Creationists often use “irreducible complexity” as an argument against evolution.
e.g. you need all parts in place and functioning before the “whole” can do its work and thus reproduce and spread its features.
The bacteria flangellum is one such feature that have been attributed with “irreducible complexity”.
You need the “tail” and some “engine” parts in place before it can be used as a propeller and drive the bacteria forwards.
Evolutionists have however proven this wrong and shown that each of these parts have had other purposes before they were re-used/combined for propulsion, so each part was already present.
The key here is that evolution in reality is not directed to a “final goal” it simply makes organisms adapt to their current environment.
e.g. an organism might evolve a single pair of legs and later generations might get more of those legs if that is beneficial.
The front pair of legs might even later evolve into a pair of arms that allows the organisms to grab food while they eat and so on.
In short, existing features can be reused and refined in order to reach a higher fitness level in the current environment.
As far as I know, we still have not managed to accomplish this sort of “undirected evolution” in computer programs in the same sense.
If we make a program that are supposed to come up with a solution for a given problem, I would use “directed evolution” and try to breed solutions that are better and better at solving the given problem.
So if our program was supposed to come up with a propulsion system for a body, it would fail at evolving the bacteria flangellum since we experience the effects of irreducible complexity, our program is unable to evolve all the parts for other reasons than moving the body forwards.
In order to harness the full power of evolution in computer programs, we need to be able to simulate “undirected evolution” so that we can evolve all these parts that later can be re-used for other purposes.
Are there any research going on in this topic at all?
I know that the old “Tierra” simulation was sort of undirected, the only goal was to consume as much CPU as possible, but it sure could use undirected evolution to get to that goal.
But other than that, anything?
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