midwifetoad
Posts: 4003
Joined: Mar. 2008
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| Quote (dvunkannon @ July 07 2009,12:16) | | Quote | Sometimes the total count of "correct" letters will go backwards. All the more astonishing in retrospect. Dawkins' program can't do that.
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Errr, no. That was what the whole latching kerfuffle was about! |
The latching crowd asserted that once a letter was correct it was protected from mutating. That's a separate issue from whether the total number of correct letters can decline.
At reasonable mutation rates, there will "always" be at least one perfect, unmutated child in the Dawkins program, and the total fitness will never decline. It is theoretically possible for two good mutations to offset one bad one, so it is possible for a good letter to revert.
My program pretty much guarantees that every fourth generation will decline in total fitness.
Since my fitness definition is much broader than a single target, I stir the pot to avoid getting stuck on a single individual having a high fitness score.
I don't know if I am modelling anything real. My only concern is to demonstrate that selection can do interesting things without a specific target.
I would argue, however, that my fitness database is at least partially equivalent to a real selection history. Which is to say, the distribution of letter pairs or phonemes in a real language is the result of a real selection history, and the database embodies that history.
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Any version of ID consistent with all the evidence is indistinguishable from evolution.
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