Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!venera!vaxa.isi.edu!smoliar
From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: "Sensor Evolution"
Message-ID: <12534@venera.UUCP>
Date: 22 Mar 90 17:50:13 GMT
Sender: news@venera.UUCP
Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar)
Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute
Lines: 26
Summary:

In article <946@unix386.Convergent.COM> cliff@unix386.Convergent.COM (Cliff
Neighbors ext 3216) writes:
>  I thought evolution was something that
>happens to the system, where the environment beats the shit out of it
>("selection") and the only way it survives is by replication, mutation
>and luck -- not by "responding" to the conditions.  It seems to be a process
>of destruction more than responsiveness, the zero degree of learning.
>
What Edelman and other immune system researchers have discovered is that
selection may occur WITHIN an organism, as opposed to "happening to" it.
In other words, the organism starts off with far more variety than it needs
and builds its own architecture through selective processes.  This explains
such observations as that fact that no two organism are "wired up" exactly
the same way.

=========================================================================

USPS:	Stephen Smoliar
	USC Information Sciences Institute
	4676 Admiralty Way  Suite 1001
	Marina del Rey, California  90292-6695

Internet:  smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu

"Only a schoolteacher innocent of how literature is made could have written
such a line."--Gore Vidal