On 10/4/2012 7:31 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
On Thu, Oct 04, 2012 at 07:02:59PM -0700, meekerdb wrote:
On 10/4/2012 6:52 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
Both are examples of evolutionary design than revolutionary design, as
it were. Another example is the design of x86_64 processors by
Intel. It is debatable whether anything _really_ complex could be
designed by means other than evolution.
Sure they evolved. But they weren't designed by *random* variation.
Engineers could see what improvements they needed and they did
sometimes backtrack and stop supporting old features in order to
make new ones work better. I think there's a crucial difference
between "a design evolved" and "it was designed by (Darwinian)
evolution."
If it is crucially different, then that difference ought to be
measurable. Got any ideas?
Sure, the ratio of the number of new designs built that didn't work compared to those that
did. It's a difference of process. It doesn't have to show up in the successful designs.
Brent
One possibility might be modularity,
although modularity can be favoured in Darwinian evolution too, so as
to increase evolvability.
See eg Pepper (2000), "The evolution of modularity in genome architecture",
http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~comqcln/al7ev/pepper.ps
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