Re: Behaviorism vs. evolutionary psychology

JGCASEY <jgkjcasey@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on Thu, 12 Jul 2007:
If you want to "evolve" the sequence 123456789 there may be something that
can generate every possible 9 place number and test it for success. But as
that number gets bigger the chances become exponentially unlikely of
success.

You've mentioned things like this kind of "trial and error" before.
But that's not how evolution works.

The result of evolution may be a very, very unlikely thing, in terms of the
space of all possible arrangements of molecules.

But evolution isn't randomly assembling huge structures of molecules, and
then hoping one of them luckily turns out to be a human being.

Instead, it's a very long series of small, incremental improvements.

In fact, the silly (anti-evolution) Intelligent Designer attempt to use an
argument like this, by trying to find biological structures that could not
possibly evolve in an incremental fashion, but need to exist as "all or
nothing". Their work is silly, but they are at least correct that IF it were
possible to prove such biological structures existed, THEN the theory of
evolution would have a hole.

Because evolution does NOT proceed by random trial and error of assembling
huge structures.

Instead, it is very slow and gradual transformations from one form to
another, with every intermediate form also having some survival advantage.

That's why the odds aren't as bad as you suggest. Because it isn't random
("Monte-Carlo") search through the space; it's hill climbing with a fitness
function to guide you. Genetic mutation gives you some nearby point in the
species space, and the species follows the direction that seems to lead
upward (in the local fitness space).

-- Don
_______________________________________________________________________________
Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org/ don@xxxxxxxxxx
I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I
hate plants. -- A. Whitney Brown
.

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