> (to paraphrase Dennett). > > Not really. Is _Natural selection_ more powerful than _Artificial > selection_? No. Is _Artificial selection_ more powerful than _Sexual > Selection_? No. > > Is a random search better than a directed search? Occasionally you might > get lucky, but for the rest of 99.999999999999999999999999999999999% of > the time, No.
Bob ZActually the answers to all of these questions may in fact be yes. I cannot do this arguement justice and I would suggest Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" and Kaufman's "At Home in the Universe" as places to start to understand this better. Let me give it a try. Natural Selection probes what Dennett Calls "Idea Space". It does so in a random manner but quickly latches on to good ideas. It is the only reasonable strategy for finding the truly novel revolutionary ideas that dominate the history of biological adaptation. And when a novel revolutionary idea is found it can simply overwhelm all that is present or it may take off in a completely new direction, create its own environment rather than simply filling a niche in an existent environment. Human inovation is like that. The truly revolutionary things are typically not seen as such at their outset and the inovators of these revolutions are often simply trying to solve a finite practical problem. Think of the history o! ! f the internet. Were the innovators o ut to change the world? Did they think they would do so? Kaufman talks about self-organizing systems and that find solutions automatically. With complex problems it is often impossible to have a working model of how to procede. Self organizing systems do not need such a model. Natural Selection cuts the Gordian knot of complex situations with unpredictable outcomes. There is no plan, but the methods used insure that efficient solutions are found since they will be better than less efficient systems. > > We aren't talking about a stupid machine, we are talking about an > Artificial _Intelligence_. Not only that, it is given all of the > knowledge of mankind up to that point, all of the Axioms, and their > proofs, and the capability to do research (a 'directed search' if you > will). > But in the face of deterministic chaos, such knowledge has never been sufficient to acurately predict the behavior of a complex system. It is possible to make general statistical predictions (event a will occur 80% of the time with plan b) but this would not be good enough in my estimation. Very quickly the system would fail to make accurate predictions and then it would fail. No matter how much knowledge you have of a system and no matter how good your model for its function you will sooner or later enter a chaotic zone where the results are unpredictable. > > >
