Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

Here is an evolution simulation that I wrote that precisely does do calculations:

https://schneider.ncifcrf.gov/paper/ev/evj/

There is considerable controversy surrounding the claims made for the Ev program. It gets very technical. See articles at https://evolutionnews.org/2010/12/bio-co...co-author/ and https://evolutionnews.org/2016/03/ev_ever_again/. Montanez, Ewert, Marks and Dembski responded to these claims with their paper "A Vivisection of the ev Computer Organism: Identifying Sources of Active Information", at http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/...O-C.2010.3. From the paper:

"The success of ev is largely due to active information introduced by the Hamming oracle and from the perceptron structure. It is not due to the evolutionary algorithm used to perform the search.

Indeed, other algorithms are shown to mine active information more efficiently from the knowledge sources provided by ev.

Schneider claims that ev demonstrates that naturally occurring genetic systems gain information by evolutionary processes and that “information gain can occur by punctuated equilibrium”. Our results show that, contrary to these claims, ev does not demonstrate “that biological information…can rapidly appear in genetic control systems subjected to replication, mutation, and selection”. We show this by demonstrating that there are at least five sources of active information in ev.

1. The perceptron structure. The perceptron structure is predisposed to generating strings of ones sprinkled by zeros or strings of zeros sprinkled by ones. Since the binding site target is mostly zeros with a few ones, there is a greater predisposition to generate the target than if it were, for example, a set of ones and zeros produced by the flipping of a fair coin.

2. The Hamming Oracle. When some offspring are correctly announced as more fit than others, external knowledge is being applied to the search and active information is introduced. As with the child’s game, we are being told with respect to the solution whether we are getting “colder” or “warmer”.

3. Repeated Queries. Two queries contain more information than one. Repeated queries can contribute active information.

4. Optimization by Mutation. This process discards mutations with low fitness and propagates those with high fitness. When the mutation rate is small, this process resembles a simple Markov birth process that converges to the target.

5. Degree of Mutation. As seen in Figure 3, the degree of mutation for ev must be tuned to a band of workable values."

Schneider attempted to rebut this paper in a short article, at https://schneider.ncifcrf.gov/paper/ev/d...s2010.html.

Robert Marks' response to Schneider's response is at http://evoinfo.org/papers/autopsy.pdf. His conclusion:

"While we appreciate Schneider’s correction on some typographical errors, the results of the paper still hold. We agree with Schneider that information is gained by the genome through extraction of it from the environment. However, we show that information sources must exist which allow access to that information. Schneider has assumed two powerful sources of information within ev, the perceptron structure and the hamming distance oracle. These information sources are the cause behind the gain in information, not 
evolution or the mere existence of information in the environment. The information in the environment takes the form of a point of high fitness in a fitness landscape. However, the mere existence of that point does not allow reaching it. Reaching that point requires a particular shape to the fitness landscape to guide evolution."