From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Jan 04 2004 - 21:48:29 MST
Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 04, 2004 at 07:24:21PM -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>>
>>Before we continue, might I ask you why you have such an
>>astounding vitriolic reaction to the idea that evolution might
>>continue?
>
> Well, for one thing, you're using completely different meanings of
> the word 'evolution'. Eliezer means evolution as a blind,
> non-directed series of changes over many generations, you apparently
> mean *any* iterative change process.
I wouldn't say that the changes are non-directed. Calling evolution
"non-directed" might be taken as implying that genetic makeup changes
randomly, rather than alleles being driven to universality as the
statistical outcome of their covariance with reproductive success.
Mutation is non-directed, and recombination is blind (or from a gene's
perspective, fair), but natural selection is a statistical trend.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:43 MDT