From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Re: SWAA Lecture
Organization: LLNL
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 23:01:25 GMT

In article <1785@tdat.teradata.COM> swf@tools3teradata.com (Stan Friesen) writes:
>In article <1jelm6$ejh@agate.berkeley.edu>, philjohn@garnet.berkeley.edu (Phillip Johnson) writes:
:      Grasse argued that the Darwinists who dominate evolutionary
: biology have failed, due to their uncompromising commitment to
: materialism, to define properly the problem they were trying to
: solve.  The real problem of evolution is to account for the
: origin of new genetic information, and it is not solved by
: providing illustrations of the acknowledged capacity of an
: existing genotype to vary within limits.
>
>True, and if that were indeed all that had been demonstrated, Darwinian evolution
>would be in dire straits.  Fortunately the creative power of *selection* can
>be easily demonstrated in many ways.

	Good examples are various computer programs, such as
simulated-annealing optimization programs and artificial-life programs
like Tierra. The latter program has generated several examples of
evolution by natural selection that include some very nontrivial
results, results the original programmers often did not expect.

:  To be sure, none of
: these examples demonstrated the kind of innovation that Grasse
: had in mind.
>
>That has changed in the last 20 years or so.  New *types* of research have
>provided such examples.  (Check into some of the 'artificial life' simulations,
>for instance, which often generate solution unanticipated by the researchers).

	Exactly my point. I wonder what Grasse' (accent on e) has had
to say about artificial-life programs. What is especially interesting
about thse is that some of them, like Tierra, produce results
analogous to those known in the biological world, like parasitism (one
string of code using another to help itself reproduce) and unexpected
optimizations (the shorter, the easier to reproduce; one example
produced an unrolled loop of 4 operations that was faster than
counting off the loop).

:  They also permit Darwinist writers to
: take the mutation/selection mechanism for granted even when they
: are describing evidence which directly contradicts it.  This feat
: of intellectual contortionism is strikingly illustrated by
: Stephen Jay Gould's book, Wonderful Life.  Gould's bestseller
: adds a great deal to our knowledge of the "Cambrian explosion,"
: meaning the sudden appearance of the invertebrate animal phyla,
: without visible ancestors, in the 600 million-year-old rocks of
: the Cambrian era.  Unicellular life had existed for a long time,
: and some multicellular groups appear in the immediately
: Precambrian rocks, but there is nothing that can be established
: as ancestral to the Cambrian animals. ...
:      In recent years the mystery has deepened, because it appears
: (at least according to Gould) that the Cambrian animal groups
: were far more varied than had been imagined.  The more distinct
: groups there were in the Cambrian, the more chains of ancestors
: there ought to have been in the Precambrian.  Some remarkable
: Cambrian fossils found in a Canadian formation known as the
: Burgess Shale were originally classified in familiar groups.
>
>Unfortunately for your argument Gould is only half-right here.  Many of his
>examples have even been refuted.  Hallucigenia is now known to have been
>an only slightly unusual Onychophoran, for instance, and even Wiwaxia is now
>placed securely in a modern phylum.

	I know about the Hallucigenia identification (it had to be
flipped over), but where does Wiwaxia go? I've also heard of one for
Opabinia, also, and even Anomalocaris, though I don't recall them
offhand.

>I, myself, in studying later mass extinctions have found a profound pattern,
>in which large, K-selected species die off, and smaller, opportunistic, r-
>selected species survive.  This suggests that the key factor in surviving
>a mass extinction is the ability to rapidly respond to new opporunities
>starting from a minute population.  (BTW, this tends to support catastrophic
>models of mass extinction - since that is the most likely way to reduce alll
>populations to small sizes).

	I guess it should be emphasized that "survival of the fittest"
is a misleading statement, because what may be "fit" in one situation
may be "unfit" in another one. What may be good in "normal" times may
not be good in "abnormal" ones.
-- 
/Loren Petrich, the Master Blaster
/lip@s1.gov