Information and Genetics

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In other words, I wonder if it might be possible for you to stick around long enough to get to the bottom of this one so that in future discussions either we no longer object to it because we know it's true, or you no longer bring it up because you know it's false.

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I’m not sure what particular argument you are objecting to. Is it my claim that evolution is not falsifiable (or already falsified)? I’d be more than happy to pursue a thread on this, though it has already been done in the past.There is something else we need to get on the table. The following is a completely honest assessment of the debate and is not intended to tick anyone off, though it is the usual response (but not always). First, I realize that dedicated evolutionists object to evolution being called a religion, but this is exactly how 99% of dedicated creationists (including myself) view evolution (when I say dedicated, I refer to those who are actively involved in the origins debate). On the other hand, 99% of dedicated evolutionists believe YECs hold foolish, religious beliefs and also are not going to be convinced by reason. We too object and say that while we do believe in a Deity who created ex nihilio (ie religion), we also believe the overwhelming historical & empirical evidence supports our beliefs. Probably 99% of committed evolutionists scoff at such nonsense. All of this is simply a reality of the debate.So, for you to hope that progress will be made by either of us on such an immovable argument as to whether or not evolution is falsifiable, is a wasted hope! I am 100% convinced evolution is either falsified or not falsifiable. From your perspective you are perhaps at or near 100% the other way. So we need to face the reality behind this immovable object of creation vs molecules-to-man evolution. I talk to fellow creationists all the time. I have never met a dedicated creationist who does not believe that evidence has absolutely nothing to do with why dedicated evolutionists believe in evolution. In your circle of dedicated evolutionist friends I very much suspect you believe the same of creationists. Both of us think the other’s mind is made up despite the evidence! So we should just be honest with each other about this.There is another component of our dueling perceptions. I truly believe I would have abandoned creation if evidence didn’t support it. But it doesn’t matter that I believe this, because evolutionists likely do not believe me when I say I would have abandoned it. Likewise, creationists also do not believe it when evolutionists say this or that evidence would convince them evolution is false.Now there obviously are peripheral topics that either side can be persuaded on, provided they do not overturn the applecart! (examples are speciation, simple-to-complex, etc). The immovable objects are those things that overturn one’s worldview (such as whether or not evolution has been falsified). We just need to be honest about these realities of this debate, whether we like it or not.Speaking for myself, the reason I debate on the internet is 1) to keep up with the latest arguments so that I am fully prepared when I debate or lecture in public, 2) when I run out of things to do at work, ie. boredom-killer! I suspect #2 is the bigger culprit explaining my visits here! I certainly don’t have any delusions that I will convert an evolutionist.So, all that being said, on to debunking your latest arguments!

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No, Rei has made it quite clear he beleives GAs emulate biological evolution.

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Rei has made it quite clear in his rebuttal to this very statement that you're wrong:

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"*Research* GAs do. Commercial GAs show applications for it, but employ speedups because we don't want to wait 4.5 billion years. What is so hard about this for you to grasp?"

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The only distinction I’ve seen Rei make between the two are speedups. This makes them indiscernible to me.

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In order to actually address the issue you have to explain how GA's do not employ the principles of evolution. You have to show that they do not accurately model, in principle, reproduction, mutation and selection, which are all the components of descent with modification through natural selection.

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I have already done this! In a nutshell:1) GAs employ truncation selection. For example, in Avida see BIRTH_METHOD, Choose max Age/Merit. This is severe truncation selection! Problem is, there is no evidence that truncation selection occurs in nature.:
2) GAs assume that a rare number of beneficial mutations exist (the variety where the mutated-type is more fit than the parent type in a normal (typical) environment). There is little or no evidence of this in nature.
3) GAs set the hypothetical Beneficial mutation rate too high. There is no evidence of this in nature.In fact, evidence points to a mutation rate that given enough time will lead to extinction of all life ( 404 Not Found )
4) GAs do not permit extinction, ie they do not disqualify themselves but will instead run ad infinitum if need be. If realistic mutation rates were used they could not produce anything at all.
5) GAs are useless unless intelligence is there to cause the output to be realized. This is especially true of commercial GAs, as Rei calls them.I could give other less obvious ones, but this is a start.[This message has been edited by Fred Williams, 09-29-2003]

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Do you actually think that a design team of any kind will be "determined to use the result no matter what"? I have preformed a lot of software design and we frequently throw out the result of the design efffort when we realize it isn't going to be suitable.

