From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Nov 30 2000 - 18:29:21 MST
Replicators: Evolutionary Powerhouses
http://library.thinkquest.org/C004367/home.shtml
This interactive exploration of evolutionary and cultural biology
was created by three high school students (Russian and American)
and their coaches as a Thinkquest project. The premise, the theory
of replicators, was developed by biologist Richard Dawkins and
described in his popular writings. Replicators are "anything in
the universe of which copies are made" -- DNA sequences and MP3
files being two distinct examples. We were mesmerized by an activity
module called Breed Your Own Text. It took the replication simulation
318 attempts to arrive at target word "shakespeare" from "monkey
typists," but only 217 to attain "serendipity" from "monkey
barrel."
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It took 208 trials to get from `extropian' to `posthuman' (but it's
actually just a sequence of individual point mutations with no global
phenotypic interaction beyond its teleology, which is a shame).
Damien Broderick
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