Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucsd!sdcsvax!sequoya!bloch
From: bloch@sequoya.ucsd.edu (Steve Bloch)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets
Subject: Re: NN Question
Keywords: natural selection
Message-ID: <6082@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu>
Date: 9 Mar 89 00:38:53 GMT
References: <32125@gt-cmmsr.GATECH.EDU> <10624@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Sender: nobody@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu
Reply-To: bloch@sequoya.UUCP (Steve Bloch)
Distribution: usa
Organization: University of California, San Diego
Lines: 18

In article <10624@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> brp@sim.UUCP (bruce raoul parnas) writes:
>In article <32125@gt-cmmsr.GATECH.EDU> kirlik@hms3.gatech.edu (Alex Kirlik) writes:
>>One answer would seem to be that there is a tremendous amount
>>of additional processing in the brain that is extraneous to
>>the processing critical to the task being modeled, yet we are
>>only modeling this "critical" segment. 
>
>Natural selection would eliminate a great deal of "extraneous" processing

Not necessarily.  Natural selection is a good improviser, but a terrible
designer, and in particular it's very reluctant to throw away something
just because it no longer serves its original purpose.  In addition, some
of the hypothesized "extraneous processing" might be what a designer would
call "redundancy for fault-tolerance", which is selected FOR within
reasonable limits.

"The above opinions are my own.  But that's just my opinion."
Stephen Bloch