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Of course! It is Rei who answered yes to my question, saying that he believes a design team will take the result no matter what! He sure has a lot of confidence in GAs, wouldn’t you say? It was Rei’s insistence of this that made it extremely, extremely difficult to continue to debate him or take anything he says seriously.

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Why do engineers produce prototypes? To find out what is wrong with a design and correct it for one thing.

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Of course!

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Do GA's produce usable designs? YES.

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The better way to state this would be Can GA’s produce usable designs?, which I have said since day one is YES. But this is beside the point. Rei claims GAs emulate evolution, and implies it proves evolution can happen. In both cases Rei is wrong.I think I answered your subsequent post in my response to Percy.Unfortunately this is all I have time for today.

And it was I who later realized I misunderstood the nature of the use of the GAs. In this case, they produce a better result so, of course, they will be used. Rei is, after all, actually working in with these things.Separately from that you have not shown that they don't emulate evolution. Any objections I have seen you raise seem to have been answered.

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1) GAs employ truncation selection. For example, in Avida see BIRTH_METHOD, Choose max Age/Merit. This is severe truncation selection! Problem is, there is no evidence that truncation selection occurs in nature.:

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Fred, again you display your utter ignorance (or deliberate deception) on the topic. There are 6 birth methods you can chose from. Age/merit is not default. The others do not do any sort of merit analysis. My version has a default of #4 (choose random from entire soup). These are run asynchronously, and are not truncated. It just simply sets how the world processor determines where to let the organism write to. By default, it lets them "give birth" in a random location in the world.

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2) GAs assume that a rare number of beneficial mutations exist (the variety where the mutated-type is more fit than the parent type in a normal (typical) environment). There is little or no evidence of this in nature.

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(applies to #3 also)A) Did you not say that you accepted that rare beneficial mutations occur in an earlier discussion? You even had a graph.B) Avida (which is one of many *types* of GAs, of which there are many examples of each - you really seem to have no knowlege of the vast majority of them) makes no assumptions of any sort. All they did was code the function that does memory writes to randomly "slip up" in the process, and write incorrect data. How many times does this sort of thing have to be pointed out to you?? Point to where a default setup of Avida (one of the only GAs you have experience with) deliberately makes "beneficial mutations". Go on! Do it! The closest thing to even having an influence for something beneficial is the "merit" system, which simply gives smaller algorithms more CPU. It's part of the "physics" of the virtual universe.

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4) GAs do not permit extinction, ie they do not disqualify themselves but will instead run ad infinitum if need be. If realistic mutation rates were used they could not produce anything at all.

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My god, how many times do I have to correct you on this one? Stop, take your copy of Avida, and enable phylogeny tracking. Lines go extinct *all of the time*. It is virtually impossible for the entire soup to go extinct, because that would require simultaneous bad mutations from every single organism - that's something that's *not going to happen*. If you disagree, explain how *you* would expect universal bad mutations to happen to everything at once (or some other mechanism that could wipe out everything).

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5) GAs are useless unless intelligence is there to cause the output to be realized. This is especially true of commercial GAs, as Rei calls them.

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Since I've already corrected you half a dozen times on this one, please: Explain what sort of intelligence I need to "realize" an ANN. I've described it enough, if you've read at all, please - explain.Fred, I have to ask, and I want an answer:Have you actually read any of my posts? Because it looks like you haven't.Either you haven't, or you don't want to address my responses.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."[This message has been edited by Rei, 09-29-2003]

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There is something else we need to get on the table. The following is a completely honest assessment of the debate and is not intended to tick anyone off, though it is the usual response (but not always). First, I realize that dedicated evolutionists object to evolution being called a religion, but this is exactly how 99% of dedicated creationists (including myself) view evolution (when I say dedicated, I refer to those who are actively involved in the origins debate). On the other hand, 99% of dedicated evolutionists believe YECs hold foolish, religious beliefs and also are not going to be convinced by reason. We too object and say that while we do believe in a Deity who created ex nihilio (ie religion), we also believe the overwhelming historical & empirical evidence supports our beliefs. Probably 99% of committed evolutionists scoff at such nonsense. All of this is simply a reality of the debate.

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So, for you to hope that progress will be made by either of us on such an immovable argument as to whether or not evolution is falsifiable, is a wasted hope! I am 100% convinced evolution is either falsified or not falsifiable. From your perspective you are perhaps at or near 100% the other way. So we need to face the reality behind this immovable object of creation vs molecules-to-man evolution. I talk to fellow creationists all the time. I have never met a dedicated creationist who does not believe that evidence has absolutely nothing to do with why dedicated evolutionists believe in evolution. In your circle of dedicated evolutionist friends I very much suspect you believe the same of creationists. Both of us think the other’s mind is made up despite the evidence! So we should just be honest with each other about this.

