N.Wells
Posts: 1836 Joined: Oct. 2005
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Quote (GaryGaulin @ Aug. 17 2014,17:30) | Quote (N.Wells @ Aug. 16 2014,23:14) | Despite the use of the terms "fitness" and "evolutionary" in discussions of fitness functions in evolutionary algorithms, these concepts are not identical to what happens in biological evolution and natural selection. |
Then you admit that the Darwinian model is an incomplete model of reality. You should have just stopped right there.
Not inherently including intelligence in living things makes Evolutionary Algorithms unable to at the multicellular level develop to include gay and those who do not want to have offspring (or can't) who are none the less needed to help sustain the complex society required for a species like ours to thrive.
Spending days talking about "fitness" is an unnecessary distraction from the modeling work required for fully biologically accurate simulations. Saying even more about it is only more time wasted talking about generalizations, which do not help program molecule on up models of living things including humans with brain made of virtual neural cells. If the computer generated humans are not in panic after telling them you are going to turn off their program then something is still missing (possibly consciousness but might be expressed though not real) because some should start crying while others protest in anger against a sadistic Creator who gave them life but has to end the world when their allotted university supercomputer time is used up and have to rush to write a paper on their tragedy?
You can somewhat successfully argue that Darwinian theory is a close enough approximation for your needs, but it's simply not close enough for the systems biology work in decades ahead. The only thing I needed to show is even John Harshman going "on the other hand" full circle back to (according to Darwinian theory) the "core point is strong". I agree that almost ten times bigger heads would certainly not be fitting. Survival of the fittest is close enough of a generalization for what would happen where we did have heads that made us easy animal food, and reality where new undifferentiated neurons migrate to where most needed, as memory size increases.
In reality the neurons do the selecting. Their behavior would not allow 9 out of 10 go to waste, in places where not needed. Out of place neurons more likely perish or are destroyed by not successfully differentiating then contributing to the network they migrate into, in search of a place they can fit into, where their other needs such as nutrition and protection are then met. Not being wasteful makes sense enough where cellular intelligence does the selecting and being wasteful makes a neuron waste that is soon gone out the waste stream along with others who failed to become a useful part of the cellular society.
We could easily go 1000 hours more going in circles over details where Darwinian theory already went full circle on me exactly like it did for John, which is why I liked it so much. It's the start of a logic flow that only gets way more complicated from there. A case where it depends on how you look at things.
Even where you make progress with the more semantic issues this does not help code models where the behavior of self-learning/self-programming cells and living genomes are the source of the selection being discussed. At the neural level is what can be said to be a survival of the fittest that prevents wasteful use of resources by starving out cells that fail to find a place to fit in with all the rest. Around we go again, never modeling the "selection" process that is actually there, waiting to be modeled. What is needed is a model for "behavior" including that which is "intelligent" and includes emergent "intelligent cause" events to program towards, which will automatically produce all other behavioral levels above it. Getting self-replicating RNA working right may soon have them working together to construct DNA memory systems they work from, but did not come from, as the ID theory seems to most suggest. In any event what I am explaining is only unnecessarily complicated by getting into anything having to do with fit, fitness and selection, which are variables from Darwinian theory, only. Being rid of them makes modeling reality a whole lot easier. |
Good lord what a load of tripe.
No, the theory of evolution does not provide a complete model of reality. No one ever claimed it did. It doesn't include anything outside biology, and there's a lot of stuff in biology that is covered by other theories. The claim is that it provides the best available model so far for biological change over generations.
Evolution does indeed include intelligent organisms (they are called animals) and intelligence, just not according to your misuse of the term. You have yet to justify your usage of "intelligence".
I have no idea why you think that the theory of evolution does not apply to nonreproductive individuals. At the simplest level, nonreproductive individuals can just be evolutionary failures, whose genes are removed from the population. The ToE does an excellent job of explaining what happens to the genes of individuals that don't reproduce. However, there are complications: some of the TOE's greatest triumphs have been in explaining and predicting evolutionary benefits of nonreproductive individuals in groups like social insects and apparently altruistic animals like beavers, via contributions to the reproductive success of close relatives who share their genes. In short, it is evolutionary advantageous to sacrifice yourself for more than two siblings or more than four cousins (if you are all diploid), etc. Models for altruism extended to nonrelatives can also prove advantageous to your own reproductive success, but that gets more complicated. You are not saying anything new here, although you are making a hash of it.
You have not backed up your objections to fitness, which are wrong and woefully uninformed.
Your model has nothing to do with "molecules on up" below the level of bugs, as it starts and ends with bugs, so stop bloviating.
Since no one has created computer-generated humans, your statements here are somewhere between premature and hogwash.
Stop attacking "Darwinian theory" when that is not what you mean. "Darwinian theory" has long since been surpassed - For example, Darwin didn't know about genes. (Come to think of it, your ideas don't properly include genes either - you say the word, but you don't incorporate genes and genetic change in your model, and you don't explain anything about them except for asserting without evidence that they are intelligent.)
"I agree that almost ten times bigger heads would certainly not be fitting." Try restating that in a way that makes sense.
"Survival of the fittest is close enough of a generalization" You just claimed that your thinking parallels Harshman's, and now you turn around and contradict one of his main points. Get your story straight, Gary.
Quote | At the neural level is what can be said to be a survival of the fittest that prevents wasteful use of resources by starving out cells that fail to find a place to fit in with all the rest. | You are contradicting yourself. That's wasteful. Not wasteful would be not developing unneeded neurons in the first place, or repurposing those that you have already produced.
Quote | What is needed is a model for "behavior" including that which is "intelligent" and includes emergent "intelligent cause" events to program towards, which will automatically produce all other behavioral levels above it. | As NoName said, you are doing this wrong: you are proceeding from conclusions based on your personal delusions and misunderstandings to what you think is a generalized model: you need to go from details whose reality has been confirmed to models that explain them, with lots of groundtruthing of the model as you proceed.
{quote]You can be sure I would not agree with John unless I understood where they were coming from.[/quote] John's a he, not a they, and you don't agree with him and you clearly don't understand where he is coming from, as you get it all wrong.
In short, you are babbling, and wrong.
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