[FRIAM] random v stochastic v indeterminate

[Jenny Quillien]

An excellent foray into such a topic is /Arrival of the Fittest: how 
nature innovates/ by Andreas Wagner.

 From the Preface:  the power of natural selection is beyond dispute, 
but this power has limits. Natural selection can /preserve/ innovations, 
but it cannot create them. And calling the change that creates them 
random is just another way of admitting our ignorance about it. Nature's 
any innovations- some uncannily perfect - call for natural principles 
that accelerate life's ability to innovate, its innovability.

Dave West turned me onto the book and has promised a discussion about 
how it is relevant to 'evolution' in software. It is certainly relevant 
to Nick's e-mail.

Jenny Quillien


On 8/9/2017 8:47 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>
> Hi everybody,
>
> Thanks for your patience as I emerge (hopefully) from post-surgical fog.
>
> I figured I best start my own thread rather than gum up yours.
>
> First.  I had always supposed that a stochastic process was one whose 
> value was determined by two factors, a random factor AND it’s last 
> value.  So the next step in a random walk is “random” but the current 
> value (it’s present position on a surface, say) is “the result of a 
> stochastic process.”  From your responses, and from a short rummage in 
> Wikipedia, I still can’t tell if I am correct or not.
>
> Now remember, you guys, my standard critique of your discourse is that 
> you confuse your models with the facts of nature.  What is this 
> “evolution” of which you speak?  Unless you tell me otherwise, I will 
> assume you are speaking of the messy biological process of which we 
> are all a result: -- */The alteration of the design of taxa over 
> time/*.   Hard to see any way in which that actual process is 
> evidently random.  We have to dig deep into the theory that EXPLAINS 
> evolution to find anything that corresponds to the vernacular notion 
> of randomness.  There is constraint and predictability all over the 
> place in the evolution I know.  Even mutations are predictable.  In 
> other words, the randomness of evolution is a creation of your 
> imaginations concerning the phenomenon, not an essential feature of 
> the phenomenon, itself.
>
> So what kind of “evolution” are you guys talking about?
>
> Yes, and forgive me for trolling, a bit.  I am trying to wake myself 
> up, here.
>
> nick
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ 
> <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
>
>
>
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