Evolution Generator Program

My first thoughts are that supervising every generation by hand is a bloody nightmare. For myself a scenario utilising a set of selection criteria to automatically select the sequences to go into the next generation would be far preferable.My ideal output would be some sort of graph of generation against fitness/identity to target sequence, as well as an archive of all of the offspring and progeny from each generation. I definitely see the value of having every step in the process there for scrutiny, I just don't like having to do all the scrutiny myself every generation.I appreciate that this approach doesn't allow you to vary the mutation rate generation by generation, but I'm not sure how useful that ability is anyway.TTFN,WK

Just out of interest what did you use for the program? Is this the front end of a perl script?TTFN,WK

I seem to remember there was an online experiment along these lines. By using hundreds/thousands of web users it got around the attention span issues you mentioned.TTFN,WK

Hi ICANT,I'm not Percy but I think that the answers to your questions are kind of what the programis there to address. I think you should view these as mutations that have got as far as being incorporated into an embryo, i.e. have not been targetted by DNA repair mechanisms. The repair processes are not part of the model. DNA repair doesn' t operate across generations so it isn't particularly relevant.As to the proportions of good bad and neutral mutations, you could probably estimate this quite simply by considering the mutation rate and the number of characters available in the alphabet that Percy is using. Alternatively you could just run the program through few iterations and make your own observations on the rates of beneficial/neutral/deleterious mutations, that is kind of one of the points of such a program surely?Just a quick run at 10 10 as the settings gave me 5 beneficial, 5 deleterious and I didn't bother to count the neutrals but it should be around 10 since I had a target string about 20 characters long. One thing to bear in mind, as Percy pointed out, is that as your sequence gets closer to the target these proportions will change dramatically at the same mutation rate, with many more deleterious mutations arising.TTFN,WK

Why do you think Percy didn't answer? I can see his reply at Message 29 he addresses all of your questions apart from the rather bizarre one about DNA repair. In fact since this is the very message you replied to to ask these questions one is left wondering WTF?All you needed to do was run the program with the conditions you wanted and you would have been able to quantitate the frequency of the different mutational outcomes, Percy gave you clear advice as to how to distinguish those outcomes.Why do you think Percy should go to the trouble of running it to get those answers for you when the program is there for you to run yourself? He really isn't in any sense that anyone but you would recognise. Intelligent design proponents are not generally considered to be evolutionists. His program can create information, it just can't do what he suggests it should be able if random mutation and natural selection worked, but that is because his program models those processes in a ridiculous way. For example there is only one sequence every generation so obviously any deleterious mutation represents the end of the entire chain, in Percy's model there are multiple offspring even if any sequence with a deleterious mutation is weeded out there is still a good chance of having sufficient viable sequences for further generations to come from. Perry's program essentially has no selection in it at all, it says it does but what he calls selection has nothing to do with how natural selection works.As an example of how Marshall's program can create new meaning I just ran it and my first mutation produced this ...

quote:

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The quick brown fox jumpedDover the lazy dog

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I added the bolding but to anyone capable of reading the fnords there's some pretty clear meaning there about the coherence of ID and creationist arguments. Percy has given you the raw materials to work this out but I'll give you my take. The information is produced by random mutation of the sequence, as indeed it is in Marshall's program, but what allows for the accumulation of information is the selective process which is a context sensitive environmental factor, in this case the desired target sequence that the user defines but in the case of biological evolution the environment that the organism is in.TTFN,WK

Is that related to truthiness?TTFN,wK