Re: "We Believe in Design"

On 5/27/05, Pim van Meurs <pimvanmeurs@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Iain: In a nutshell, the way I see it is that if
> intelligent design is necessary to get any of these
> things to work properly, then since nature contains
> many
> marvellous things that appear to be designed ( even
> Dawkins uses the word "designoid", noting the eye's
> resemblance to a camera), then likewise the sequence
> space of DNA, as Glenn says, is likely to have been
> intelligently designed. As Glenn says, you can't prove
> it was so, but the evidence from how we get
> biologically inspired computer algorithms to work
> suggests strongly that it was.
>
> Why? I fail to see how us using biologically inspired
> algorithms shows that intelligent design was needed.

Because every example of us using biologically inspired algorithms that I've
ever come across requires us to do the intelligent pre-programming - to
stack the deck at the start of the learning/optimization process in order to
make it work. I've not seen any example in the machine learning literature
that suggests that the intelligent pre-programming can be done "by natural
selection" as you seem to claim. That's not to say that biologically
inspired algorithms are a useless tool - the applications of Neural nets are
many, and I have seen quite a few useful applications of GA's that it's hard
to see how you could do any other way ( I recently saw a very impressive
application where subjects could assemble a "photofit" picture of an
assailant using a technique that seemed very similar to Dawkins's
"Biomorphs" for example - but the design of the "chromosomes" in this case
was very clever indeed, using eigenvalue/eigenvector decompositions of
facial shapes and textures - THAT was the intelligent part of the work, for
which the author deserves full credit - not the evolutionary part).

But the fact remains that these are not magic tools that will solve your
problems without you putting in the design effort simply because they are
biologically inspired.

For instance, science has been studying evolvability
> and shown how evolvability can be under control of
> selection. In fact, Toussaint and others have shown
> how neutrality becomes an essential component in
> evolvability and that neutrality becomes subject to
> selection.
> So if natural selection can influence evolvability,
> why is intelligent design **required**?

We seem to come from different disciplines. I work on optimization and
learning systems - you seem more familiar with the biology. I think it would
be helpful if you could explain what you mean by natural selection
influencing evolvability. Do you mean that it shapes the fitness surface?
That somehow it decouples all the variables (like a mathematical
transformation), so that single changes rather than multiple ones are all
that is required to increase fitness/survival rates? Could Natural Selection
somehow magically produce a coding of a human face by doing Eigenvector
decompositions of a large database of faces? How would it do this? All
natural selection can do in a GA context is increase the survival chances of
fitter organisms. It is little more than a gradient descent (ascent)
mechanism. A reference for your claim would be most helpful, preferable one
that is online. If such a thing can be done in nature, it ought to be
exploitable in a computer algorithm and used to make better optimizers.
Iain
Received on Fri May 27 15:32:29 2005