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Fred, I would like to point out that I have never met a creationist who actually knew anything about evolution, had taken the time to read Darwin other than quote mining, had any background in biology particularly key disciplines like genetics, or had ever picked up a primary literature article on modern molecular evolution. Even Peter Borger's grasp of basic molecular biology (not evolution per se) was atrociously poor. You and your compadres view evolution as a religion because it allows you to avoid actually thinking or learning. How do you think it looks when you claim that transposons refute evolution when you cannot even spell transposon properly and claimed that your conclusion is based on skimming a review article in a lay person publication? I am under no false pretense that creationists will suddenly forfeit the intellectual sloth they so frequently display and actually learn what the theory of evolution actually is, why it is different from abiogenesis, and what the primary literature (much of which is open to the public for their own analysis) actually demonstrates...but it is hardly accurate to describe creationist dogma based on a non apparent diety based on a book written by multiple authors and full of errors as in anyway comparable to science which actually describes the world as accurately as possible as opposed to ignoring the parts that contradict dogma.I agree with you that nobody here will change their minds. Creationists fear the unknown and cling to a big Daddy figure, scientists embrace the unknown and want to learn so that the unknown becomes smaller...you can stay in the dark...but it is a pity.

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1) GAs employ truncation selection. For example, in Avida see BIRTH_METHOD, Choose max Age/Merit. This is severe truncation selection! Problem is, there is no evidence that truncation selection occurs in nature.:

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This is only ONE of the available methods. The DEFAULT method is to choose the oldest "creature" out of the "mother" and those in the eight neigbouring cells. Even the method Fred refers to does not directly implement truncation selection, since instead of using a fixed cut-off for merit it uses age modified by merit and chooses the worst (highest) score. (And all methods choose empty cells over occupied cells).[ADDED in Edit] The most famous use of Avida - the paper "The Evolutionary Origin of Complex Features" by Lenski et. al., showing the evolution of IC functions, in fact used the CHOOSE_RANDOMLY birth method (selecting either the "mother" or one of the 8 adjacent cells to be replaced). Avida clearly does NOT rely on the max Age/merit method.The paper is available at - and the information is in the "Experimental Conditions" section.
http://myxo.css.msu.edu/papers/nature2003So Fred how did your investigation into Avida manage to miss all these facts ?

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2) GAs assume that a rare number of beneficial mutations exist (the variety where the mutated-type is more fit than the parent type in a normal (typical) environment). There is little or no evidence of this in nature.

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That beneficial mutations have occurred is documented. I suspect that this point is nothing more than a quibble on "usual environment".
As it stands it is clearly false.

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3) GAs set the hypothetical Beneficial mutation rate too high. There is no evidence of this in nature.In fact, evidence points to a mutation rate that given enough time will lead to extinction of all life ( 404 Not Found )

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This is just nonsense. If it were true life would be extinct. A higher proportion of favourable mutations simply speeds up the process of evolution.

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4) GAs do not permit extinction, ie they do not disqualify themselves but will instead run ad infinitum if need be. If realistic mutation rates were used they could not produce anything at all.

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This presumably means TOTAL extinction. In principle Avida running with a DEATH_METHOD could result in that. But it is hard to see how this is a serious objection, unless total extinction is assumed to be near inevitable.

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5) GAs are useless unless intelligence is there to cause the output to be realized. This is especially true of commercial GAs, as Rei calls them.

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This clearly does not apply to Avida, Tierra and the like. Even for commercial GA's it is because they run in software rather than attempting to breed the hardware directly - which is what Fred seems to be demanding. This objection is obviously silly even when it does apply.[This message has been edited by PaulK, 09-30-2003]

If we restricted ourselves to discussing only that which had never been discussed before then most activity here would cease. I perhaps hold a higher opinion of the participants on both sides of the debate, but that's neither here nor there. The relevant point is that this is a discussion site, not Fred's Essay Site, and not Percy's Annex to Fred's Evolution Fairy Tale Site. Participants here stake out their positions and defend those parts that are challenged. If there are parts of your position you think pointless to discuss then you must stop repeating them, because ignoring rebuttals isn't permitted here. The frustration caused when someone continues blithely on repeating controversial points while ignoring rebuttals is so dangerous to productive discussion that it is even covered in the Forum Guidelines:

2. Debate in good faith by addressing rebuttals through the introduction of new information or by providing additional argument. Do not merely keep repeating the same points without elaboration.

