Intelligent Design in Science Class - Sample curriculum please

Not exactly true.Kevin Kelly -- Chapter 15: Artificial Evolution

quote:

---

Ray seeded his world (which he called "Tierra") with a single creature he programmed by hand -- the 80-byte creature -- inserted into a block of RAM in his virtual computer. The 80 creature reproduced by finding an empty RAM block 80 bytes big and then filling it with a copy of itself. Within minutes the RAM was saturated with copies of 80.

​

But Ray had added two key features that modified this otherwise Xerox-like copying machine into an evolution machine: his program occasionally scrambled the digital bits during copying, and he assigned his creatures a priority tag for an executioner. In short he introduced variation and death.

---

Kevin Kelly -- Chapter 15: Artificial Evolution

quote:

---

"I started with a creature 80 bytes large," Ray remembers, "because that's the best I could come up with. I figured that maybe evolution could get it down to 75 bytes or so. I let the program run overnight and the next morning there was a creature -- not a parasite, but a fully self-replicating creature -- that was only 22 bytes! I was completely baffled how a creature could manage to self-replicate in only 22 instructions without stealing instructions from others, as parasites do. To share this novelty, I distributed its basic algorithm onto the Net. A computer science student at MIT saw my explanation, but somehow didn't get the code of the 22 creature. He tried to recreate it by hand, but the best he could do was get it to 31 instructions. He was quite distressed when he found out I came up with 22 instructions in my sleep!"

---

I'd say that it's not even an explanation.Here:
A few years ago I was doing a high-speed run down the center lane of a 5 lane road in my Firebird. (2 lanes in each direction plus a center "turn only" lane.) I fishtailed it, did a 180, and ended up squirting between two oncoming cars while going backwards at 90mph."I meant for that to happen."Does that explain anything? I don't think so.
Same goes for an IDist taking something that happened and saying, "Some intelligent being meant for that to happen."This message has been edited by DominionSeraph, 04-15-2006 10:51 PM