Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!pasteur!sim!brp
From: brp@sim.uucp (bruce raoul parnas)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets
Subject: Re: NN Question
Keywords: natural selection
Message-ID: <11111@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 15 Mar 89 17:08:36 GMT
References: <32125@gt-cmmsr.GATECH.EDU> <10624@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <6082@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu> <971@afit-ab.arpa> <18130@gatech.edu>
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU
Reply-To: brp@sim.UUCP (bruce raoul parnas)
Distribution: usa
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 20

In article <18130@gatech.edu> carter%sloth@gatech.edu (Carter Bullard) writes:
>>>>
>capabilities of natural selection.  To presume that you have an 
>understanding of CNS function to the point where you can predict
>what influence natural selection has had on the development of 
>the process is somewhat, hum, how shall i say, premature.

In my original posting I did not claim that I had any idea whatsoever what
natural selection was doing to the CNS specifically.  As you state, that would
be quite presumptious on my part.  I only said that I believed that natural
selection would work in such a way as to reduce the levels of what was termed
earlier as "extraneous" processing.  I have no idea what this processing may
be or how it might be eliminated, only that for the brain to perform the vast
amount of computations and other functions that it does, there must not be too
much of this "extraneous" stuff going on.  BTW, redundancy and fault-
tolerance are not examples of, at least by my definition, "extraneous"
processing.

bruce
brp@sim