Amiram Hayardeny's My China Experience

Artificial Evolution and Software

How did chickens lose the ability to fly?  How come some dogs are docile, quiet, "great with kids", while others are aggressive, dangerous, unpredictable.  How were cows domesticated?  Horses?  Pigs?  Why are people so set to get a "pure bred" dog?  Why is regular rice so different than "wild rice"?  The answer to all these questions is "Artificial Evolution".  Evolution, in a nutshell is the following process: a species is content living in some environment.  One or more individuals come up with a spontaneous mutation of some characteristic.  Nobody cares, nor does it bother the individual.  Until the environment changes in a way that makes this individual, along with its spontaneous mutation to become more comfortable (adapted, successful, ...) to the new environment.  Over time, this individual may get a better chance at reproduction, hence increasing the frequency of that mutation in the population.  Over a longer period of time, the entire population may carry that mutation.

Note that this description is slightly different from the description of the "cataclysmic evolution", in which the one with the mutation survives, while all the rest of the population die while suffering great pain due to the new environment.  I can't avoid writing about an argument I have had with a very close person who was absolutely positive that the giraffes got their long necks by stretching it to reach the leaves on the trees at a time of famine.  The ones who did that survived and their offspring inherited this convenient characteristics.  Obviously neither are correct.  Changes must be genetic to survive reproduction, and in the case of cataclysmic evolution - everyone dies and there is no chance to pass on anything to anybody...

The question stands: how does domestication occur (in animals as well as plants)?  The joke says that for humans the answer is rather simple: they get married...  But jokes aside, how does a wild animal become docile?  The answer is evolution, of course, but in this case not natural evolution, but artificial - man made.  Lets assume for the sake of the argument that you have a couple of sheep that you caught while hunting.  They are aggressive, violent, and you run the risk of losing them all the time.  They reproduce, and the litter, while very similar to the proud parents, have one, particularly quiet, non-aggressive individual.  You realize that, and when the litter matures, you prevent the others from reproducing, while making sure that she does.  The new litter has a far better chance of being less aggressive, easier to handle.  When you do it over a few generations, you will end up with a calm, docile, domesticated herd of sheep.  Same goes for cows, dogs, pigs, etc.  It isn't that different in plants.  You look for the corn plant that gives the most cobs, the better grains, and you make sure that it is the only one whose seeds you use for the next season.  Keep doing that, and you have a better corn.  That's the way it's been done for centuries.  That's how we have high-yield milk producing cows, ridable horses, calm sheep, hunting dogs, etc.

It also goes the other way.  If you select the absolute most murderous Bull Terrier in the litter, and let them reproduce for a few generations, you will get the American Staffordshire Pit Bull Terrier, who is anything but docile, quiet or "great with kids".  If you pick the tomato whose shelf life is the longest, and use its seeds only, you will get a species of tomatoes which can sit in the supermarket for years, but taste like rotten styrofoam...

You could, I guess find similarities in the world of computers.  An application is released.  The "litter" could be millions of copies.  Developers select the good, most successful, most adaptive modules and evolve them to be better by fixing bugs, adding features (hence, in a way, letting them reproduce).  The modules which are not successful are left behind.  Over the course of time, software (hardware too) evolve.  Malicious developers take the worst characteristics of software, and let them evolve to create more aggressive, violent, murderous software modules: viruses.  It's all about evolution.  Artificial evolution that is.  Keep in mind, that the market always welcomes the first kind, the kind that produces better software, better quality, better features.

Posted at 10:12AM Jun 06, 2007 by Amiram Hayardeny in Personal  |  Comments[12]