Jim writes:

>My main point here is that sloppy use of terminology leads to misleading
>intuitions.  And, I think that the whole field of "complexity" is
>plagued by bad choices of terminology and some very, very bad intuitions.
>Furthermore, I don't see the situation as likely to improve when 
>books can be sold by coining meaningless, but evocatative, phrases
>such as "the edge of chaos".  IMO.

There is nothing meaningless in the phrase, "edge of chaos."
Reproduction must
be very nearly replication if the ancient knowledge maintained in germline DNA
is not to be lost, but neither can the process be pure replication.

In a perfectly thermodynamically "cold" universe, where no error would be
introduced into the germline, evolution would be impossible. Darwinian
evolution can proceed only in those environments where informational entropy is
greater than zero, but that of course is all physical environments. 

There is every reason however to believe that the evolutionary process "heats
itself up" above those ambient rates to increase the rate of mutation right to
the "edge of chaos", so that rates of adaptation are increased to
better track
changing environmental conditions, but not so much that the fundamental
knowledge maintained in a lineage's inherited genome is being destroyed. This
is the simple idea underlying the phrase.

Wirt Atmar
---
þ RIMEGate(tm)/RGXPost V1.14 at BBSWORLD * Info{at}bbsworld.com

---
 * RIMEGate(tm)V10.2áÿ* RelayNet(tm) NNTP Gateway * MoonDog BBS
 * RgateImp.MoonDog.BBS at 4/29/04 9:02:43 PM