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Complex organs have developed from simpler organs in a series of small incremental improvements, while the organ all the way have been fully functional. Think
by olavk 13y ago
Complex organs have developed from simpler organs in a series of small incremental improvements, while the organ all the way have been fully functional.
Think of it like iterative developing a program by adding or modifying one line at a time, while still keeping the program runnable. You can start from a simple program and develop it into a complex program with this method, although it will be a very tedious and inefficient process compared to if you were allowed to rewrite multiple lines in one go. But evolution works in small increments.
- dabernathy89 13y agoIf you add to your analogy that you have no knowledge of the existing codebase, and you have no idea what you're adding or modifying, then you understand my difficulty grasping the concept. Thanks for the reply though!
- Udo 13y agoMaybe that is a fruitful way of looking at it. Take evolutionary algorithms, for example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm). Essentially you start with a random program and iterate on it using an evolutionary model. The point of these algorithms is precisely that an understanding and knowledge of the code base is not required. All that's necessary is some way of measuring the program's fitness for a task.
- toasterlovin 13y agoRight, but if you had _billions_ of years, you could still write an amazing program, even if you have no knowledge of the codebase and no idea what you're modifying.
- dllthomas 13y agoBillions of years running trillions of experiments in parallel.
- toasterlovin 13y agoExactly. The time scale is one of the most important parts to swallowing evolution on an intuitive level.
- dllthomas 13y agoWell, my point was that it is not just time, but also the massive parallelism. Both combined is just such a phenominally mind-bogglingly large amount of exploration.