think so, and I don't think *you* think so,
either. What about the intelligence of the algorithm itself, and whether it
adequately models processes that can occur in Nature? The fact is that the
basic evolutionary algorithm is utterly blind. It makes no plans, it has no
goals, it has no purposes, it has no foresight, it has no knowledge of what
will work and what won't (it does not even distinguish the two), it is not
conscious, and so on. It is not even as intelligent as the average computer
tic-tac-toe game. If you think something dumber than a tic-tac-toe program
is capable of *intelligently* coming up with the things that evolutionary
algorithms come up with, then you effectively give up your whole case,
because a falling rock has about the same degree of "intelligence." You
would thus be admitting that Nature can do the whole job with no more
intelligence than such a totally blind process as the core evolutionary
algorithm, which is what *we've* been claiming all along!
(Incidentally, evasions such as this pretense that the intelligence of the
maker of the algorithm must necessarily be transmitted into the activities
of the algorithm in execution are among the reasons why ID theorists have
earned such a bad reputation among actual scientists and other rational
people. If they want to be taken seriously, they need to pay at least
minimal attention to the real meaning of what they are claiming, and
whether it makes any sense -- preferably *before* they make the claims.)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 13:29:18 EDT