Passive in the sense of not being able to actively produce offspring that are like the parents. The “being like” is the genes. Volcanoes do not produce volcanoes in the sense that worms produce baby worms.
For an AI that means its ability to run on hardware. And to pass its intelligence down to future versions of itself. A little vaguer, but still the same idea.
This is just the idea of evolution through natural selection, a rather widely held idea.
Natural selection does not cause variation. It just selects which varieties will survive. Things like sexual selection are just special cases of natural selection.
The trouble with the concept of natural selection is not that it is too narrow, but rather that it is too broad. It can explain just about anything, real or imagined. Modern research has greatly refined the idea, determined how NS works in practice. But never to refute it.
Exactly and in the real world there are factors that do cause variation and those factors do matter for how organisms evolve.
It something that Darwin didn’t fully articulate but that’s well established in biology today.
The basic breakdown of evolution that I got taught five years ago at university (genetics for bioformatics) is:
Evolution = Natural Selection + Gene Drift + Mutations
At the time there wasn’t a consensus of the size of those factors but it’s there are scientists who do consider gene drift to be as influential as natural selection. One of the arguments for that position was that if I remember correctly something like half of the DNA difference between humans and other apes is in mutations that don’t produce different genes.
That’s argument is a bit flawed because even DNA changes that don’t change which proteins a gene produces can be subject to natural selection. On the other hand there no good way to estimate the factor. I however doubt that anyone who runs computer models of genetics considers natural selection to be >0.99. If you shut up and calculate it’s just not realistic for the factor to be that high.
Not every gene mutates equally so, that factor has to be in the formula and you get wrong results if you just look at natural selection pressures and gene drift.
It is absolutely the fact that gene drift is more common than mutation. Indeed, a major reason for sexual reproduction is to provide alternate genes that can mask other genes broken by mutations.
An AGI would be made up of components in some sense, and those components could be swapped in and out to some extent. If a new theorem prover is created an AGI may or may not decide to use it. That is similar to gene swapping, but done consciously.
It is absolutely the fact that gene drift is more common than mutation. Indeed, a major reason for sexual reproduction is to provide alternate genes that can mask other genes broken by mutations.
Both have nothing to do with natural selection. Genetic drift is when a gene get’s lucky and spreads to the whole population even though it provides no advantage. Alternatively a gene like human vitamin C enzymes that’s useful but for which there isn’t strong selection pressure can die in gamblers ruin.
Passive in the sense of not being able to actively produce offspring that are like the parents. The “being like” is the genes. Volcanoes do not produce volcanoes in the sense that worms produce baby worms.
For an AI that means its ability to run on hardware. And to pass its intelligence down to future versions of itself. A little vaguer, but still the same idea.
This is just the idea of evolution through natural selection, a rather widely held idea.
Today biologists don’t consider natural selection not the only factor but also see things like gene drift and mutations to be important.
Natural selection does not cause variation. It just selects which varieties will survive. Things like sexual selection are just special cases of natural selection.
The trouble with the concept of natural selection is not that it is too narrow, but rather that it is too broad. It can explain just about anything, real or imagined. Modern research has greatly refined the idea, determined how NS works in practice. But never to refute it.
Exactly and in the real world there are factors that do cause variation and those factors do matter for how organisms evolve. It something that Darwin didn’t fully articulate but that’s well established in biology today.
The basic breakdown of evolution that I got taught five years ago at university (genetics for bioformatics) is: Evolution = Natural Selection + Gene Drift + Mutations
At the time there wasn’t a consensus of the size of those factors but it’s there are scientists who do consider gene drift to be as influential as natural selection. One of the arguments for that position was that if I remember correctly something like half of the DNA difference between humans and other apes is in mutations that don’t produce different genes.
That’s argument is a bit flawed because even DNA changes that don’t change which proteins a gene produces can be subject to natural selection. On the other hand there no good way to estimate the factor. I however doubt that anyone who runs computer models of genetics considers natural selection to be >0.99. If you shut up and calculate it’s just not realistic for the factor to be that high.
Not every gene mutates equally so, that factor has to be in the formula and you get wrong results if you just look at natural selection pressures and gene drift.
It is absolutely the fact that gene drift is more common than mutation. Indeed, a major reason for sexual reproduction is to provide alternate genes that can mask other genes broken by mutations.
An AGI would be made up of components in some sense, and those components could be swapped in and out to some extent. If a new theorem prover is created an AGI may or may not decide to use it. That is similar to gene swapping, but done consciously.
Both have nothing to do with natural selection. Genetic drift is when a gene get’s lucky and spreads to the whole population even though it provides no advantage. Alternatively a gene like human vitamin C enzymes that’s useful but for which there isn’t strong selection pressure can die in gamblers ruin.