From: tmyoung@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Thomas M. Young)
Subject: Re: The Moat around God's Eye
Organization: Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 92 10:28:49 EDT

In article <1992Jul22.080741.12412@ee.eng.ohio-state.edu> rob@watney.eng.ohio-state.edu (Rob Carriere) writes:
>... Evolution is basically a hill-climbing optimizer with randomly chosen 
>steps.  You can't even _hope_ to show anything better than convergence to 
>local optima for such a thing, and considering that the `hill' you're 
>climbing is changing as fast as you're climbing it (the other species 
>evolve too) even local optimality seems a rather strong assumption.
>
>As a simple example, a good look at the human body shows that the plumbing
>system leaves room for improvement, to put it mildly.  Yet this design is
>locked into a rather large number of species.  There simply isn't an
>evolutionary way out of the mess, so once some ancestor species evolved onto
>this particular `hill,' a lousy design was frozen in.
>
>Similarly, while their high fecundity is clearly not good for the Moties,
>there is no evolutionary path out of it, as changing the fecundity would
>effectively require a complete overhaul.  So they're stuck.
>
>SR

Note that evolution is not well modeled by a pure hill-climbing algorithm,
in that the genetic codes retain information about prior positions on the
hill, and can bias the selection of new step directions.  The problem of
getting stuck in a local optimum is very real even so, but rather unlikely
to happen.

Also, note that the Moties seem to be extremely intelligent, adaptible, and
generally good survivors.  It would seem to me that the situation with the
Moties could easily have come to pass if they were vastly superior to their
competition *in spite of their birthrate*.  They must have had some really
nasty predation in their early development.  Perhaps they had a pheremonal
control mechanism on their birthrate that was mediated by the predator?

A reason why they didn't evolve out of their birthrate problem could be that
they initially developed under conditions which promoted very high rates
of mutation.  They would then develop a genetic code and reproductive 
strategy that was more mutation resistant. (We use a tell-me-twice code
with some error checking, they could easily use a more elaborate system).
When their star became a red giant, perhaps the level or radiation dropped?
Then they were stuck with an inappropriately slow evolution rate at a stage
of their development that made changes to the evolution rate even slower to
occur.  So now let some catastrophy open up some niches, and they will stay
empty for a long time, unless some adaptible (intelligent) species can take 
over empty niches *without* having to mutate.  

In any case, the thing that I found more far-fetched was the culture that
the Moties developed.  They could have ended their cycles by just adopting 
the same strategy as a lot of early human cultures: kill the unwanted 
children.  The first Motie society to do that would swiftly control the 
planet, as they would be able to devote less energy to supporting their huge 
population.  

I mean, consider Moties of the first cycle, at a stage of their development
where they were hunting & gathering on an isolated island.  They would
completely wipe out any conceivable food supply within a few generations.
(Yeah, yeah, but they don't like fish, OK?)  They swiftly reduce the island 
to a barren waste and die out.  A few of them would escape in dugouts or 
the equivalent, and join tribes on other islands.  On one such island, a 
tribe of nasty Moties that eat their young has a stable population that 
floats with the food supply.  They wait a few years until the wasted island 
recovers, then go settle there.  

At the high-tech end of a cycle, it seems that all you need to do is isolate
a population of nasty Moties by putting them in a habitat and sending them
out-system using a large enough delta-V that subsequent unhappy nice-Moties
have to large a volume of space to search to be able to locate & destroy
them with certainty.  The nasty-Moties can then return from their cometary
orbit at the low-tech end of the cycle and take over.  No more cycles.

Nevertheless, I *did* enjoy the novel quite a lot.  Perhaps these things
will be addressed in the sequel?


--
Tom Young                                         tmyoung@rodan.acs.syr.edu
Xref: sparky rec.arts.sf.written:10168 rec.arts.books:12965