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4. Bare assertions on controversial points should be avoided by providing supporting evidence or argument. Once challenged, support for any assertion should be provided.

These rules of course apply to the rebuttals and to the counter-rebuttals and so forth. That's how productive discussion works. The only exception is related issues that are off-topic, which should be moved to another thread if, in the opinion of the participants, they're likely to generate a long discussion.--Percy

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Yeah, if you evolve anything in software, it is usually almost impossible to understand. If readability is a goal, then you probably shouldn't touch a GA with a 10 foot pole

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By contrast, if you employ programmers (aka intelligent designers) to produce software, it is usually almost impossible to understand. Even for the programmers.------------------

Lol... give me a few months and I don't understand my own code, and I write simple stuff-- nothing professional.------------------
No webpage found at provided URL: www.hells-handmaiden.com

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This [max age/merit] is only ONE of the available methods.

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This is a strawman, I never said it was the only method, I said it promoted *severe* truncation selection.

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The most famous use of Avida - the paper "The Evolutionary Origin of Complex Features" by Lenski et. al., showing the evolution of IC functions, in fact used the CHOOSE_RANDOMLY birth method (selecting either the "mother" or one of the 8 adjacent cells to be replaced). Avida clearly does NOT rely on the max Age/merit method.

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Not only is this a continued strawman, you seem to be implying there is no selection at all.

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So Fred how did your investigation into Avida manage to miss all these facts ?

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I challenge you to read the paper and explain why you believe truncation selection is not occurring. For example:

Forty-five of the steps increased
overall fitness, 48 were neutral and 18 were deleterious relative to
the immediate parent. The large proportion of beneficial mutations
along the line of descent is not surprising, because this lineage
represents the eventual winners that were assembled by natural
selection. After the origin of EQU, another 233 steps occurred along the line
of descent leading to the final dominant genotype. Of these, 62 were
beneficial, 132 neutral and 39 deleterious. All nine logic functions
were performed from genotype 306 onwards.

I look forward to your explanation (hand-wave?) how such efficient selection occurred in such a short period of time without virtual truncation selection occurring.BTW, in this paper the authors admit a high probability EQU will be reached. Why this stuff passes peer-review as evidence of the naturalistic origin of complex function is beyond me. This is a tacit admission that the program was rigged to succeed. Is ‘evolution’ guaranteed to succeed? Perhaps this will help some understand my reason #4 why GAs don’t represent reality: GAs do not permit extinction, ie they do not disqualify themselves but will instead run ad infinitum if need be. If realistic mutation rates were used they could not produce anything at all. Thanks for providing a classic example, Paul.

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If we restricted ourselves to discussing only that which had never been discussed before then most activity here would cease.

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Point well taken. It does seem to mildly contradict your objection regarding Forum guideline #2.

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I perhaps hold a higher opinion of the participants on both sides of the debate

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,Please don’t misunderstand what I am saying. I think the retirement speech of a highly regarded scientist (right now I don’t recall his name) summed this up well — he warned his scientist colleagues that the easiest person to fool is yourself. Both sides have a priori biases based on philosophical worldview, and while minds are made up despite the evidence they *think* the evidence supports their side. Both of us view the other this way, it’s a simple reality of the debate. Mammuthus helped prove this very point in his response here.

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The relevant point is that this is a discussion site, not Fred's Essay Site, and not Percy's Annex to Fred's Evolution Fairy Tale Site. Participants here stake out their positions and defend those parts that are challenged. If there are parts of your position you think pointless to discuss then you must stop repeating them, because ignoring rebuttals isn't permitted here. The frustration caused when someone continues blithely on repeating controversial points while ignoring rebuttals is so dangerous to productive discussion that it is even covered in the Forum Guidelines:

