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Re:More UFOs Than Ever Before by antisemiotic on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @04:42AM (#20864694)
Humans have a history of occasionally choosing bad fitness functions that predates computers, for example look at the awful things we've done to persian cats or chihuahua dogs.
Re:More UFOs Than Ever Before by ben_w on Wednesday September 04, 2019 @12:42PM (#20878919)
Well yes. Also, the fact that brains (not even just human ones) influence the real world’s organic evolutionary fitness functions does make it somewhat impossible to perfectly replicate in a computer.

Fortunately my point has no dependency on any specific fitness function, natural or programmed — my argument has been that the original claim “We can observe that cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we have no idea how they make sudden jumps for a more efficient design;” totally misrepresented evolution, that in fact evolution totally can make sudden-looking jumps (a point which in retrospect I don’t think I properly justified, even if my list of examples was intended that way), and that it’s trivial to demonstrate this by writing a genetic algorithm.