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Some years ago, Dawkins wrote a famous GA software program to demonstrate how Darwinian evolution might successfully work. He entered the following random string of letters into the program.
WDLTMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P
One letter at a time, his program evolved this string of letters. After only 43 iterations, by randomly changing letters and deleting results it didn’t want, the program reached its preprogrammed goal of the following sentence:
METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
This was heralded as a success. However, Dawkins’ software program was programmed to compare each new sentence to the goal sentence and either select it for continued “mutation” or reject it based on whether it more closely resembled the goal than the previous mutation. But his very own “1.0” Darwinian evolution explicitly forbids preprogrammed goals! So Dawkins’ “Weasel” experiment had nothing to do with the true Neo-Darwinism.
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