A comment by Richard Gabriel that I stole from another conversation (the only
FRIAMMER in that conversation is Jenny Quillien who used to attend the mother
church before moving to the Netherlands).
*"I think it adds a dimension to many of the evolution conversations we have
had the past couple of years.**
*
*
*
*I recommend reading either “Why Greatness Cannot be Planned: The Myth of the
Objective” by Lehman and Stanley or its more technical foundational paper
"Abandoning Objectives: Evolution through the Search for Novelty Alone,” by the
same authors. In this book and paper they argue that natural and artificial
evolution are (better thought of as being) based on (or implemented as) novelty
seeking with survival as a (boring) constraint. The main step of evolution,
they say, is to produce diversity / novelty so that the new creation creates a
new niche: the new mutations don’t compete with others for resources, they
exploit different resources. For example, when exaptation created the first
flyers, all of a sudden a whole raft of predators became irrelevant. **
*
*
*
*So evolution is looking for new ways to live instead of better ways to live.
Within an established species, it might be that evolution as optimization
creates incremental improvements.**
*
*
*
*If evolution is based on creating novelty, then after all the simple
(different) ways to live have been tried, the only direction to go is
complexity."*
davew
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