He who would live must fight;
he who does not wish to fight
in this world where permanent struggle
is the law of life,
has not the right to exist.
he who does not wish to fight
in this world where permanent struggle
is the law of life,
has not the right to exist.
— Adolf H, My Struggle
Something to bear in mind next time someone describes something as “natural selection” in action.
It also highlight’s FOSS’s non-destructive approach to development. Perhaps we should whomp up an official philosophy & call it:
“main() { kampf(); }?”
Comments
I wouldn’t be so selective in limiting my criticism that way.
Some of the other applications people find for the odder aspects of mutation plus selection are absolutely hilarious!
BTW, uncanny precognition again WRT PRep. Well done. If you can find a way to channel that, it’d be well marketeable.
No precog involved. I visited Perth because he was ill. I was present at the end because his daughter called and said it was time.
So I guess you could view “existing long enough to work your way through something regarded as development” to be a survival trait in itself.
By "development" I meant pre-birth.
The human genome has 10^9 symbols selected from a four symbol alphabet. Human brains have 10^10 neurons with 10^14 connections. Obviously the genome can't code the brain and yet it does. The missing link is a (in the case of Humans, hideously convoluted) development process.
There is a lot of interesting work coming out of the artificial life people on this (google "artificial ontogeny"). I expect it to start having spin-offs for non-Alife genetic algorithm types RSN.
However, “development” as such is no different from ordinary living, except that our prospective wee beastie doesn’t yet have to forage for food & drink, or figure out how to dispose of wastes.
With human beans, a remaining difference is in cells like brain cells, which don’t replicate or grow very much at all after birth.
Spin-offs for Alife people... now there’s a mind-boggling concept!