"You may have heard of evolutionist Richard Dawkins's computer program designed to illustrate that evolution can accomplish amazing things. And you may have heard some good critiques of this program and of its later, more sophisticated cousins. I want to quickly summarize those critiques and
then describe another way Dawkins's argument fails, a failure mostly overlooked but highly significant.
Dawkins's program is well-known enough that it has its own Wikipedia entry and nickname: "the weasel program." The program "evolves" a string of gibberish letters into a line from Hamlet: "Methinks it is like a weasel."
Dawkins was inspired by the old saw that if you put some monkeys in front of a bunch of typewriters and have them bang away long enough, eventually one of them will reproduce a Shakespearian poem purely by chance. In truth, the odds of that happening are actually so long that whole galaxies would burn out before we got a Shakespearian sonnet out of one of those poor creatures. And to Dawkins's credit, he understands this.
Dawkins uses his computer simulation not to argue for the powers of brute chance but to show that evolution can do the job far more quickly because evolution isn't purely random in the way a monkey banging away on a typewriter is. It is guided by natural selection.
However, if you have read critiques of the weasel program, you know Dawkins's evolution simulation still has a couple of major limitations to it.
The Two Most Obvious Problems
First, on its evolutionary journey from gibberish to the line from Shakespeare, the program passes through and builds from utterly dysfunctional intermediates. That's a problem because the Darwinian process of natural selection tends to eliminate dysfunctional offspring.
Second, the computer simulation has been programmed to aim for a particular distant goal -- the weasel line from Hamlet. That's a problem because Darwinian evolution doesn't work toward particular distant goals. It isn't mindful but mindless, not seeing but blind.
But Dawkins waves off these shortcoming by saying the little program is merely for illustrative purposes and suggesting that more sophisticated programs will be designed soon enough that properly mimic natural selection while still illustrating how wonderfully productive the evolutionary process can be.
Three decades later, we're still waiting." EN&V
Dawkins's program is well-known enough that it has its own Wikipedia entry and nickname: "the weasel program." The program "evolves" a string of gibberish letters into a line from Hamlet: "Methinks it is like a weasel."
Dawkins was inspired by the old saw that if you put some monkeys in front of a bunch of typewriters and have them bang away long enough, eventually one of them will reproduce a Shakespearian poem purely by chance. In truth, the odds of that happening are actually so long that whole galaxies would burn out before we got a Shakespearian sonnet out of one of those poor creatures. And to Dawkins's credit, he understands this.
Dawkins uses his computer simulation not to argue for the powers of brute chance but to show that evolution can do the job far more quickly because evolution isn't purely random in the way a monkey banging away on a typewriter is. It is guided by natural selection.
However, if you have read critiques of the weasel program, you know Dawkins's evolution simulation still has a couple of major limitations to it.
The Two Most Obvious Problems
First, on its evolutionary journey from gibberish to the line from Shakespeare, the program passes through and builds from utterly dysfunctional intermediates. That's a problem because the Darwinian process of natural selection tends to eliminate dysfunctional offspring.
Second, the computer simulation has been programmed to aim for a particular distant goal -- the weasel line from Hamlet. That's a problem because Darwinian evolution doesn't work toward particular distant goals. It isn't mindful but mindless, not seeing but blind.
But Dawkins waves off these shortcoming by saying the little program is merely for illustrative purposes and suggesting that more sophisticated programs will be designed soon enough that properly mimic natural selection while still illustrating how wonderfully productive the evolutionary process can be.
Three decades later, we're still waiting." EN&V
These also shall be unclean unto you among
the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel,
Leviticus 11:29
P.S.-That includes Dawkins "Weasel program".....
