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Hello Friend,
“Regarding your comment: “"But the simulation still shows the power of the principle of evolution"â€
Yes, it shows exactly that: the power of an intelligently designed mathematical evolution and NOTHING MORE.â€
In 1981 my colleague and I published a paper “stochastic optimization is system design†based on he theorem of Gaussian adaptation (GA). At this time GA managed to increase the manufacturing yield from about 5 to 95% in a 76-dimensional space. This was far beyond our own intellectual capacity. So, if you mean that GA is a representative of Intelligent Design (ID, but 1981 we knew nothing about ID), I may perhaps agree with you. As has been shown, the natural random evolution may make use of the GA-theorem to some extent, so, in this sense natural evolution may also be as a random process suitable for ID.
The natural evolution, which you seem to deny in a way I will be unable to understand, is far more complex and efficient and may even solve combinatory problems such as the travelling salesman problem as earlier shown. The limitation with GA is that it is a parametric algorithm, not very good at combinatory problems.
You also wrote: “In my view, because of the profound differences between the two "settings" the results can in no way be seen as supporting evolution OF LIFE ON EARTH, which is a totally different matter: no designer, no algorithm, no direction, no calculating machine, no problem to solve, etc.
Still, I am pretty sure that our designers used some pretty good "evolutionary algorithms" to design lifeforms...â€
“No problem to solveâ€, there are very many difficult problems to solve in climbing a phenotypic high-dimensional landscape.
“No calculating machineâ€, yes, but the machinery is driven by energy from the sun, using the universal laws of nature – including the entropy law – and the rules of genetic variation such as crossover, inversion etc. as a random number generator.
“No directionâ€, oh yes! It follows the direction of an increasing mean fitness and diversity, so, it is goal seeking.
“No algorithmâ€. I don’t agree, evolution constitutes a very sophisticated genetic algorithm.
“No designerâ€. Since evolution is a very creative designer by itself, capable of creating huge amounts of information in the art of survival, you are wrong also in this case.
So, sorry to say, this is 100% misunderstanding!
Gkm