midwifetoad
Posts: 4003
Joined: Mar. 2008
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| Quote (Henry J @ July 06 2009,15:25) | At a guess, computing a phenotype for each genome might make it easier to allow for things like neutral drift, or making some traits more critical than others without necessarily attaching those traits to certain genes.
Henry |
That sounds like saying genes modify the effects of other genes.
But unless you have some way of modeling biological development, you are not being more "realistic" than my database of letter combinations known to have fitness.
I can quickly assign a fitness score to any arbitrary string of characters, comparing say EUPOUACCT to EUPOUAGCT, and choose one to be the parent of the next generation.
Now if you were doing a straight Weasel program you could just count the number of letters that match your target. But I am not searching for a target. I am shaping a population to look and sound like words from a specific language.
I'm not claiming to model biology, and I have doubts that we have the ability at this time to model biology. What we can do is model specific claims and specific assumptions.
All I set out to do was respond to criticisms of Dawkins asserting that his program did nothing but seek a fixed target. The demonstrable fact is that a clever selector can build unanticipated structures -- functional strings much longer than those known to the selector.
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Any version of ID consistent with all the evidence is indistinguishable from evolution.
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