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This is the very reason I wrote an Essay, to convey why certain perceptions occur, such as your view that I have ignored rebuttals. You don’t think I have answered them, yet from my POV I have many times over. It seems you just don’t like/agree with my rebuttal. That’s your right.I grant there are however a few points I haven’t had a chance to defend because I got involved in too many threads and just don’t have the time. For one, I believe it is Maynard Smith who believes Lamrarckism could still be in play, but I have to dig up the citation. I just didn’t have time to respond to that post (I think PaulK).If you are objecting to my ignoring Rei’s posts, then I don’t know what to tell you because I simply don’t have time to debate someone who is so severely clouded by his ideology that he can’t see the incredibly bizarre claim he made about design engineers. It is so bizarre that NosyNed saw it and unwhittingly didn’t realize he was confirming my claim about Rei’s really out-of-this world position, but now he is backtracking because he is apparently too ashamed to challenge an ally and colleague on such a dumb, dumb, dumb, argument. Sorry to be so blunt. It is the dumbest thing I’ve read since that guy on Yahoo claimed that sending a monkey through the public schools would produce high-school level intelligence for the monkey! (the funny part is that he was unwittingly describing the sorry state of our public schools! ) Since this board doesn’t have a IGNORE function as Yahoo does, I had to turn on my mental IGNORE button on Rei’s posts. If Rei wants to explain his bizarre stand he can always email me, perhaps there is a chance I misunderstood him (but I doubt it, NosyNed read it the same way I did, and I’m sure others did too). But in the meantime, I simply don’t have the time to respond to what I see as blatant intellectual dishonesty. We should have a fair amount of leeway as to who we respond to here (Especially since evos typically outnumber creationists on these boards by 5 to 1 or more).I have to run. I’ll be offline until at least Monday.Two comments to Mammuthus: Most creation scientists I know used to be evolutionist scientists. Two authored college evolutionary textbooks (Kenyon, Parker). Regarding transposons, I did not misspell it. I mistyped it. I’m sorry you can’t see the difference. This type of trivial attack is not productive, don’t you agree?

No Fred it is not a strawman.You claimed

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2) They do not emulate evolution in nature because they typically invoke truncation selection (the GAs I have looked at are Tierra and Avida)

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If the only support for your claim relies on a single option then you certainly cannot claim that Avida typically relies on "truncation selection". Which raises the question of how you can come to a general conclusion when you have not even examined one of your *two* examples sufficiently to support your claim.I explained how Avida was used for that particular paper. If you think that implies that there is no selection then you either don't understand Avida or how the behaviour of Avida results in selection. Either way it shows that your knowledge of Avida is very superficial - yet you list it as one of the GAs that you DO know. Which raises the question of whether you have only a single example - or none at all.I will repeat that it is clearly stated that the selection of cells for replacement was random. And that you have not even shown how the age.merit example produces truncation selection. That is enough to demolish your argument.And if you wish too claim that the description you gave implies truncation selection then it is for you to explain how. It looks to me as if you are simply assuming that success relies on truncation selection which begs the question. I can't refute an argument that isn't even given.(I will point out that it explicitly states that the particular line was the most successful in the run - and so it follows that it will show a high proportion of beneficial mutations, because lines with fewer would be less successful ! So evaluating the efficiency of selection based on this line alone is "selective reporting" - and the fact that even this line included a significant number of deleterious mutations - 18+39 = 57 - shows that selection was certainly not able to eliminate all of the deleterious mutations)Indeed it seems that you assume that evolution cannot work and then dismiss any evidence form GA's that the processes underlying evolution do work as "rigging" because they contradict your assumption. A closed circle of reasoning for a closed mind.As for your final comment

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Is ‘evolution’ guaranteed to succeed? Perhaps
this will help some understand my reason #4 why GAs don’t represent reality: GAs do not permit extinction, ie they do not disqualify themselves but will instead run ad infinitum if need be. If
realistic mutation rates were used they could not produce anything at all. Thanks for providing a classic example

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it is just another example of question begging. You fail to deal with my point that you need to actually SHOW that total extinction is so likely under a "realistic" scenario (ignoring the prima facie evidence that life has existed for billions of years without total extinction) - as well as equating "high probability" to certainty.

Fred, this is getting extremely annoying. I've studied GAs since middle school. I work with them. I have several different ones installed on my computer at home. I've written several - I even wrote a simple variant for a thread on this forum. And you're not responding to a single point that I raised, and yet are clearly still taking part in the forum. Can you be more blatant with your violations of the forum guidelines??

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This is a strawman, I never said it was the only method, I said it promoted *severe* truncation selection.

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As I stated (which you promptly ignored), it isn't even the default mechanism. Will you focus on the default mechanism, which is to choose randomly where to give birth? Because, well, the algorithms need some place to copy themselves to, and there's not an infinite amount of memory.

