No Free Lunch

From: Lucy L. Masters (masters@cox-internet.com)
Date: Mon Jul 15 2002 - 15:47:22 EDT

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    Larry wrote:

    "...which assumes that the increasing adaptedness of animals is due to
    random mutations within a population, followed by natural selection
    of better adapted individuals. The No Free Lunch conclusion says that
    one should not, averaged over time, and over all genetic algorithms,
    expect purely natural physical processes to contribute appreciable
    information content to an animal's genome."

    Lucy responds:

    Larry...this is interesting but a bit beyond me. Please explain more.
    The above statement (so far) seems contradictory. Randomness and
    natural selection seem purely natural to me (not that God isn't involved
    in natural processes, you understand). I understand statistics but only
    from the standpoint of clinical psychology. Randomness is, of course, a
    defined term and one that deals with the human ability to perceive (or
    not perceive) a pattern over time. So how is "natural" precluded by
    randomness/natural selection and how is this at all related to Dembski?
    I seem to recall that Dembski had great troubles with the concept of
    randomness and viewed it rather objectively rather than subjectively.
    What am I missing?



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