GO NADS GO NADS GO!

Here’s an interesting article critiquing Intelligent Design (it’s definately not creationism!). Anyways, it provides some evidence that is more easily explained by evolution than intelligent design. I mean, it could be that the designer was a moron, but that sort of invalidates the intelligent part of ID.

I’ve just got an idea, I will create a new theory called the Natural Algorithmic Design theory, or NAD for short. Basically instead of an intelligent designer, we can use an algorithm common in computer science that searches for a solution in a given space by the evaluating the fitness of a possible solution.

The solutions in this case could be the organisms and the space could be their environment, the Earth. The possible solutions are generated by combining random aspects of multiple previous candidates, and by pruning solutions that have low fitness scores. The idea behind this is that over time the parts of the solution that cause high fitness scores will be preserved, while harmful parts will be tossed.

One interesting outcome of the algorithm is that with a complex enough solution space, there may be many radically different solutions that emerge and they all can receive high fitness scores. The more complex the solution space, the more complex the solutions that emerge. This seems like it might make sense, as the Earth is very complex and the creatures on it are very complex. In fact, because of the interactive nature of the solution space, as the solutions become more complex, the space itself becomes more complex. Crazy!

Hmm, well then what will be the operator that will execute this algorithm? Genes found on DNA (and possibly RNA) are thought to control the development of organism. Perhaps that’s the most likely candidate. Until proven otherwise, I will assume that these are indeed the operators. And so I will call my final theory the Genetic Operator, Natural Algorithm Design theory, or the GONAD theory.

PS. The algorithm described is called a genetic algorithm, a subset of evolutionary algorithms