Gil Dodgen posted the following over at Uncommon Descent:
All computational evolutionary algorithms artificially isolate the effects of random mutation on the underlying machinery: the CPU instruction set, operating system, and algorithmic processes responsible for the replication process.
If the blind-watchmaker thesis is correct for biological evolution, all of these artificial constraints must be eliminated. Every aspect of the simulation, both hardware and software, must be subject to random errors.
Of course, this would result in immediate disaster and the extinction of the CPU, OS, simulation program, and the programmer, who would never get funding for further realistic simulation experiments.
All I can say is “wow”. Either Dodgen is having us all on (which I doubt, since he’s started a new thread to respond to the charge that he doesn’t know WTF he’s talking about), or he honestly doesn’t understand the difference between the simulated environment and the machine doing the simulating.
Presumably he also believes that when NOAA simulates the effect of a hurricane hitting the Florida coast, they have to pour rain onto their computers. And that every time an orc dies in World of Warcraft, a real orc dies in some distant land.
I know that I’m often too rooted in the concrete and have trouble going from a collection of facts to a general principle, but damn!
