[FRIAM] interjection from another conversation

[Prof David West]

A comment by Richard Gabriel that I stole from another conversation (the only FRIAMMER in that conversation is Jenny Quillien who used to attend the mother church before moving to the Netherlands).

*"I think it adds a dimension to many of the evolution conversations we have had the past couple of years.**
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*I recommend reading either “Why Greatness Cannot be Planned: The Myth of the Objective” by Lehman and Stanley or its more technical foundational paper "Abandoning Objectives: Evolution through the Search for Novelty Alone,” by the same authors. In this book and paper they argue that natural and artificial evolution are (better thought of as being) based on (or implemented as) novelty seeking with survival as a (boring) constraint. The main step of evolution, they say, is to produce diversity / novelty so that the new creation creates a new niche: the new mutations don’t compete with others for resources, they exploit different resources. For example, when exaptation created the first flyers, all of a sudden a whole raft of predators became irrelevant. **
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*So evolution is looking for new ways to live instead of better ways to live. Within an established species, it might be that evolution as optimization creates incremental improvements.**
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*If evolution is based on creating novelty, then after all the simple (different) ways to live have been tried, the only direction to go is complexity."*

davew
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