potato comments on Science as Attire - Less Wrong

48 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 August 2007 05:10AM

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Comment author: potato 15 November 2011 12:30:42AM *  0 points [-]

Or even worse, they'll talk about something completely outside the domain of evolutionary biology, like an improved design for computer chips, or corporations splitting, or humans uploading themselves into computers, and they'll call that "evolution". If evolutionary biology could cover that, it could cover anything.

That seems unfair. Do they mean evolutionary biology when they say evolution? What if they just mean heredity, variation, and selection? I use "evolution" to describe how technologies spread throughout culture, because it spreads by those three mechanisms, and those seem to be the mechanisms of biology as well. I think of evolution as a class of algorithms which optimize for something (or "select") without doing prediction, but restraining the search space by keeping only those that pass certain tests, and trying only those nodes out which are closed to ones that passed. and we see the failures in optimization we would expect from such an algorithm in many non-biological mechanisms.