Evolution Generator Program

Hi ICANT, thanks for trying it out, I figured you'd be on vacation already.Just to save time, try starting with a very short line of text, like maybe "Jesus loves us." Set the number of mutations to 2 and the number of offspring to 10, then try selecting the 2 to 4 strings that have the highest number of matching characters in each generation and let me know what happens. The fittest strings are those with the largest number of matching letters.It doesn't matter whether you select parents or offspring, all you're doing is selecting which strings contribute to the next generation. Sometimes the parents are more fit than any of the offspring.--Percy

You guys might be interested in Thomas D. Schneider's EvJ program which can be found here. He used this same program to show how biological information arises in evolving systems through the evolution of a binding protein and a binding site for that protein. You can find the article here.

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.Percy already answered, but I thought I would provide an extra conceptual explanation. The selection process is not supposed to be random. If you randomize it, you remove the benefit of selection from the model, and all you get is random evolution, which is not what the ToE proposes.Random mutation + random selection = random evolution.Random mutation + discriminate selection = evolution proposed by ToE.I hope that helped.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Percy.I made the entire alphabet in 65 generations, with 10 offspring per parent, using the rule that I select all individuals with the highest number of matches each generation, and by dialing down the mutation rate when the next generation didn't improve over the last. I also set a ceiling of selecting 15 individuals, because 150 is a huge generation to deal with.The whole thing took about 15 minutes.(P.S. I've just started studying this week for my candidacy exams, so the insertion of occasional mindless, monotonous things in the middle of my study day is a nice break for my brain. )

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi Percy, I am on vacation.My wife just is not packed and ready to leave the house yet.I did one using JesUS loVEs ME.I set it to 2 mutations and 5 OFFspring.I selected the highest humber from each parent.By the time I got to 50 generations I was getting 9's in some of the OFFspring.Continuing the same process when I reached 100 generations the highest number was 8.Since I had used upper and lower case letters the most perfect matches I had was 3.What would a letter match represent as far as DNA information is concerned?Is it supposed to represent new information or changed information in the string?God Bless,

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

Hi ICANT!When the program checks whether letters match it doesn't care about upper and lower case. An upper case "J" will match a lower case "j". I did this on purpose because it is actually somewhat analogous to nucleotides in DNA where, for example, the amino acid arginine is coded for by both CGA and CGG - it doesn't matter whether the last letter is A or G, you still get arginine. So it doesn't matter whether it's a lower case or capital "J", it's still Jesus. Ancient Hebrew didn't have upper and lower case, did it? I'm not sure.So it sounds like you were able to use selection to get closer and closer to the target phrase, "JesUS loVEs ME," though you couldn't quite get all the way there. That's quite a dramatic difference from the random selection you were using before.As the string changes the information is new in the sense that it is information that was not there before.--Percy

Interesting. I felt that the concept was a good one; I just lacked the time to prove it.

I've been messing around with it, highly addictive, but in an Asperger's syndrome kind of way. Makes it feel as though you're playing the god of natural selection.To get anywhere you have to exert too much user input. you should make it a bit more manageable.

Hi Percy,Still not on the road, so I got some questions.I will assume that Peter Marshals program is biased to support his worldview.Now I have some questions about your generator.If I set the mutations at 10 per generation using 15 parents how many of those mutations are:Good mutations?Netural mutations?Delentious mutations?How many get repaired by the automatic process in DNA?God Bless,

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

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

I can't run the program at 10 mutations at all. It just waits and waits and never produces a result.

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

Can I guess that your target string was shorter than 10 characters?This is a bug, I should be detecting pathological cases, but anyway, try a longer string and see if it works.--Percy

A good mutation is any character position where the letter was black and is now red. A neutral mutation is any character position where the letter changes but not color. A deleterious mutation is any character position where the letter was red and is now black.--Percy

THE IRONY!!!! IT BURNS!!!!!!!!