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This is a quotation I painstakingly copied off a Ted Talk. Transcribing speech is not easy for me, and I had to restart the video several times to get it all down.
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What did Darwin say? I know you know the idea of Natural Selection, but let me just paraphrase The Origin of Species (1859) in a few sentences. What Darwin said was something like this:
* If you have creatures that vary, and that can't be doubted; I've been to the Galapegos, and I've measured the size of the beaks, and the size of the turtle shells, and so on and so on, and a hundred pages later...
* And if there is a struggle for life, such that nearly all of these creatures die, and this can't be doubted; I've read Malthus and I've calculated how long it would take for elephants to cover the whole world if they bred unrestricted and so on and so on and another hundred pages later...
* And if the very few that survive pass on to their offspring whatever it was that helped them survive; then those offspring must be better adapted to the circumstances in which all this happened than their parents were.
You see the idea? If, if, if, then. He had no concept of the idea of an algorithm, but that’s what he described in that book, and this is what we now know as the evolutionary algorithm. The principle is; you just need those three things: variation, selection, and heredity; and, as Dan Dennett puts it, "If you have those, then you must get evolution or design out of chaos without the aid of mind."
— Susan Blackmore (Susan Jane Blackmore, July 29, 1951), British author, lecturer, parapsychologist turned sceptic, and broadcaster. "Susan Blackmore on memes and 'temes'", TED Talks, TED2008, February 2008.
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