In an discussion with some fundamentalist religious people, I am related to, they brought up the argument that:
“Life cant create itself from chaos, like a book cant write itself from the explosion of a printing house”.
Therefore I want to show them how a book can write itself by the laws of natural selection.
The problem is that in the process of evolution there are millions of decisions to make
and so I need a bigger audience like you got on this webpage.
Second problem is that I don’t have any IT experience and cant program the webpage by myself.
But if we implement this evolution experiment into this webpage maybe we could get some help from the webpage support itself.
I have no private interest in the idea itself just in the scientific result.
The whole process is divided into 4 steps.
- Letter
- Word
- Sentence
- Book
- Letter
We have to start with the evolution of one letter.
My idea is that we have 5x5 pictures that have random arranged pixels.
From those pictures we pick that one that looks the most like a letter we know.
From the picture we chose the webpage creates again 5x5 related pictures that are just a little different from the first one.
Again we chose that one that looks the most like any letter we know.
After some time we should get a picture that should be readable for everyone.
We have to repeat this process until we got one result for every letter and sign we need to write a book.
I attached a picture to this Post that shows how that would look like for the letter A. (Evolution of A)
I’m sure that if we invest enough time that we could get a perfect shaped letter
but that is not necessary because the letter has to be just good enough
like nature is not perfect but good enough to survive.
And we need the motivation more in later steps of the process.
It would be awesome if someone of you had an idea how we could create all the letters from one starting point.
It’s not matching reality that we have one starting point for each letter.
A structure like the tree of life would be awesome.
2.Word
The second step is really easy to program
but it will be hard to get enough words to build some meaningful sentences.
Even a 5 year old speaks round about 5000 words.
And we cant targeting those words we need the most.
The only good thing is that the most used words are mostly simple.
For the process we start with one letter.
From there we have variations of the letter itself
and/or a second letter and its variations that is attached to the first one.
The steps might look like this for the word mum:
g v f n m
mi ml mv mu
mui mux mum
For more complicated words its needs more steps for the evolution process.
But again we don’t need a perfect solution.
The word just has to be accurate enough that everybody understands it.
But the correcter the word the better the results.
If we connect step 2 and 3 the word can be corrected later and will also change them self in step 3 accordingly.
unterstending dosnnt nead perfekkt explanadions.
3.Sentences
In the third step the system of evolution stays the same
but the “speed” of evolution slows down because of the increased time we need for reading it.
But that also happens in real biology
because the lifetime of complex lifeforms are also much longer
than those of the simple ones.
The choices for the sentence building could look like this.
pot
hot
go
got
god
god cant
god ISS
god is
god is paper
god is tree
god is life
god is dead
- Book
For the Book we just have to ad up the results we got from step 3.
In this case we cant evolve through the combinations of sentences.
Not because its not possible
but it would need billion of years until we would get a storytelling Book.
Therefor I prefer that you evolve one sentence and than can ad it to the book if you think it fits.
I’m very exited to see which story this audience has to tell through the laws of natural selection.
What do you think of the idea and do you believe that it would be worth the effort?
(Sorry for the English but it’s not my mother tongue)
"Life can't create itself from chaos, like a book can't write itself from the explosion of a printing house".
Thing is life didn't create itself out of chaos.
Emerging complexity is not random.
Here's a talk I think you'll find fascinating.
The Story of Earth: How Life and Rocks Co-Evolved
Carnegie Science -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08EaPC0zetw&t
Published on Jul 29, 2014
Dr. Robert Hazen, Carnegie Institution for Science, Geophysical Laboratory
The story of Earth is a 4.5-billion-year saga of dramatic transformations, driven by physical, chemical, and—based on a fascinating growing body of evidence—biological processes. The co-evolution of life and rocks, the new paradigm that frames this lecture, unfolds in an irreversible sequence of evolutionary stages. Each stage re-sculpted our planet's surface, each introduced new planetary processes and phenomena, and each inexorably paved the way for the next. This grand and intertwined tale of Earth's living and non-living spheres is only now coming into focus.
Sequential changes of terrestrial planets and moons are best preserved in their rich mineralogical record. "Mineral evolution," the study of our planet's diversifying near-surface environment, began with a dozen different mineral species that formed in the cooling envelopes of exploding stars. Dust and gas from those stars clumped together to form our stellar nebula, the nebula formed the Sun and countless planetesimals, and alteration of planetesimals by water and heat resulted in the approximately 250 minerals found today in meteorites that fall to Earth.
Following Earth's growth and separation into the core, mantle, and crust, mineral evolution progressed by a sequence of chemical and physical processes, which led to perhaps 1500 mineral species. According to some origin-of-life scenarios, a planet must evolve through at least some of these stages of chemical processing as a prerequisite for life. Once life emerged, mineralogy and biology co-evolved, as changes in the chemistry of oceans and atmosphere dramatically increased Earth's mineral diversity to the almost 5000 species known today.
The easy viewing documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyhZcEY5PCQ
Kudos for attempting to demonstrate how order may arise from chaos by using selection on a random process. However, your selection process derives from a goal-oriented intelligence. You know what your end result should be. Can you make a convincing case that this “intelligent design” indeed simulates natural selection in a way that would convince those you are trying to convert?
Much in life arises from random events. Even everyday life. Many discoveries arise from random events. As you recognize in your OP, the selection of useful consequences of random events is not random, so the entire process is not as disorderly as it may appear.
As i wrote, the target is to convince them not me or any scientific thinking person.
Therefor the example is to simple and has to many week points.
As long as works I’m fine with it.
As lucky as I’m they want to convince me by logic arguments.
I’m just fighting back.
And from my experience you cant convert anybody from the outside.
They have to see by themselves how evolution works.
If the idea is from inside your own head its much harder to close your ears to it.
The process is quite random if you imagine that it also would work if some Japanese, Chinese or Russian would play it.
It would even work for an alien language.
Also there is no target story.
You can tell what you want in any spoken language in the universe.
If the Matrix of 5x5 is to small we can talk about a bigger one.
50x50 is easily possible on a common screen.
It also would it make easier to get nice results for the shape of the letters.
But we need some constrains to make it work.
Where’s that head scratching smilie?
Have you ever read “The Blind Watchmaker” by Richard Dawkins? He has a chapter similar in concept to this, but he started with the letters we already know. He wanted to see how long a string of random letters would take to evolve into a recognizable sentence – a specific sentence, that is. The one he chose as his target was “Methinks it is like a weasel.”, a line taken from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. His point, however, was not to show how evolution worked, but to show how Cumulative Selection works better than simple random step-by-step mutation.
Maybe if you found that book and at least read that chapter it would give you some ideas how to work your program.
I red the book a few years ago.
Maybe I should do that again.
The basic concept is out of his book.
That’s how I ended up on this platform. =)
I just added the other steps.