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challenge you to read the paper and explain why you believe truncation selection is not occurring. For example:

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Forty-five of the steps increasedoverall fitness, 48 were neutral and 18 were deleterious relative to the immediate parent. The large proportion of beneficial mutations along the line of descent is not surprising, because this lineage represents the eventual winners that were assembled by natural selection. After the origin of EQU, another 233 steps occurred along the line of descent leading to the final dominant genotype. Of these, 62 were beneficial, 132 neutral and 39 deleterious. All nine logic functions were performed from genotype 306 onwards.

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They're following the most successful genotype in this quote. What, do you expect the most successful genotype to be one that has accumulated *bad* mutations? Ones that accumulate bad mutations tend to die off, while ones with good mutations tend to replace them. You seem completely unaware of how Avida works - have you ever even run it? I've explained it several times; if you're not catching on to the fact that it functions by making *random errors in the copy process* when *writing to a random section of memory*, I don't know what it will take to get this through your head.

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BTW, in this paper the authors admit a "high probability" EQU will be reached. Why this stuff passes peer-review as evidence of the naturalistic origin of complex function is beyond me. This is a tacit admission that the program was rigged to succeed. Is 'evolution' guaranteed to succeed?

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Not guaranteed, but evolution is pretty bloodly likely to succeed. As referenced over in this thread, where I wrote a piece of software to demonstrate it (designed to be very easy to understand):http://EvC Forum: Fixation of genetics - program -->EvC Forum: Fixation of genetics - program

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If you are objecting to my ignoring Rei's posts, then I don't know what to tell you because I simply don't have time to debate someone who is so severely clouded by his ideology that he can't see the incredibly bizarre claim he made about design engineers.

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You never addressed my criticism of your stance on this. Because you've been ignoring all of my posts. Refer back to the "blackjack" analogy. Refer to my question to you concerning our ANNs. Refer to my pattern-comparison algorithm, which takes no human input other than what patterns you want to compare. Do you understand this? *I Have These Things Right Here* - I'll give you source code if you want! What does it take to prove it to you?

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but now he is backtracking because he is apparently too ashamed to challenge an ally and colleague on such a dumb, dumb, dumb, argument.

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Aaaaaaaaaargh!

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If Rei wants to explain his bizarre stand he can always email me, perhaps there is a chance I misunderstood him (but I doubt it, NosyNed read it the same way I did, and I'm sure others did too

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Read, for God's sake! NosyNed retracted the criticism and turned to agreement with me after reading my response. Read what Ned wrote:

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You are right, I was thinking too conventionally. With the GAs used this way, of course, almost by definition, the output would be used.

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Ok???

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But in the meantime, I simply don't have the time to respond to what I see as blatant intellectual dishonesty.

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I have continually offered to give you the complete source code for everything. I even wrote an easy-to-understand piece of software so that you (or a creationist software person that you know) can understand it, and put it and its output on EVC. What more can I possibly do??? I am getting so incredibly frustrated with you. You don't read why I write.P.S. - Due to your superb context reading (which has failed to read a single thing that I've written), you have continually failed to ignore fact that the pronouns in reference to me are "she". Nor did you ever bother to look at my profile which has my web page in it (I went to your website).Should I start referring to you as 'it' so that you know what it feels like?Signed,
- Karen Rei Pease------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

Fred, I don't know the GAs that are being talked about (none in fact) I just have a rough idea of how they work.I sit back and see two camps making very specific statments about speicific GAs and their use. Why are these apparently basic facts being disagreed about? For example, the truncation selection issue. It looks like, when I read the back and forth, that it has been explained and it is NOT an issue. You say it is?Could you explain that please using a much more detailed description based on your knowledge of Avida and what settings it has and how they work. This will help all of us, since you and the others all know Avida already and the rest of us watching the discussion don't and therefore don't get what is being said properly.Rei, has been making specific factual claims about GAs. In the details of how they work or may be used. Exactly what is untrue about those.The bit about the engineers using the output was explained very clearly by Rei. This insight into the nature of their use enabled me to understand what was being said. I don't know why you don't understand that.As I understand what was said, there are cases where the GAs are only going to produce better results with each "generation". The decision has already been made to use the GA as a tool to solving the problem at hand. This decision has already considered issues like the nature of the result (not maintainable if it is code for example). Thus, obviously the output will be used. What do we disagree on on that?

I'm sorry to take someone's time, but could someone post a description of what "truncation selection" is and why it is an issue here? It would help those of us who are not cogniseti like Fred and Rei to understand the points being made?