Wesley R. Elsberry
Posts: 4991
Joined: May 2002
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| Quote (midwifetoad @ Feb. 19 2015,09:57) | Question for Wes:
Have you read Wagner's book, in which he discusses systems of AND, OR and NOT operators and asserts that when you reach a certain "genome" length, you can almost always find a mutation that does not change the output?
Furthermore, having mutated an element, you can almost certainly find another element that can be mutated without affecting the output. And that you can stepwise change 80 percent or more of the elements without affecting output.
He calls this inovability. I think an equivalent term would be evolvability. His assertion is that it is a characteristic of any complex system, and that the level of complexity doesn't have to be high. His digital genomes have 16 elements.
What he is arguing against is the ID claim that functional sequences are isolated and cannot be bridged by point mutations. Or Dembski's claim that some special or designed search process is required. |
I haven't read Wagner's book, so I can't speak to that.
However, the phenomenon described might not be as weighty as it looks from the short description here. It's pretty easy to get "don't care" conditions in digital circuits, and anything upstream of a "don't care" input could be changed without effect. In biology, you'd be looking at the distinction between epistasis and evolvability. The extent to which you report Wagner is able to change things in stepwise fashion does make it sound like it probably isn't all some sort of digital circuit "epistasis", though.
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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
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