RE: We believe in design

--- Iain Strachan <igd.strachan@gmail.com> wrote:

> Pim,
> I agree that these two examples would "help" the
> evolution along by having a
> more adaptive and powerful search strategy, but they
> don't actually change
> the shape of the fitness surface being explored,
> merely the rate at which it
> can be traversed.

On the contrary, fitness surfaces are strongly
affected by neutrality.

Look at for instance RNA and the work done in this
area. Combine this with the scale free nature of RNA,
realize that a simple process of duplication and
preferential attachment can explain scale free
networks and one comes to understand why RNA sequence
space extends through and that the common RNA
structures are close to any other common structure
within space, connected by neutral pathways which
extend throughout space.
Neutrality affects the fitness function.

more later but neutrality and scale free are two
concepts which are very relevant to evolution and help
understand such concepts as robustness, evolvability,
modularity.
Since neutrality can be shown to be selectable, this
all combines to quite a strong finding that evolution
can evolve (evolvability).
It should not come as too much of a surprise that
evolution can evolve neutrality or even the mutation
probability distribution function. In other words, the
representation problem may not really be that much of
a problem after all. Understanding that the genotype
phenotype mapping itself is under evolutionary
control...

Compared to evolutionary algorithms in nature, we have
so much to learn.

Check out the work by Stadler and Schuster and Fontana
on RNA for instance or the work on the protein
networks. Fascinating.
Received on Sat May 28 12:01:51 2005