This is exactly why I cannot believe the TOE. If we can have so many failures with predetermined goals and desired outcomes, driven by intelligence, purpose and power.....how then could it even be remotely possible, that the evolutionary proccess being completely directionless with no intelligence, purpose or power, even achieve anything! let alone the mind boggling complexities that we see in life today?.
I think I see where you're going with this.
Let me see if I can illustrate the error in your thinking via a quote from the movie "The Zero Effect."
quote:
Now, a few words on looking for things. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you're only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you're sure to find some of them.
See, if you set out with a goal in mind, your odds of reaching it are very low. If you set out to accomplish anything at all, you're bound to do it.
Intelligent problem solving - even engineering - isn't a process of creating correct solutions where none existed before. It's a process of filtering out all the impractical or otherwise unsuitable but still very valid solutions and leaving only the most correct solutions. In that sense intelligence is indistinguishable from natural selection.
You mention the driving intelligence behind genetic programming - but what about situations where (for instance) the programmers wanted a basic occilator but wound up with a complex radio reciever? Where was the intelligence there?
The simple fact is, random chance can, over sufficient time, cause any physically possible configuration of matter. Both natural selection and intelligence are simply ways of cutting that time down a bit by searching through the set of all possible configurations through some method.
Honestly, I think the results of GP show something very interesting indeed - that natural selection is a
better designer than intelligence.
[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 05-23-2003]
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