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David Bailey's Latest Papers
I've highlighted David Bailey's website before; it contains pdf's of the various articles he's written, some of which have been published in Dialogue.
He's got a few more recent papers up. One on intelligent design looks like it is going to be appearing in Dialogue soon. His latest describes a program he wrote that takes random text and generates English text using an evolutionary process. You'll have to read it for the details. Then there is another on LDS Biblical literalism which, among other things, has some interesting comments about antediluvian ages.
1 comments:
Even though I don't think that Bailey's experiment demonstrates all that he hopes it does, we must admit that it is significantly better than Dawkins' program.
The problem which I see with any analogy between genetic fitness and the authoring of a book is that words and grammar are largely conventional symbols. The "fitness" or coherence of a passage is entirely imposed on it from without by an obeserver. The fitness of a biological system, however, is for the most part internal to the system. Whereas in the case of words we are deciding what fitness consists of, in biology we are concerned with discovering what fitness consists of.
I do think that computer simulations such as these, however, do fully demonstrate the creative powers of evolutionary process, contrary to what Jerry claims. Our designing a program which will itself create novel designs, does not change the fact that it really is the program and not the original programmers which are doing the designing.
Jared,
Perhaps you could link some of those papers for Jerry over at MoEvo
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