Is evolution an algorithm?

[SoCalDem]

This is a deliciously provocative & interesting Danz Series lecture..and enlightening, as well..

It's not "new", but the professor conducting it, is very interesting and the conclusions are thought-provoking..

http://www.researchchannel.org/asx/uw_danz_algo_250k.asx

other Research Channel programs...by subject

http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/subject.aspx?fID=569

[BlooInBloo]

1. IIRC, Dennett talked about it from that end in DDI a decade or so ago...

Along with others.


EDIT: Wow - over a decade after leaving the field, I can still dial it up. woot!! :rofl:

[SoCalDem]

2. Yep.. They replayed it the other night & I'm re-watching it online

I loved watching those little computer robots rewiring themselves & evolving:)

I am a math-dunce & I love this stuff:) even if I don't understand it:)

[BlooInBloo]

3. Oh - that video IS Dennett!! hahahaha!!

I should really click on links *before* commenting. :rofl:


EDIT: In any case, that stuff is wonderful thought to chew on, whether you're in-the-know or not.

[Guaranteed]

4. Daniel Dennett is always really interesting.

Read a good amount of stuff by him across psychology and philosophy. Thinks outside the box.

[BlooInBloo]

5. Pretty much all of Rorty's students are that way. Grand-students too.

[Guaranteed]

6. LOL, watching the video-

Yes, I DO prefer philosophy over science. :P

[BlooInBloo]

7. (shrug) Relies on the assumption that the difference is a difference in *kind*...

rather than a difference in *degree*, or *emphasis*.

It's likely that anyone coming out of the Kuhn/Rorty tradition would disagree with that assumption, at least when stated thus baldly.

[Guaranteed]

8. Well I just see science as an offshoot of philosophy.

It's the philosophy of the scientific method. And I think it's useful but just not nearly so as its image.

So, yeah, it's a difference in emphasis. Scientists emphasize something that I think is limited.

[BlooInBloo]

9. As far as reality is concerned, it's exactly the other way 'round, of course...

But you're welcome to see it however you like.


EDIT: It *is* funny, though, the suggestion that philosophy is *un*limited. Even philosophers have recognized the silliness of that - and for 100s of years. Kant is, I suppose, the locus classicus of this:

"Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." (somewhere in the B preface to CPR)

[Guaranteed]

10. Well, I think the problem is that scientists create constructs that

are based on realistic concepts but describe the unperceivable.

It's a heckuva mission to start with- but it's inherently flawed. A tautology of its own, much like the theory of natural selection.

[BlooInBloo]

11. Let me guess: You don't have any significant knowledge of what *actual* "science" is like, do you?

[Guaranteed]

12. Well, that's a pretty dismissive response.

Do you disagree that the goal of science is, more or less, to describe the indescribable?

For one certainly hasn't gotten "to the bottom" of things if it's so easy to see.


And while I've never worked directly in the field I have a long history of great success in the academic sciences- biology, physics, chemistry. I'm what people generally think of as a smart person- smart enough to be critical of even the scientific method.

I know its limits- Hume and Kant both pointed them out for me.

[BlooInBloo]

13. There's good reason for people who know something about "science"...

to be dismissive of those who don't, but nevertheless feel qualified to toss peanuts at it.

Despite what your undergrad philosophy (and clearly less in "science") has taught you, actual "science" bears little, if any, resemblance to the caricature you put up in its place.

Indeed, Kant was talking about you in the little quote-let I provided.

Hume wasn't talking about science at all (again, despite what your undergrad classes might have said.)

Thankfully Dennett took puh-lenty of time to actual learn the content of the sciences he comments on.

Really, they should just disallow grad philosophy students whose undergrad degrees are in philosophy. Only allow people who actually know the barest beginnings of something, before letting them get all meta about it. And then make them get masters' degrees in a real field to boot.


EDIT: I'll happily acknowledge my error if you're capable of discussing, say, the benefits of Largrangian formulations of mechanics in an intelligent way. Googling doesn't count, naturally. Or the importance of self-adjoint operators to the modern physicist.

[Guaranteed]

15. Tell you what- just get back to me when you figure it all out.

I'd love to hear it. ;)

Good luck!

[Alias Dictus Tyrant]

14. Everything is an algorithm...

...and so it should be no surprise that evolution is. And by "everything" I really do mean everything. There is nothing under the heavens that does not have a functional expression.

Evolution is a pretty basic discrete systems dynamic, so we would expect to find it everywhere in the universe as a trivial consequence. On the other hand, one could assert that "evolution" is really just a fuzzy portmanteau for consequences of algorithmic information theory and therefore ambiguous in application.

[Xipe Totec]

16. Awesome! Thank you!

I'm forwarding to my son.

I will forward it as well to my PhD advisor, who's specialty is genetic algorithms for distributed processing.

I found it quite intresting and eerily similar to this research topic.