flip-flop in it. Darwin, as we noted in the preceding chapter, division or alphabetize lists or figure out the income of the Average Taxpayer.
never hit upon the utterly necessary idea of a gene, but along came Mendel's Fancier algorithms produce the dazzling computer-animated graphics we see concept to provide just the right structure for making mathematical sense out every day on television, transforming faces, creating herds of imaginary ice-of heredity ( and solving Darwin's nasty problem of blending inheritance).
skating polar bears, simulating whole virtual worlds of entities never seen or And then, when DNA was identified as the actual physical vehicle of the imagined before. But the actual biosphere is much fancier still, by many genes, it looked at first (and still looks to many participants) as if Mendel's orders of magnitude. Can it really be the outcome of nothing but a cascade of genes could be simply identified as particular hunks of DNA. But then algorithmic processes feeding on chance? And if so, who designed that complexities began to emerge; the more scientists have learned about the cascade? Nobody. It is itself the product of a blind, algorithmic process. As actual molecular biology of DNA and its role in reproduction, the Darwin himself put it, in a letter to the geologist Charles Lyell shortly after 60 AN IDEA IS BORN
publication of Origin, "I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent __ If I were convinced that I required such additions to the theory CHAPTER THREE
of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish..." (F. Darwin 1911, vol. 2, pp. 6-7).
According to Darwin, then, evolution is an algorithmic process. Putting it Universal Acid
this way is still controversial. One of the tugs-of-war going on within evolutionary biology is between those who are relentlessly pushing, pushing, pushing towards an algorithmic treatment, and those who, for various submerged reasons, are resisting this trend. It is rather as if there were metal-lurgists around who were disappointed by the algorithmic explanation of annealing. "You mean that's all there is to it? No submicroscopic Superglue specially created by the heating and cooling process?" Darwin has convinced all the scientists that evolution, like annealing, works. His radical vision of how and why it works is still somewhat embattled, largely because those who 1. EARLY REACTIONS
resist can dimly see that their skirmish is part of a larger campaign. If the game is lost in evolutionary biology, where will it all end?
Origin of man now proved. — Metaphysics must flourish. — He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.
—CHARLES DARWIN, in a notebook not
CHAPTER 2: Darwin conclusively demonstrated that, contrary to ancient intended for publication, in P. H. Barrett et al.
tradition, species are not eternal and immutable; they evolve. The origin of 1987, D26, M84
new species was shown to be the result of "descent with modification." Less conclusively, Darwin introduced an idea of how this evolutionary process His subject is die 'Origin of Species,' & not die origin of Organization; took place: via a mindless, mechanical — algorithmic—process he called
& it seems a needless mischief to have opened the latter speculation at
"natural selection." This idea, that all die fruits of evolution can be explained all.
as the products of an algorithmic process, is Darwin's dangerous idea.
—H
-
ARRIET MARTINEAL , a friend of Darwin's, in a
letter to Fannie Wedgwood, March, 13, 1860,
CHAPTER 3: Many people, Darwin included, could dimly see that his idea of quoted in Desmond and Moore 1991, p. 486
natural selection had revolutionary potential, but just what did it promise to overthrow? Darwin's idea can be used to dismantle and then rebuild a Darwin began his explanation in the middle, or even, you might say, at the traditional
never hit upon the utterly necessary idea of a gene, but along came Mendel's Fancier algorithms produce the dazzling computer-animated graphics we see concept to provide just the right structure for making mathematical sense out every day on television, transforming faces, creating herds of imaginary ice-of heredity ( and solving Darwin's nasty problem of blending inheritance).
skating polar bears, simulating whole virtual worlds of entities never seen or And then, when DNA was identified as the actual physical vehicle of the imagined before. But the actual biosphere is much fancier still, by many genes, it looked at first (and still looks to many participants) as if Mendel's orders of magnitude. Can it really be the outcome of nothing but a cascade of genes could be simply identified as particular hunks of DNA. But then algorithmic processes feeding on chance? And if so, who designed that complexities began to emerge; the more scientists have learned about the cascade? Nobody. It is itself the product of a blind, algorithmic process. As actual molecular biology of DNA and its role in reproduction, the Darwin himself put it, in a letter to the geologist Charles Lyell shortly after 60 AN IDEA IS BORN
publication of Origin, "I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent __ If I were convinced that I required such additions to the theory CHAPTER THREE
of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish..." (F. Darwin 1911, vol. 2, pp. 6-7).
According to Darwin, then, evolution is an algorithmic process. Putting it Universal Acid
this way is still controversial. One of the tugs-of-war going on within evolutionary biology is between those who are relentlessly pushing, pushing, pushing towards an algorithmic treatment, and those who, for various submerged reasons, are resisting this trend. It is rather as if there were metal-lurgists around who were disappointed by the algorithmic explanation of annealing. "You mean that's all there is to it? No submicroscopic Superglue specially created by the heating and cooling process?" Darwin has convinced all the scientists that evolution, like annealing, works. His radical vision of how and why it works is still somewhat embattled, largely because those who 1. EARLY REACTIONS
resist can dimly see that their skirmish is part of a larger campaign. If the game is lost in evolutionary biology, where will it all end?
Origin of man now proved. — Metaphysics must flourish. — He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.
—CHARLES DARWIN, in a notebook not
CHAPTER 2: Darwin conclusively demonstrated that, contrary to ancient intended for publication, in P. H. Barrett et al.
tradition, species are not eternal and immutable; they evolve. The origin of 1987, D26, M84
new species was shown to be the result of "descent with modification." Less conclusively, Darwin introduced an idea of how this evolutionary process His subject is die 'Origin of Species,' & not die origin of Organization; took place: via a mindless, mechanical — algorithmic—process he called
& it seems a needless mischief to have opened the latter speculation at
"natural selection." This idea, that all die fruits of evolution can be explained all.
as the products of an algorithmic process, is Darwin's dangerous idea.
—H
-
ARRIET MARTINEAL , a friend of Darwin's, in a
letter to Fannie Wedgwood, March, 13, 1860,
CHAPTER 3: Many people, Darwin included, could dimly see that his idea of quoted in Desmond and Moore 1991, p. 486
natural selection had revolutionary potential, but just what did it promise to overthrow? Darwin's idea can be used to dismantle and then rebuild a Darwin began his explanation in the middle, or even, you might say, at the traditional
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