Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Go back and read Charlie Lineweaver's paper

That's what he says...
Adam — (archived)

...but like I said he doesn't say how one determines if there is a goal or not. I find the number of convergent evolution cases to be quite compelling evidence of attractors in morphospace, even if new gene creation is essentially stochastic. But even that particular idea, of purely stochastic gene evolution, is dubious based on the work by Lynn Caporale and others about hypervariability in specific regions of genes and specific types of genes.

Doesn't mean there's any intelligent direction of evolution - though that's arguable too, depending on what one means by intelligent. Howard Bloom's suggestion that an evolving population is essentially a connectionist parallel computing system - a cloud computer cluster - exploring morphospace makes a lot of sense. There may well be intelligence "directing" evolution even if there's no director as we understand the term. Think "superorganism".

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