ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
*****************************************************************************

And now, digital evolution
By Lee Spector  |  August 29, 2005

RECENT developments in computer science provide new perspective on
''intelligent design," the view that life's complexity could only have
arisen through the hand of an intelligent designer. These developments show
that complex and useful designs can indeed emerge from random Darwinian
processes.

Most scientists agree that the argument for intelligent design, which is
over 200 years old, was put to rest by Darwin in 1859 and by the subsequent
triumphs of 20th century biology. Nonetheless, President Bush recently
advocated teaching intelligent design in schools along with evolutionary
theory. School boards around the country, most notably in Kansas, are
staking out similar positions. What can account for the persistence of this
long-discredited idea?

Scientific illiteracy is certainly part of the explanation, but other
factors are also at play. Prominent among them is the fact that discussions
about evolution are usually discussions about the origins of the discussants
themselves. We tend to hold our own species in high regard and to look down
on random and mechanical processes. Our appreciation for the magnificence of
humanity, and of all life, is well grounded but it may also blind us in ways
that we are not blinded when studying rocks or electricity.

Thanks to technology, however, we can now explore evolution without
discussing ourselves and without even discussing life. We can do this by
building evolutionary processes into computer programs. When we do this we
do not find that our appreciation for the magnificence of life is in any way
diminished. Rather, we find that our appreciation for the power of evolution
is amplified.

A growing sub-field of computer science is devoted to ''evolutionary
computation." The user of such a system specifies the ingredients that can
be used and how the ''goodness" of any particular design can be measured.
The system then creates and tests thousands or millions of random
combinations of the ingredients. The better combinations are allowed to
produce ''children" by mutation (random changes) and recombination (random
part-swapping). This often produces, after many generations, genuinely novel
and useful designs and inventions.

Evolutionary computation has proven to be useful for solving practical
problems. It has been adopted by researchers and engineers, and it is the
focus of scholarly journals and international conferences.

One of the major conferences offers cash prizes for ''human-competitive"
results; that is, for cases in which evolution has out-designed human
beings. To win the prize contestants must show that their systems equaled or
improved upon the performance of humans as measured by such criteria as
patents and peer-reviewed publications. In 2004 I shared the ''gold medal"
with a team from NASA that evolved an antenna for the Space Technology 5
mission.

My entry involved the evolution of quantum computing circuits, which are
difficult for humans to understand or design. More to the point, they are
extremely difficult for me to understand or design, and I could never have
produced the results on my own. I am not a designer equal to that task, but
evolution is. I created the ''primordial ooze" out of which quantum circuits
could grow, and I wrote the programs for random variation and selection. But
evolution did the heavy lifting.

Of course biological evolution and evolutionary computation differ.
Engineers using evolutionary computation specify explicit measures of
''goodness" that govern selection, while biological selection is governed
only by survival and the ability to reproduce. In addition, biologists now
understand that processes other than natural selection, for example
symbiosis and influences during development, also contribute to evolution.
But evolutionary computation and biological evolution are both fundamentally
driven by random variation and selection, and the successes of one hint at
the power of the other.

It is easy to appreciate the power of selection operating on random
variation when it is stripped of its emotion-laden connections to human
origins and is shown to be capable of designing complex solutions to
difficult problems. If one extrapolates this power to a system the size of
the Earth, then it may not be such a stretch to imagine that evolution could
produce the stunning complexity and beauty of our biosphere. Viewed in this
light, Darwinian evolution is itself a designer worthy of significant
respect, if not religious devotion.

Lee Spector, professor of computer science at Hampshire College, is the
author of ''Automatic Quantum Computer Programming: A Genetic Programming
Approach."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/08/29/and_now_digital_evolution/

***********************************************************************
More information about the Informal Science Education Network and the
Association of Science-Technology Centers may be found at http://www.astc.org.
To remove your e-mail address from the ISEN-ASTC-L list, send the
message  SIGNOFF ISEN-ASTC-L in the BODY of a message to
[log in to unmask]