When does design become intelligent? (AS OF 8/2/10 - CLOSING COMMENTS ONLY)

Hi ICANT,Your Perry Marshall link (HugeDomains.com) describes itself this way: Evolution is descent with modification (mutation) combined with natural selection. Marshall's mutation generator does only mutation, no selection, and selection is a key component of evolution. This is very misleading because he is telling people that evolution is just random change while completely ignoring the selection component.Marshall introduces selection on his explanation page (HugeDomains.com). His examples are fine except that his mutation is rate is far too high. For example, the mutation rate for bacteria is around one in a hundred million base pairs (analogous to Marshall's letters) per generation. By changing at least one letter in each generation Marshall is using a mutation rate that is about four million times greater than the rate for bacteria. Such a tremendous mutation is, of course, fatal, as Marshall clearly shows.If he applies his selection algorithm to more reasonable mutation rates and has more than one offspring per generation then he'll get much different results.--Percy

Yes, but it doesn't do "Darwinian Evolution experiments" like he claims, does it, because it cannot perform meaningful selection. That's why it's misleading. Random text substitution is not an analog for evolution.You need to address the rest of my message that explained why Marshall's descriptive text was also wildly misleading.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Clarify.

Hi ICANT,I didn't realize this thread was going to be closed. Last night I rigged together a simple evolution generator program. You can find it here: It is a much more accurate representation than Marshall's of what evolution is really like.I would appreciate feedback on the program, but I guess not in this thread. I'll start another thread.AbE: I started a thread for the Evolution Generator program over at Evolution Generator Program.--PercyEdited by Percy, : AbE