1) It's not my theory 2) Whilst it is true that individual genes do not have goals, it is not true that natural evolution, as a search algorithm, does not. Whe

1) It's not my theory 2) Whilst it is true that individual genes do not have goals, it is not true that natural evolution, as a search algorithm, does not. When we talk about goals for GAs (which is of course the context of this very discussion we are having), we are specifically talking about high values of the fitness function of the GA. In the case of natural evolution, the 'goal' is to reproduce a gene as much as possible. Note, this is a goal of the GA, not of the gene, and the usage of the word here does not indicate an actually entity with a motivation, but simply reuses terminology that is quite common in discussion of search algorithms (evolution being but one example of these).