From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Jun 06 2002 - 10:07:09 MDT
Technotranscendence wrote:
>
> (Also, I wouldn't focus too much on marginal improvements in
> "reproductive fitness" given that there must be a threshold below which
> such improvements are no better than noise. Why? Well, individual
> organisms are discrete units -- not infinite collections. I know this
> isn't an issue you raised, but I'm raising it.:)
Improving from an average of 2.02 surviving children to 2.04 surviving
children is a significant improvement to reproductive fitness, if spread
over a sufficient number of generations, or so I would guess. There is only
a certain amount of selection pressure to go around per generation, though,
so my guess is that 1% of all selection pressure in a generation is a fair
amount.
See "A Speed Limit for Evolution":
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/jcollie/sle/
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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